msisk6

I grew up behind the bowling machines. My dad was a bowling machine mechanic and worked on machines all around the midwest. He often moon-lite as the on-duty mechanic during league nights and I'd go with him.

Mostly he worked at the local 16-lane alley with ancient AMF machines. The logic was all relays in a "chassis" on each machine. Relays would fail, pins and balls would end up where they're not supposed to be, folks would roll the ball into the sweep. All kinds of stuff. As a kid was was fantastic to see. A pinsetter machine is a real Rube Goldberg type contraption. Probably lead me to being an engineer.

We had the several opportunities to buy a small-town bowling center, but looking at the economics -- even back in the 1980's -- wasn't good. Most of the operating profit back then came from alcohol sales and that's a totally different business.

Good luck! Recently Facebook has been showing me a lot of bowling content. Be cool if it's making a comeback.

There used to be a big chat pile called Snowball on the north side of Joplin near the old Eagle-Picher smelter. I once saw someone fly off the top of that in a hang glider.

My grandfather on my mom's side was a miner in the lead mines. Or so I've been told; I don't remember him as he died when I was a baby. My grandmother lived near Snowball in what is best called a shack. No indoor plumbing; had to use a outhouse. She did have a telephone, although it was a party-line; you had to check the line was clear before using it.

So, yeah, that move Winter's Bone captured the feel of the area and the effects of systemic poverty really well.

Same here; grew up in Joplin before escaping to move to California in 1988.

It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.

When I was in high school the drinking age across the state border in Kansas was 18 so every weekend we'd all go over to the night clubs in Galena.

For folks interested in such things, Joplin has a Mineral Museum in Schifferdecker Park that has tons of info and exhibits on the mining that went on in this area. Has some pretty impressive (and massive) mineral samples, too. It's worth checking out if you're ever in the area.

There are lots of things to test besides basic aerodynamics. And even for that sometimes you want real data to validate models before building the full size thing.

Things that are tested/validated in wind tunnels nowadays: effect of different paint and coatings, engine inlet flow, noise, tunned mass dampers, effect of placement of sensors, control surface flutter.

I don't know fireworks that well, but these appeared to be the commercial type, with a large lift-charge that lights the sky up with a lightning style flash followed by a sky burst and the house-shaking boom of the sort I usually associate with shows put on the city or whatnot. I had two of these "shows" going on just north of me and one to the south.

And I have a pretty good idea of heights around here. I mentioned I work at Boeing on flying things so I track the ones that fly over me. They're usually about 1000 to 1500 ft. AGL on approach when they go over my house and about 200 knots. Southwest has the most flights into and out of St. Louis so it's usually a 737, and those have a wingspan of just over 100 feet on the newer models.

So yeah, I'd say these fireworks were going up at least 300 feet.

It'll be fine; the house is insured. ;)

Luckily it's so wet here at the moment the fire risk is minimal.

Yeah, it really happened. But to be fair the little dog in question is prone to seizures and all the booming certainly set this one off. She was fine after things calmed down around midnight.

I recently moved to the St. Louis area for a software job at Boeing. I'm actually in a nice quiet neighborhood in St. Charles right under the flight path for planes landing at Lambert Field.

The fireworks last night were insane. All around me folks were setting off commercial grade fireworks bursting hundreds of feet in the air. The house was shaking, my dogs were freaking out, one of them had a seizure. The air was filled with smoke and smelled of gun powder. It was one of the craziest things I've ever experienced.

Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.

I don't know what the planes were doing; I didn't hear or see any landing with all the smoke and noise.

These aluminum extrusions are called T-Slot, or as McMaster-Carr calls it, "T-Slotted Framing". Very common in industry; we have it everywhere on the Boeing factory floors. Not cheap, but very durable and reusable. Highly recommended.

Check it out starting on page 2240 of your McMaster-Carr 132 catalog. They have all kinds of things you can mount up like monitor arms. It's an erector set toy for engineers. ;)

Perhaps not. I'm certainly not an expert in Texas property law. Be interesting to see what happens. Quite a deal for the city if it sticks; get land for $10, hold it for awhile, sell for $10M, get taxes from a $1B data center build.

Huh. I lived in Taylor about 6 years ago. It's your typical small Texas town about 30-minutes east of Austin. Very Texas.

