No. 0052 - Vacation Sync

Just a few weeks back, I had some of old college friends visit me from the west coast. In the mean time, I took some vacation to go with them on a road trip to visit another college friend of ours in DC. Needless to say, there were a lot of planning involved but nevertheless, they were good times. Idealistically speaking, I wished some of my other friends would have been able to join us for the reunion tour but because now that we all have graduated and have moved on with our lives, it is getting harder and harder to sync up our PTO to go on a trip together just like the good old days. When we were still in college, syncing holidays are easy because we all went to the same school so we would share holidays. But now that we all work, PTO's can be taken anytime in the year. Unless you plan something out a year in advance, taking vacation as a bunch of friends is nearly impossible. I wish there is some program out there that would simply sync up our holidays, you know, kind of like black out dates. So say you are trying to book a flight for a family reunion, this program would automatically bounce back an error saying "Black out dates! You need to save your PTO and money for the camping trip next month!". Or say you are trying to get marry, have kids and start a family and stuff "Black out dates! Can't get marry until after your road trip to Mexico!" I would imagine a program like this would have only 2 outcomes: (1) all the friends would be able to meet up and have a great time on a vacation together or (2) you would lose a lot of good friends really fast.

No. 0051 - 6 Sigma Idiot

Currently at work, I've been assigned to a project where I have to design a capbank (as in a collection of capacitors housed in one box). Now for those of you who are not familiar with capacitors, they are more or less like a battery. Actually, a lot of them do shape like a battery, but unlike any traditional batteries from the grocery stores, if you touch the terminals, the chances are you will get a good jolt depending on the capacitance. The general rule is you don't touch them unless you have touch the terminals with a screw driver (with an insulated handle of course) first to discharge it.

As my teammates and I are about done with designing this thing, of course safety people would have to review it before it gets built. In my previous experience, these meetings never go well. They have always caused me nothing but a great deal of frustrations and anguish. Now don't get me wrong, I'm an advocate for safety but I'm just not sure if these meetings does the job. I usually call them the "What If" meetings because that is pretty much what the safety guys do; proposing a list of "what if" scenarios with an increasing order of ridiculousness. Here is usually how they go.

Safety Guy (SG): What if the operator forgets to discharge the capacitors?
Design team (DT): We've designed it to discharge automatically.
SG: Then what if the discharge is not quick enough?
DT: We can design it to make it real labor intensive to dissemble so it will take longer.
SG: How about what if it blows up. . . spontaneously?
Me in my head: The box is freakn' Aluminum!!
SG: What if the operator is really good at unscrewing screws and pulling things apart?
Me in my head: Then he deserves to get fried!? Anyone would know better than to treat lightly of MULTIPLE capacitors that are each a size of a SODA CAN!
SG: What if some one forgets to turn off everything?
Me in my head: What if the operator licks the terminals?! Come on?!?

My dilemma is where exactly should this "what if" game stop? The whole idea is to protect people from doing dumb things and hurting themselves in the process, but is there a measurement to that? To what level of idiots am I suppose to protect? Is there a measurement of idiocy? I propose that there should be one. In my everyday design tasks, we often deal with the term "6 sigma". A sigma is a standard deviation. So what 6 sigma really means is whatever we design, the final distribution curve of this thing should fit within a 6 standard deviation window or roughly 99.99966% of the time. Or in another word, whatever it is that I'm designing, it better work 99.99966% of the time. Now take that same paradigm and apply it to measuring idiots. Given a normal distribution (or bell curve). The middle bulk part would represent people with average intelligence. People to the right and left edge of the curve would represent the extreme genius and idiots, respectively. With such a curve, I think the safety guy will have a better idea of where should the "what if" questions stop because now there is a demarcation of idiots that can be saved (near the left edge of the curve but within the 6 sigma window) and those that may just jump into a swimming pool with a live capbank, what I also call the "6 sigma idiots" or people outside the left side of the bell curve.

***Note: Knock on wood, knock on wood, rabbit's foot . . . that I won't become that 6 sigma idiot and fry myself.

No. 0050 - Thoughts Separator

Has anyone ever suffers from a collision of thoughts? Let me explain. Sometimes, when either people ask me a question or I'm just thinking or pondering about something, several great ideas/thoughts/answers would arrive in my head at the exactly same time or in quick rapid firing sequence. As a result, the ideas would collide with each other and I would end up instantaneously forgetting them all. It is actually quite annoying and I wonder if this is an actual disease.

