Category: #general

Understanding Margin in Product Manufacturing

Published 2020/01/01

Understanding Margin in Product Manufacturing

There is a cost associated with every product ever made. The coffee cup you are drinking out of. The chair you are sitting in. The screen you are looking at. Every item around you was produced at some point from some sort of human labor and can have some sort of value placed on the generation of that object. The way that companies make money is to then sell products for a higher value than that cost and therefore make some money on that object. Welcome to the wonderful world of profit margin.

Describing My Writing Method

Published 2019/12/28

Describing My Writing Method

Here we are at the end of 2019 and in the past few months the blog and visibility has gone from nothing to nearly 50 postings. The money made from writing has gone from nothing to $0.43. There are now posts on Medium and Twitter about the articles from the blog. Basically, looking back, the past couple of months have served as a launching off point for an online presence and it has been more successful that I ever dared to hope way back in August when I finally got off my butt and started doing something about all of these ideas in my head.

My 50th Post

Published 2019/12/28

My 50th Post

50 already? That is a big number. It is a serious number. A lot of articles on the web state that Google doesn’t get serious about a blog until there are 50+ quality posts on the site. So in some ways, this has crossed into serious territory. In many others, it is still in its fun and wild infancy.

Blog Updates – Curation & Metrics Edition

Published 2019/12/01

Blog Updates – Curation & Metrics Edition

These past few days have been very exciting for me in regards to the blog and I wanted to comment on some of the things that have been happening for the sake of posterity. The first exciting thing that has happened is that while cross posting some of the posts from the blog on Medium, two of the posts have now been curated on that site! The following screenshots commemorate these posts: The amazing thing about these posts is that I wasn’t trying to be curated or have them highlights on different areas of the site. This is my 41st post on this blog and I am still working on getting my feet under me. I really am not sure that I have this whole thing figured out yet, but as of creating this post I have 335 views across the 9 stories that I have posted to Medium.com. That…

Published 2019/10/24

My 25th Post

Wow – 25 posts already? And not just random junk thrown up. I am happy and proud of each post and the thought and effort that went into each one. So at this point I think it is time to set some more goals! However, my life has changed drastically over the past few weeks and I feel the need to talk about that for a moment. Please bear with me. I would like to take a quick aside from the goals portion for a minute to write something really difficult to write. I have not written much in the past few weeks because I lost my father. This was a sudden even for my entire family and it has been a very rough ride. He always wanted me to be happy. Writing this blog makes me happy. Therefore, I am going to continue writing and building and getting better…

Published 2019/10/22

Workplace Haiku

When you are able to work someplace where you can have some fun with the people you work with you usually end up coming up with inside jokes and other fun things to do. Along with the previously discussed “pop time” one of the things that we did in my first full engineering job was to write workplace haiku. I am still searching for the lists of haiku that we wrote those many, many years ago and if I find them then I will work on posting some of the better ones. However, this blog gives me an ability to resurrect my haiku skills and attempt to create a couple of haiku per week. Now you may be asking yourself – why haiku? Actually, let’s take a step back and first cover: what is haiku? According to wikipedia, haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that is structured over 17…

Published 2019/10/16

What’s Your MDI?

Many, many years ago I worked with a wonderful group of people. This is the type of group that you will always look back at fondly and miss spending time with them during the day. One of the activities that we would partake in nearly every single day was something we called “pop time”. Pop time was where we would walk down to a small kitchen area where there were vending machines and a coffee maker and everyone would get an afternoon drink and chat for a while before heading back to finish up the day. We usually had pop time between 2-3pm. There was one individual in this group, Todd, that was just an all around great guy. He would usually have something fun to talk about. I would also state that he was usually on the glass half empty side of the fence. There were many rants about…

Published 2019/10/06

When Is The Best Time To Drink Coffee?

Oooohh! Another coffee post. Honestly, when I started this blogging effort I secretly felt that while it sounded good in my head, putting coffee in the blog tagline was a bad idea. How much mileage can I get from coffee? I pretty much had to force myself to create the initial post about coffee because I felt like the blog was inauthentic if I didn’t at least have one post reflecting the tagline. But heavens be praised! Due to the magic that is Google and their all-seeing eye, searching for coffee for that post has caused more coffee articles to show up in my feeds! Awesome! It looks like that tagline won’t be in vain after all… So… more coffee! And to get everyone in the mood, let’s reference one of the all-time great skits calling for more of something! So as you watch the following, just imagine that instead…

Published 2019/09/29

Why Do We Measure Things?

Yesterday was frustrating. We attended a competition that one of our kids was participating in and the end results of that did not go as we expected. At the end of the day I think the parents were more frustrated by the outcome than the kids were. And it all came down to a scoring, or measurement system that some faceless people (faceless to us) compiled somewhere else and that led to results that we did not agree with. Think about that for a second. This type of measurement happens ALL THE TIME. Your daily life is a result of these hidden measurements. The speed limit that you drive is a result of someone measuring and stating a result that is estimated to be safe for that section of road. At work it happens all the time. Statements of “you are doing a good job” are a form of hidden…

Published 2019/09/28

“Professional” is a Funny Term

The term “professional” is one that I have always found to be very interesting. The definition of the term “professional” (noun) is: “a person engaged or qualified in a profession”. As an (adjective) it can mean “relating to or connected with a profession” or “engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation rather than as a pastime”. As I am writing this I am not yet 40 yet I have been a paid “professional” in one form or another in working with computers and development for 20 years. So why are there times that I don’t I feel like I am a “professional”? I really need to explain what I mean here. Some weeks back I remember seeing an article that was talking about a study regarding self perception in younger people and how it was up to 30% more positive when they were living at home or…