It's not the sort of thing I'd think would happen here. Small town folks talk. But with the huge new Samsung fab going up on one side of town, this datacenter on the other, and the unfathomable growth in this part of Texas; I guess things are a changing.

Hopefully all the attention this is getting will enforce the original deed restrictions. It's too bad it's a data center; there's already so much hysteria around those and this being a data center project really has nothing to do with the city purposely going around the deed restrictions. But the money, I guess.

A month or so back I was hanging out at the IT center waiting for my laptop to be re-imaged (my Windows bootloader went "missing or invalid") when an engineer brought his laptop in to be upgraded from 16GB to 32GB. The IT tech took it in the back, did the job, and brought it back out in about 10 minutes.

I think part of the problem is all our laptops have smart card slots on them, and that limits the available options.

Literally next door. Maybe one other building between Autodesk and the Bay Model.

When I started in 1990, most of engineering at Autodesk was in 2320 and 2330 Marinship Way in Sausalito. Later I moved down the street across from Mollie Stone in 3 Harbor. The infamous every-Friday "Beer Bust" was in 1 Harbor during those years.

Ted Nelson had a house boat not far way, too. Wild times.

A few years later we moved up to the new HQ on McInnis Parkway in San Rafael. We also had several buildings on Civic Center Drive and several floors of 4000 on top of the hill. I think I had an office in all of those at one time or another except the HQ building -- I managed to escape that and the new fangled "open office space" they put in that one.

I haven't been there in awhile.

Back in the 90's the Autodesk tech office was next door to the Bay Model and we'd occasionally pop over for lunch and tour the place.

Great to see it still around and open to the public.

I work for a little company called Boeing and all our PCs (desktops and laptops) are Dell and our IT center will upgrade SSD, memory, and even do repairs like swapping out motherboards.

Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.

Normally I wouldn't think the American public would be so shallow.

But just tonight, while getting gas just outside St. Louis, a young woman was having an absolute meltdown outside her car about the price of gas being $3.65 a gallon. Wild.

So, yeah, perhaps the price of gas is high enough that the public would tolerate some heavy collateral damage at this point.

Yeah, on the Cummins the ECU is mounted on the intake side of the engine away from the exhaust and turbo and toward the front right under the fuel injection pump so it gets lots of cooling air.

This thread is interesting to me 'cause I'm also a software guy and recently took a job dealing with building fighter jets and the amount of engineering going into the wiring and computers on those things is insane. It's been a very interesting learning experience.

My RAM truck with the Cummins diesel engine has the engine computer mounted on the engine block. You'd think the heat and exposure to the elements would make that a bad idea, but I suppose Cummins knows what they're doing.

Just use plain text files. Anything backed by a service is going to hurt over a long enough time frame. And it seems that time frame gets shorter every year.

I still use email drafts for a lot of notes. Looking at my email draft folder the oldest one I have is from 2002 and I can still access it just fine, even on mobile.

I wrote a ton of AutoLISP back in the day to do similar things to generate well logs for environmental and geotechnical reports. Fun stuff.

In 1990 I went to work at Autodesk and got to work on all kinds of stuff over the next decade -- AutoLISP was the bridge that got me into tech as a profession over the geology field work I was doing. It's been a wild ride.

Well, yeah. Both crypto and AI require places with cheap power to rack and stack compute and GPUs.

It remains to be seen if AI will end up being about as useful as crypto in the long run.

Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale worked for either Alcoa, the nearby coal power plant, or the nearby coal mine that fed the power plant.

I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.

Aluminum smelting is an incredibly energy intensive operation. A lot of places in the US that used to host aluminum smelters now host large datacenters, include the Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon on the Columbia river near a hydro dam. It's a shame that Rockdale didn't get something useful like these other places.

As far as Al smelting in the US; I don't know. I'd imagine it produces a lot of air pollution by itself and uses huge amounts of power that is usually generated by cheap methods like burning rocks (coal) or large hydro operations nearby to minimize transmission costs. Then you gotta get ore to the site. The only Al smelter I recall being left in the US is up near Puget Sound in Bellingham, WA and I think it's currently shutdown.

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site.

Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.

The Boeing Company | Berkeley, MO | Digital Transformation Architect | Onsite | Full-time

We’re modernizing a major aerospace/defense program and need a senior architect to lead the digital transformation: cloud migration, DevOps, CI/CD, IaC, Kubernetes, automation, the works. High autonomy, big scope in the Air Dominance division of Boeing Defense, Space & Security.