The worst thing about thoughts collision (we'll call it TC for now) isn't just the deletion of the first few good ideas/comments, the worst is when the dumb and irrelevant ideas that trickles in afterward. So for people like me who has a "direct-brain-to-mouth" syndrome (bad combo with TC), it is surely a double whammy.

I was sitting in Sunday School once and the teacher asked one of those "what do you think" type question. There was a pause then TC happened to me, but by then my hand was already half way up, it was too late. Sure enough, I lost all the good comments and the stupid irrelevant one was made (I know, because the teacher had to do some polite patch up work to my comment to bring it back into the topic). After that, some other people raised their hands and gave the respond that I would have given almost verbatim. In my mind, I threw my hands up and said, "that's what I was going to say!!" (felt like an idiot).

I think what I need (and those who suffers from TC) is a thought separator that would work like an inbox to an email account. Something that would capture it all in a flash so I can go back and review them one by one. Even better, have a spam filter that would filter out all the dumb and irrelevant stuff (you see it just happened to me right now, when I typed "spam", I thought, "hmmm maybe I should have spam for dinner"). That would be the best. Or maybe something that would at least slow down the sequence of ideas coming into my head. Only if I can digest each ideas individually, I think I would be a much much much smarter person, instead of being that weirdo that makes irrelevant off-topic comments at church.

No. 0049 - 25 Random Things About Me

Okay, this is not really my invention. I'm just following the crowd with this whole "25 random things about you" movement. In fact at one point, I vowed to not do it but then again, here I am simply because I get bored very easily. To be quite honest, I'm only adding this as an invention idea because I didn't want to mess up my whole invention motif to my notes section in my Facebook. Here are the instructions that I guess we are suppose to copy and paste at the beginning. My 25 follows that. Enjoy.

Suggested Guidelines: Once tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about yourself. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You are supposed to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.

1. It seems like I do not have any short term memory. If you physically bump me, I would forget even faster as if thoughts are falling out of my ear. I also can’t retain anything if multiple thoughts arrive at the same time (I get real frustrated when that happens).

2. I can only breathe through one nostril at a time and my nose choices which nostril to breathe through (It would often reroute the airflow at random times of the day). But when it gets mad or irritated, it would just block both passages. (You can suffocate me just by covering my mouth).

3. I once had a pet “cyclop-ed” parakeet as a child (no I did not hurt it nor did I get it from a pirate) probably because it watched too much TV.

4. I asked Roseanne out to a dance as our first date but she wasn’t feeling well, so I bought her a tube of Airborne as our date gift.

5. Whenever I get hungry back in college, I just go open up my fridge and cabinets, and my appetite would go away. (It still works sometimes these days).

6. I like tripe (the Chinese way).

7. For the longest time, I thought the thundering and misting of the vegetables in grocery stores is all apart of “Plant Psychology”, as in we are trying to trick the plant to think that it is still in the fields therefore have reasons to stay alive and fresh.

8. I once had a very heated argument (even to tears) with my cousins when I was ~8 about how ants don’t have any eyes. (I was behind the no-eyes proposition).

9. Unlike most Asians, I hate seafood.

10. I used to think 99 degrees was cool, but now I think 30+ is warm.

11. I prefer noodles rather than rice.

12. I once installed my camera in my friend’s RC plane, flew it above the mountain ranges and captured movie of the Pacific Ocean.

13. I have only ditched class twice in my entire life besides honest sick day. I faked sick once in 3rd grade and I ditched a welding lecture once just so that I can make it to this professor’s office hour.

14. I get noxious when I smell Spaghettio because back in 6th grade, my science teacher used it to represent intestines to a fake murder scene at the baseball field. He was trying to teach us the Scientific Method.

15. I love McDonald fries.

16. I get annoyed when I see little kids wearing their soccer cleats off the field (e.g. grocery stores, downtown sidewalks).

17. If I didn’t become an engineer, I would have been an architect. (And if not that, then a photographer)

18. I learned how to speak fluent English from watching the Simpsons and Full House.

19. My first crush on a foreigner (Caucasian) was the girl in Labyrinth when I was a little boy. (I’ve recently found out that the girl happens to be Sarah Connelly, who ironically is also the star to A Beautiful Mind, my number one favorite movie of all times. Roseanne accuses me of sub-consciously favoring that movie not because of the story but simply because Sarah Connelly is in it. I dispute that accusation, John Nash is awesome . . . for the most part).

