thebaldgeek

Eighteen years and three months. As Freddy pointed out, thats almost 1/2 my life….. When we started here, there were 2 serial controllers (LC4’s) and 2-3 racks of digital I/O (B1’s). Now, the whole joint just humms with Opto22 gear. 14 controllers, over 100 racks and thousands of points of I/O.
Amazingly I have known the guy that first ‘picked’ Opto22 for the hospital automation for years, but never knew that he made the choice till about 2 weeks ago. What an amazing train of events has led me here, to this blog, to reflect back on the past 18 years.

I have lots of memories, and the nice thing is that they are ‘all’ good. Sure, there has been some low points, but most of them were self inflicted, so I cant point the finger at any one other than me to say that I had a bad day because of them.

The shear amount of Opto22 gear that we have installed, configured, programed and tuned would have to be the highlight. Its good stuff (and no, they did not pay me to say that!) Remember, I have been on my own the bulk of that time, so its not like it was much of a social job, FactoryFloor and ioProject are my friends that I know well.

Watching it grow and seeing the plant come alive on the graphics screen has been great. I have always enjoyed automating things, so it was a great job for me. Getting involved in the IT side of things has been fun, learning about networking under Dan was a real highlight. Working with the architects and contractors has been interesting. Getting involved with planing and building a 6 story hospital block was intense. So was commissioning it! I think I wore out a pair of shoes getting it done! (~180 SNAP-PIDV modules over the 7 floors (basement had a few) had a learning curve that has now flat lined).
We talked about web pages and touch screens for the users back in 2002, and its just happening now, about 3-4 weeks from now, the first of many touch screens will go in, at least I got to do the programming for it.

We have gone from Paragon, to Paragon NT, to Cryano to Factory Floor to ioProject, thats MSDOS to Win95, Win98, WinXP and some Linux file servers thrown in for ‘fun’. The first controllers were serial, then Arcnet, then Ethernet. From our own network to piggybacking on the IT network and infrastructure.
I think you get the point, 18 years has seen a lot of changes and different thinking go under the bridge.

The past 3 years with Nick have been great, I have really enjoyed the brainstorming sessions we have had, I had not known it, but I have really missed throwing ideas around with someone……no one, and I mean no one, other than Nick, knows what I do (what I did!), what we go though to do it down here all this time. I always wanted to someone to know, and when Nick came up to speed, it was better than I imagined.

I still wish that ‘management’ took the time to try and understand what we do. No one is irreplaceable but they just don’t get the fact that we program the computer that runs the joint. They can pay the surgeons and managers all they like, but one ‘opps’ here in the little office in the basement and all those high paying staff would walk out and the place would grind to a halt. Not bragging, just stating facts. You cant open the windows anywhere, turn the heating on and it would be 40°C in no time! Do that and watch all those high paid, ‘important’ people do their job then! Now that they are back to only one guy that knows the system, they are exposed again like they were when it was just me.
My point is simple, its important, on really big jobs, that more than one person knows how it all works…..

Anyway, its an odd feeling leaving after so long. I think the time is right, and I am really looking forward to starting at Opto22, and I am looking forward to changing rolls from ‘hard core’ programming to sales and marketing. Its going to be very exciting…….so, overall, the sadness of leaving is overwhelmed with the excitement…… Still, I suspect there will be a few tears in the bike helmet on Friday afternoon…..

180 bucks, 9 hours, 4 rides…..thats an average of 2 and 1/4 hours standing in line for each 50 second ride. One ride was 25 seconds……
None of us really enjoined it.

We stood in line for 2 and 1/5 hours for the X2. What a piece of over marketed garbage! I hope that the designer got fired! It was so rough! I had to clamp my mouth shut so my teeth would not vibrate out. To add salt into the wound, it has just been given a 10 million dollar refurbish. I am so glad that I did not get to ride the original X!!!! It was popular because we rode it the day after it opened I guess, hence the long wait. It will be interesting (not) to read some reviews and see what the popular consensuses is about the ride after all that money has been spent on it.
After that, it could only get better, and it sort of did.
Standing in line for another 2 hours saw us ride the Viper. Now thats a roller coaster, nice and smooth, no getting smashed to bits, nice loops. All over in about 54 seconds, but at least you walk away smiling.
From there we did the Superman escape. It was ok, it was the shortest of the rides at 25 seconds. I don’t remember feeling weightless for so long (pity really).
From there it was over to Tatsu. This is one weird coaster. You get in sitting down, but then they rotate it so you are horizontal (your feet are clamped in as well), then you do the whole ride like that, head first, inside and outside loops, it was really neat and super!

That was it. That was 9 hours. We ate lunch while standing in line, so there was no time lost.
All the standing on line and getting banged up in the X2 has left me with some pretty cranky hips and leg muscles, I have a pretty solid limp at the moment, not a lot of fun, I hope it works its way out asap, I have been doing a lot of streaching to try and get it sorted.

Note to self (and you lot), DO NOT do amusement parks on a public holiday!

We spent an enjoyable Monday morning with Steve and Karrie and the kids. (Oh, and Sunday night we watched ‘P.S I love you’, the girls loved it, the guys put up with the girls loving it).
We installed blinds in the rooms, weeded the vegi garden, planted his fruit trees, installed the closet cloths racks and just generally did stuff. Since we don’t have a house to do stuff with, its fun to help them.
Monday afternoon we had a super smooth fast run home. (i.e the holiday weekend traffic nightmare did not show).

I have given up on the computer and have gone back to the old hard drive, its not the best, but I hope in a day or so I can get it a little more sorted. I am going to see if I can get the sound working and look at running Windows in a virtual machine with this old version. (Im still keen to only run the one PC for both Linux and Windows). Anyway, just letting yous all know the status of the computer (aka, still not happy).

Yes, I know the blog has been down for 2 days, its hosted by a company in Australia, not me or Dan, its just another reason why I have gone back to my old hard drive, the blog was working on there.
Sooner I can get it up and running, sooner I can transfer the site from Dan (and the flaky blog hoster) to my PC and have things the way they were.

So, that was our first long weekend in America……. they can only get better from here!