My Thoughts on the Gulf Oil Spill

There are two topics that are just about guaranteed to make you more enemies than friends: politics and religion. I realize that this blog is freely accessible to anyone including potential employers, co-workers, or clients. Because of this, I try to avoid the aforementioned ”two topics”. However, this is a personal blog, after all, so I will try to keep some balance here. Somehow the discussion of BP’s actions have gotten rather politically charged, and I feel like writing about something like this is  metaphorically like navigating a social minefield. Regardless, I’m going to share my thoughts anyhow. Potential employers, co-workers, clients: stop here if you are particularly sensitive about this.

Continue reading

American Wire Gauge

The English measurement system sucks so bad.

The most annoying nuisance of the system is, by far, wire gauges. For example: A big wire is, say, .5 AWG (american wire gauge) whereas a small wire is maybe 36 AWG. Does it seem completely ridiculous to anyone else that thicker wires have smaller numbers? Yes? good. Now lets say I want to go REALLY big. Like, you know, bigger than zero… guess what bigger than 0 is. Nope, wrong. It’s 00. Going bigger than 00 is 000, then 0000 (see where this madness is going?). To make things easier, you write 00 as 2/0,  000 as 3/0, etc. and pronounce these as “two aught”, “three aught”, etc. After 4/0 it switches completely to a different system. Yeah. You heard me.

Continue reading