When I started on the smart home billing thing they would not let you do bill averaging to be on the program. Understand that they allow you to do the smart billing and bill averaging both at the same time now. You pay a low rate for nights and weekends, then the cost goes up for the hot part of the day. They provide a smart thermostat that receives a signal for the price during the hot part of the day. You can set different temps for each price point. You can also set a time and temp for it to pre-cool your home while the price is low. My bill never got over $100 this past summer. Was getting over $200 before the program.

I need to find a good oil or gas heater to keep my garage above freezing, start wearing long pans in the winter and setting the thermostat lower, or both to make my winters cheaper.

The last (and only) time i was in El Centro was October 1981.
It was my first job as a millwright and we went down there to rebuild a couple of large compressors.
4 weeks of working 6 days week 12 hours a day, I was 20 yo and making $14.29 an hour with all that OT, thought I was rich.
I remember hanging out in a bar called the Buick after work.
I've been kicked into better dives.
That was a long time ago, maybe things have changed. Ya think?

Had a department meeting today and gave kudos for 2018 accomplishments, then jumped into an overview of plans for 2019.

Could not stop from opening my mouth and making suggestions when the VP of IT paused in this presentation.
The company is a hodgepodge of buildings, We are planning to build and move to a much larger facility by 2020.

VP was presenting future goals like the new building project was going to hamper things.
I said he needed to look at the building project like it was an opportunity instead of a hinderance.

He started looking directly at me as he continued. When he started talking about how it wasn't the IT staff, but people's reluctance to change production processes that was the problem...I spoke up again, said the move would be a great opportunity to push process changes past the old methods since everything would be new and diffeent..

After that if you read his powerpoint slides he changed the focus of his presentation from our department looking at the new building as a rough spot, to it being an advantage to tray better solutions and make the view of processes more flexible.

There were also goals he was presenting that I pointed out the company had moved away from after the founder had passed and gave some more historical background to match his scenarios makeing it sound like his ground breaking changes were not that ground breaking but instead something that worked and they company had moved away from. He liked that.

No-one else was making any comments, and until I started speaking up were falling asleep. Hope I didn't shoot myself in the foot!

I lived in EC for years. The winters are nice. There was a lot of transplants from San Diego as we were leaving. It was cheaper to buy in the valley and commute 2 hours each way than buy in SD. This in turn drove the prices up on housing and of course the bubble popped. Lots of empty houses left behind.

EC is nicer than Bakersfield!

Dang, $14.29 per hour was good coin in 1981. That is like $42.90 per hour now. For a 20 year old that is real damn good. That would be just over 3K per week now. $160K per year yea that is good money. Of course you would be nuts to try to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week for a year straight.

One of my friends was desperate broke, about to loose his house, and marriage. He went to work on an offshore oil rig. Within a year he was out of debt except his mortgage. They upgraded the house, and he worked off shore one more year, paid that off, and had enough cash to start his own business.

Wow!

We are bidding a large project. They have spent a ton of money buying a lot of software from a vendor we buy from, and use. The folks I went to DC to train on that sofware. We use the same camera equipment as that client is going to buy, but they need some training. The project they want to start with is huge! The software we use to make the flight plans says it will be over 100,000 images, and the final image will be 6780 gigapixels!

An iPhone 8 is 12 megapixel camera. The big boy Canon professional is a 50 megapixel camera. So if you lined a stack of 20 of them and had them aligned to cover a discrete area the 20 images together is one gigapixel. Do that another 6,770 times and you are done. Wow.

The have the software purchased. The camera manufacturer wants my business partner to go help train them to use it. I am glad I am not trying to choke that huge monster file through the system. Wow.

When will you need to expand into your big-ass garage?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1545274419.jpg

How about data transmission speeds of 159 Tb/s? Will that do?

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-fiber-transmission.html

Yea, the good news for us, all we do is teach the final clients how to use the camera system, and the software folks will help them process the imagery.

What are they trying to do, count grains of sand to take inventory on one of their kids sandboxes?

Oh, i know...they are tracking stripper glitter!

Jim, there will never be computer encroachment into my garage. Once we need that much space, we will get an real office somewhere. I guess I do have a old iPad in my garage, but it is just to play Pandora through some computer speakers.

Richard, it is not ultra high resolution, but high. 3 inch pixel, but the issue is is is a full 3D point cloud, and each individual piont has the information of X, Y & X spacial position, and a full RGB or photo color information. Back out just a little and it is a clear image humans can understand. It can be vied from any angle, spun around and even look from the ground level and look up. And the real kicker, it is over a large metropolitan area, so there is a lot to see. A wheat field is easy, mostly flat, one basic color. A city is high detail, and every color., and way way bigger than a field. As in many square miles.

Morning all. Today and 2 hours tomorrow and I am gone till next year.

Be sure to check in with us some during your retirement training.

I'll see if I can get a kitchen pass that allows me to stop baking and check in.

Mertnin...

I must say...Being away from my own facilities all day Monday, some of Tuesday, and even longer Wednesday has really messed up my constitution. Thankfully have not had any away incidents.

no incidents is a good thing.

Looks like we had an EF2 tornado here this week. I know not much on the OK scale but nasty for us.

Yea, we are exporting our tornadoes to other places that have a shortage of them. Since a tornado in December in Washington state is really rare, you need some to get the average up. We are way down in the number of tornadoes for 2018. No one complains about a tornado drought.

I suspect the first person to complain about them is given a funny coat that buttons and ties in the back.

Zackly, that was really good $$$ but hard dangerous work.
That kind of work makes a young man get old.
But it was good motivation to go back to school at night.