20. I have driven to places before where I would be so tired when I was driving that I forgot how I got to a certain places. (For example, I once drove from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara during the night. I was so tired, that I’ve pretty much shut down my brain to the lowest running capability as in simply making sure the front of my car is in between the white lines not know where I was going. When I’ve received full mental power again, I did not remember driving through the switch backs or the tunnel of the 101 and I’ve noticed the ocean to my right. Cold sweat ran down my back as I’ve realized I’ve just cheated death. I’ve vowed to never do that again.)

21. Drinking Gatorade makes me thirstier.

22. I have yet to finishing up using an entire stick of chapstick but I’ve set that as one of the many goals in my life.

23. I hold my breath when I remove the lens of my camera.

24. I despise, loathe and can’t stand the High School Musical and all other teenie bopper movies like it. (Get real and get a job! . . . excuse my candor).

25. I hate insects of all sorts, especially those that can fly and may freak out on you. My general rule is if you have more than two pair of legs, I probably won’t like you.

No. 0048 - Wild Card Birthday

I am going to be 29 soon. And it feels a lot like someone is holding my feet to the fire. Every year that goes by, someone is pulling me incrementally closer to the fire and by the time I hit 30, that's when I go up in flames. I think that is a pretty accurate description of how I feel about my age. Since I've moved to Massachusetts, I've been looking out for a soccer league to join. They have leagues for all ages but one thing that bothers me is that they called the 30 and plus years old team "Over-the-hill league". I didn't realize I was so close to the top of the hill?! How come no one warned me about this hill?! I didn't realized I was even climbing this hill?! I thought I was still in the FOOT-hills!

I'm sure a lot of you out there are dreading to have that "3" sneak up into the tens unit of you age. The 20's were great, weren't they? You're out of the house on your own so you can have ice cream for dinner and stay out 'till 3 in the morning. You can be a couch potato or sit in front of your computer for days, but still be able to get on your feet and play some hardcore ultimate Frisbee for hours and hours without complaining "my knees are hurting". If I can choose to be 20's forever, I would. Even if I can stay in the 20's for just one more year, I would do it. That's is why my invention this month is called the Wild Card Birthday.

Here is how it works. Everybody get issued a wild card that they can keep. During any part of their life, that person may use it to legally keep the same age for another year. That simple. So if I have such a wild card, I would use it during my next birthday and give myself a second 28th birthday party (all are invited). I mean seriously, who really cares about age anyway; it's all relative. Did you feel any different when you turned 24? Not really (at least not for me). Legally you didn't really gain anything unlike 21. But will I feel something when I cross over to the 30's? Heck yes I will because I would be branded as over-the-hill according to the MPS (Mass Premier Soccer). Considering average lifespan in the US is in the hi 70's and low 80's, what is it going to hurt if we can just roll back our age by one year? That's only roughly 1.25% of our entire lifespan.

No. 0047 - Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V Appreciation Day

As Christmas is fast approach in this holiday season, it is very important for us to be a little bit more grateful for the things we may have taken for granted during the year. That's is why I'm dedicating this invention to two commands that we all PC users have grown to love: copy (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+V). I use them so much that I think the left Ctrl key on my work keyboard is probably the shiniest key from my pinky polishing it every time that I pressed it.

We all have used them, probably on a daily basis. What is so great about them is that they are universal commands that can be used between different programs, even outside the realm of the "World of Microsoft Word" (WoMW). My favorite 'inter-program-Ctrl-C&V-ing' is pulling stuff off of Adobe Acrobat/Reader. It is so easy, sometimes I feel like I'm plagiarizing. If you are reading something online and don't understand a certain word or phrase and it doesn't have a link? No worries, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and Google search in the corner will save the day. Got a long string of numbers such as credit card numbers? Ctrl+C & V will take care of you. Another favorite Ctrl+C & Ctrl+Ving moment of mine is when I'm pulling a JPEG from the web or pdfs to put into my power point. You see, I have a pep-peeve of saving separate JPEGs onto my hard drive and then insert my pictures into my document from my hard drive. My goal has always been to keep my HD as lean as possible and Ctrl+C&V allows me to bypass saving anything.

Today at work, I wrote 400-500 lines of code in Matlab in one sitting. How was I able to achieve that you may ask? Nothing but a little magic that I pulled with my pinky and ring finger. Some of you that are more programming savvy may ask "if you need to use copy & paste so much, why don't you just write some loops instead?" My answer to you is that it's complicated, OK!!!

