Boy people were not kidding when they said there was ‘Nothing’ between’ Wichita, KS and Tulsa, OK. Made the trip with Cece and Ron for classes Wednesday and Thursday, leaving Thursday afternoon and hopefully getting into Tulsa at a decent time. I have my MacBook Air with me which surprisingly handles Blender quite well.

This time around for our systems testing has gone orders of magnitude worse than the first go around. This to get better each time is it not? At least this weekend I can get back to Blender for a couple days. I’ll be off tomorrow, crossing fingers… at 1:00pm

Wednesday, third day of testing and everything seems to be going well but 3am to 4pm is getting old now and it will go on for the next two weeks. Found some errors in the systems yesterday and one was a show stopper, we will see how long it takes them to get that fixed. Today is another day and we are ready!

Yesterday, Monday when everyone arrived all talk was about the layoffs on Friday and how inappropriately they were handled by all involved. After about 4 hours I was in the process of sending a message to a co-worker regarding some problems they were having on the shop floor and saw to my dismay a <disabled> indicator next to a friend of mine, meaning he had just been laid off as well. This hit home because he had quite a few years with the company as both a direct employee and a contract engineer. He and I both went to orientation on the same day, the 16th of December 2011. Scary things happening right now.

Wow what can I say. When I arrived this morning security was right there checking my badge to something on his clipboard. Was it a list, I had no idea.

Turns out layoffs, catching people on the list and escort to HR, people missed during this exercise  were invited to a ‘Lean’ meeting and taken to HR at that point. This next point is only hearsay but I was told those removed today were not allowed to return to their desks for their personal belongings.

Makes me think, do I really want to work for companies that can do that to your life? Do I want to work for myself and go that route at the age of 50?

Something to think about.

P.S. These people did, at least get 2 month pay on exit.

We are just a month and a half away at work from going live with SAP on the first of four programs to convery and our second round of testing is starting up. During the first part of this week we have been validating data downloads and at first glance I am concerned. Our first go around with the data validation, four months ago, found very few errors and the errors we found were expected and not a big deal, we could correct the errors after go live without much difficulty. This time we have found multiple errors with no consistency from one set of work instructions to the next. Engineering has been making changes and Manufacturing Engineering has been incorporating those changes without a formal release of the Engineering models. Data validation from the beginning of conversion through the actual go live should be getting better not exponentially worse and now the time spent working on this is encroaching on my fun time at home as now it is bed time.

Have a great evening

There are so many things to play with in this new release it is hard to stop playing around. From the Rigid  Body, Hair Rendering with Cycles to Dynamic Topology can’t make up my mind on what to play with when I get home and crank up the computer. So, it is time to stop playing and finish what I have been working on then play. 🙂

To many toys!

P.S. If there are people out there that have purchased a Dell/Alienware computer lately I have noticed a problem. While typing the cursor seems to move randomly in the middle of a sentence.  This has happened multiple times and did so 6 times writing the sentences above. I was able to solve this issue by disabling the touch pad when a USB device is used. This does not make much sense because I type without any other parts of my body touching the keyboard with the exception of my finger tips. Anyway, it worked if anyone else might be experiencing this issue.

Playing with and testing animation using the new Rigid Body Tools in release 2.66, pretty dang easy. No fancy lights, just ran the sim and animated.