Year: 2007

A couple of people on the bulletin board asked me what I thought about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and what caused it. I wrote the following, which provides very little insight, but I haven’t posted anything on the blog in a while. We were kidding on vacation that I would need to get back to help fix the bridge, but I was at least able to scan the documents I mentioned below which were requested by the investigators. Every bridge collapse causes engineers to change how we do our work, and this won’t be any different even though it isn’t known what caused the problem yet.

Here’s what I wrote about why the bridge fell:

Continue reading “Bridge Collapse”

At work we discussing a project that we would design and then turn it over to another owner. My boss said that wouldn’t work because the other owner wouldn’t want a project that we had designed. That would be like buying a pig in a poke, he said.

I knew what he meant, but wondered what a “poke” was and what that referred to. According to Wikipedia and a few other sources, a poke is a bag. At markets people would sell a young (live) pig and put it in a burlap bag for the customer to carry home. But shady vendors would substitute some other, cheaper animal instead of a valuable baby pig. One animal they might use would be a cat. That way the buyer would know something was alive, but then end up with nothing of value.

So that’s kind of funny that you actually want a pig in a poke and would get stuck with a cat. But the other neat part is that if you investigated the contents before handing over your money, then you “let the cat out of the bag” and realized the vendor was trying to cheat you.

I guess it was so widespread that it spawned two different phrases that are still in use hundreds of years later. Some scam!

My friend Don, in Thailand, sends me links to articles on The Straight Dope every now and then. I got one from him today on The Metric System in the US. It’s a “classic” article so it was written in 1995 and hasn’t been updated. I started writing back to Don about our experience at work with the metric system, mostly after the article was written. I got a little carried away, so I decided to make it a blog entry.

Continue reading “Metrication”

The second quarter of 2007 was my best quarter ever with Amazon by a good bit. I think I benefitted a lot from spring break and graduation season when people buy battery packs for the new iPods or for upcoming travel. I had $5,783 in sales, resulting in $263 in commissions. Battery pack sales were strong, with the Maxell battery pack nearly equaling the discontinued Belkin at its peak, with 51 of those sold during the period (one was returned). The next closest was the EZgear Powerstick, also powered by AA batteries, with 16 units sold. The others aren’t even worth mentioning. Another big seller was the PAC unilink adapter, with 19 of those sold via my iPod to Sony car stereo page.

Continue reading “2nd Quarter Results”

At work I edit a manual of design practices and from time to time people will write with suggested changes. Recently I had a guy who was asking me to add some information. In the e-mail he quoted a sentence from the manual and included the new information. He also edited some numbers I already had in the sentence to add a comma, making 3500 appear as 3,500.

I don’t know where I picked it up, but it seems like I learned at some point that you don’t need the comma in 4-digit numbers, but should include them with 5 digits and above. I looked through the manual and at least I was consistent. I did a search to see what the standard practice is and it was pretty useless. Wikipedia has a big long article about commas that says one standard is to use spaces (actually half spaces) between thousands, like this: 15 000 and another is to use commas like this: 15,000. Of course they didn’t use a 4-digit number. Naturally they had to add the crazy thing where commas are used as decimal points and periods are used for thousands in some countries (which I learned about when I got my very first HP calculator that could be set to display numbers either way). In a discussion on Wikipedia, one contributor flat out refuses to ever use commas in numbers because it is WRONG (his caps) regardless of what the Wikipedia style manual tells him to do. That’s insubordination.

Continue reading “Commas in Thousands”