Let us not take things for granted this holiday season and appreciate something that is so simple yet so powerful such as these two quick key commands. Maybe the next time you are cleaning and dusting your keyboard, you can give the Ctrl, C and V key an extra shine so they would stand out amongst all the other keys on the keyboard. Or maybe give those three buttons a tune up/check up every once in awhile. The Ctrl key is very prone to looseness since it typically sits on the corner of the keyboard. And lets not forget that 'C' and 'V' also has double duties serving as 2 of the 26 members of our alphabets ('C' probably gets used more so if you have to pick a favorite one to baby, I would pick C). Since the holiday seasons are also about being a little nicer than usual, I'll also give a shout out to the Apple's Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V counterparts: Apple+C & Apple+V (Unix's 'highlight' and 'double mouse button/middle mouse' are not bad either). I invite all to share their favorite copy and paste moments as we celebrate Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V Appreciation Day.

Note* Ctrl+X is not too bad either, but I don't use it nearly as much. I think Ctrl+X is a bit more barbaric than Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V, as I may accidentally delete stuff when I don't mean to (back-to-back Ctrl+X action will do that to you). Maybe next year I may grow comfortable enough to appreciate it as well. Ctrl+Z is a very strong runner-up for next year too.

No. 0046 - Engineers on Wall Street

Let me try to say this as tactfully as possible; I think all those who works at Wall Street should be fired and replaced with engineers, period! The economy is in trouble, we hear about it everyday; shrinking 401k's, shrinking job markets, shrinking GDP and etc. People are pointing fingers at each other playing the blame game. In own opinion, I couldn't really find anyone else to blame besides the greed of Wall Street and those who works there. Let me explain to you why I think an engineer (especially ME, AERO, Civil and maybe EEs) would do a better job and we wouldn't have been in this whole mess in the first place if engineers were to call the shot.

My fellow engineering friends or those who have taken more than 2 quarters of college physics can resonant with me on this one. You see, in the engineering field, we all have been exposed to this topic call Thermodynamics. Yes, the dreaded Thermo! I personally never really excelled or found interest in this branch of my ME curriculum , nevertheless, as a helpless engineering student like I was back then, this stuff was beaten into my head. As some of you may painfully recall the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. Let me explain to you how understanding these laws could have prevented us from this whole economic mess.

The first law of thermodynamics pretty much illustrates the fact that energy may be manipulated in any shape or form we want in a closed system, but it all adds up in the end meaning the end states remain fixed. Does Conservation of Energy ring a bell? Energy is neither created or destroyed, that simple. In this economic turmoil that we are living in, credit is rapidly disappearing and prices of things are falling. Why? Because the economy has violated the very fundamentals of the first law. I never quite understood the phrase "money breeds money" because the only way that this could happen is to have someone infusing cash into the system. Not unless we started doing business with the Martians or aliens from out of space, I believe an economy is a closed system. I don't care how global this economy is, it is one giant CLOSED system. Money ought to just flow around and not spontaneously reproduces itself. I don't care how or what kind of business transactions we do, or what "credit default swaps" are performed or however complicated a business deal gets, the ends state is the same meaning if there is $100 running around out there in the economy, then $100 it remains, not $1000 all of a sudden in ten years.

Second law of thermodynamics has to do with entropy. A standard high school definition is that entropy is the measurement of chaos or disorder in the world and that it is constantly increasing (I suppose that is analogous to the way the economy is spinning out of control). For as ominous as that may sound, there is actually more to it. The second law more or less points out how things spontaneously move or go the direction they do. For example, heat transfer naturally goes from hot to cold or pressure always goes from high to low. The key take away point from the second law is its opportunity to do work as energy is spontaneous flowing around. For example, the released pressure may be used to blow into a turbine to do work, or heat released from a hot source could be used to heat the water to create steam power. Same thing with money in the economy, its health (work) is predicated by its flow or liquidity. Oh by the way, one more minor detail about the second law, it is only valid as long as the CONSERVATION OF ENERGY IS SATISFIED!!! Once again, where did all these extra money (aka credit) came from??

As I refer back to my good old trusty thermo book, it actually mentions in a chapter that these theories has been applied to other fields such as psychology and ECONOMY! Now I'm really scratching my head, where are all the engineers on Wall Street? Probably next to none, but instead they are replaced with the type of people that don't have classes on Fridays also known as Cal Poly Business Majors! (Shirk-Dog, this is a satirical piece, you know I love you like a brother man). Am I bitter you may ask? Yeah, I would say. I mean how can I not be when I was drudging my way to my Friday 4 pm continuum mechanics "beat down" midterm when all the business majors are half drunk already. As you can tell by now, I really don't like business people.

Oh and by the way, while I'm on a rant, another profession that I despise - statisticians. Don't "Student-T" me?!?! I save this one for a later day.