You’ll drive architecture and technical strategy across multiple teams, replace legacy pipelines with modern tooling, and shape long-term engineering direction. U.S. citizenship + ability to obtain a clearance required.

What we’re looking for: - Deep experience with cloud (AWS/Azure), Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC - Strong systems thinking and architecture design - Leadership across multi-team environments - Experience driving org-wide technical change

Comp: ~$151k–$205k + full benefits

Primary location is Berkeley, MO (at St. Louis Lambert International Airport) but for the right candidate Mesa, AZ and Seattle, WA might work.

More info / apply: https://jobs.boeing.com/job/berkeley/digital-transformation-...

Or contact me via LinkedIn; link in Bio.

The idea that the surface of the earth consists of a bunch of rock "rafts" floating around on a hidden mantle, occasionally running into each other -- with some falling and others rising -- seems rather crazy. It took a lot of data to convince folks it was real.

Early Warning (Zelle) | Senior Cloud Engineer | NYC, SFO, or Scottsdale, AZ | Full-time | $125-160k + Bonus

Early Warning, the fintech company behind Zelle®, is hiring a Senior Cloud Engineer to help us build and operate secure, scalable, cloud-native infrastructure. Our Cloud Engineering team is responsible for the core platform services powering real-time payments across the U.S.

What you’ll do: • Design and manage cloud infrastructure in AWS using Terraform and Kubernetes • Build resilient systems for compliance-heavy, high-availability environments • Drive automation, observability, and DevSecOps best practices

Tech stack: AWS, EKS, Terraform, Helm, CI/CD, Python/Bash, GitLab, Vault, Linux

About you: You’ve operated infrastructure at scale, are strong with infrastructure as code, and understand cloud-native architecture. You’re collaborative, security-conscious, and passionate about reliability.

Location: NYC, SFO, or Scottsdale, AZ. Hybrid in office 3 days a week

Apply: https://earlywarning.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/earlywarnin...

Questions? Feel free to DM or reach out via LinkedIn!

There's poor quality videos of older tests on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a1acYZ93yc

These inert reentry vehicles are impacting at hypersonic speeds; I wouldn't want to be anywhere near there.

Early Warning (Zelle) | Staff Engineer, Cloud Engineering | Scottsdale, SF, NYC | HYBRID | $150-190K + Bonus

Early Warning powers and protects the U.S. financial system, operating products like Zelle® and Paze℠. We're seeking a Staff Engineer to lead our cloud infrastructure as we complete our multi-year migration to AWS.

Role: Lead design and implementation of cloud-native solutions using AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, EKS). Focus on scalability, security, and cost optimization.

Requirements:

- 10+ years in Cloud Engineering/DevOps, 3+ years AWS

- Deep expertise in AWS core services and Kubernetes (EKS)

- Experience with Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD

- Track record implementing PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FFIEC controls

- Current AWS certification(s)

- Experience building observability at scale

- BS in Computer Science or related (MS/PhD preferred)

Benefits:

- Base: $150-180K (Phoenix) or $160-190K (NYC/SF) + bonus

- Healthcare (medical, dental, vision) + HSA

- Unlimited PTO (exempt) + 11 holidays

- 12 weeks paid parental leave

- 401(k) with 100% match on first 6%

Apply: https://earlywarning.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/earlywarnin...

My current Vuescan license is from 1999. And I think that one was just to replace an older serial due to some upgrade on their end. It's probably the most bang for the buck of any software I've actually purchased.

I don't do much scanning anymore, but I do have an ancient Nikon CoolScan 35mm scanner that's probably at least 20 years old now. I get it out every few years to scan something I found and, with Vuescan, it still works remarkably well.

Although the last time I fetched it out from a storage container by our barn (I really should store it in the house) I found the negative strip scanner wasn't working anymore, but the slide adapter did and that was good enough for the task at hand.

I have both; I got the LG when they first came out and the Studio display last year during a good sale on Amazon.

The panels seem the same but everything on the Apple one is better, as you would expect.

But lately my LG is starting to have issues with ghosting and color shifts around the edges. It's still ok to use (I'm typing this on it) but I guess it's nearing the end of it's useful life.