Geek On The Mountain


138th Post Special


Jul 31

Posted: under TV.

Welcome to the 138th post special!…

I didn’t really have any content lined up, but I thought the subject matter was at least relevant..

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Nuts


Jul 29

Posted: under General.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a large container of cashews. I noticed that they had printed on the lid both the expiration date and the manufactured on date. These dates were 2 years apart, but interestingly, we were already a year and a half into those 2 years. The nuts were fine. They weren’t stale or anything like that. It’s just that generally so speaking, from a manufacturing point of view, this is rather incredible. What this means is that there is a year and a half’s worth of inventory sitting between the nut maker and the store that sells them. This is something that I almost sadly know too much about…

There are generally two “types” of manufacturing. I use the term types loosely, because you could do either to varrying degrees and I couldn’t really tell you right off hand that there is even a solid cutoff point between the two. Perhaps it would be better to explain it as a state of being more lean or less lean….Anyways, the two types of which I speak are batch manufacturing and lean manufacturing (sometimes called just-in-time production, or the Toyota production system). The differences are pretty straightforward. Basically, in batch manufacturing, huge batches (lots) of goods are produced at once. The nuts are a good (though quite extreme I think) example. There is a year and half’s worth of inventory sitting around. I’m taking a guess that the store I bought them from (a large chain) buys them directly from the manufacturer. If they were buying through an intermediary, the inventory levels would still be quite large, though not quite so bad. I’m saying this because at every level, inventory is held. This might be 1 hours inventory or it might be a months worth (perhaps a year in this case). Also, for all I know, the nut manufacturer has a very small inventory, and the store I got them from is holding nearly 18 months worth of stock. That doesn’t seem likely though, since if the had a tendency to do it for nuts, they probably would do it for other things too, and I really don’t think they have the warehouse space for all of that. At any rate, some of the invtory is being held by each party. The second type is lean manufacturing, and basically means low levels of inventory. A truly lean system will hold no inventory at all over what is needed(i.e. they have half a days inventory, but that is because they are making goods for the truck that goes out the next day), though I’m quite sure that in practice this is rare. This is what I mean by more lean or less lean. Somewhere between no inventory and 18 months worth lies the point at which a company will call itself “lean”, though as I said I couldn’t really tell you where exactly….it’s in the ballpark of a day or three.

As I said before, there are other factors as well. Certain parts may have to cure for a certain period of time, so a certain level of inventory must be maintained just for that. There are other examples basically along those lines (wine is probably a good extreme example). I don’t know if nuts have any such consideration, but for all I know they could.

Batch manufacturing is the way manufacturing started out, and it has been traditional to do it this way in the US. It makes sense at a certain level. You have machines that take a long time to change-over to different model/product, so you make large batches to minimize the downtime due to the change-over. Maybe you tend to hold on to lots of inventory to make sure you can still make shipment to your customer when a machine breaks down. Maybe it’s just tradition. I could go on, but I won’t. This system has problems. The inventory covers up problems. The change-overs could be made shorter, but with enough inventory to cover the downtime, there is no need. The same is true for machine problems. Instead of really needed to fix the root cause, problems can just happen again and again because the inventory is there. Big lots of parts can lead to quality problems. If something was setup wrong and no-one notices it until you change-over again, would you rather have produced 500 bad parts or 5000? There’s also a matter of flexibility. Say the customer calls up and changes their order for the next day. The trouble is, you don’t have enough produced of that particular item to meet the order. Now it takes you 12 hours to change-over, and then…..you couldn’t ship what they needed in time. In the long run, a customer will find a supplier who can ship what they need when they need it. It’s good to keep in mind as well that inventory is expensive. A company could have millions of dollars tied up in their inventory. I say tied up, because the inventory levels can be cut, then that money can be used for something purposeful (paying down debt, buying new equipment, etc) instead of just sitting in the warehouse. And speaking of warehouses, those cost money too. That space could be better used for actually producing parts, or not at all (in the case of a dedicated warehouse that might otherwise not be needed).

Toyota started the whole lean manufacturing thing. The idea was to eliminate waste (waste being anything that isn’t adding value…even a few steps to get to tools is waste). If you look at it, you’ll realize that a lot of it seems rather anal, but in reality, when you make thousands of widgets a day, even small savings add up quickly over time. Lean manufacturing isn’t just about inventory levels, but many other things follow from this. Look at all the problems I mentioned above, and you’ll see how this helps. A lot of it has to do with management as well. They may have never particularly noticed before when machines would break down all the time, but when there isn’t enough inventory to cover the downtime and the customers start complaining, they’ll really get right to it and try to make sure that things get fixed and fixed for good.

If you want a good example, have a look at Dell. They don’t even start making your computer until you order it. They probably don’t have a whole lot of finished computers sitting around.

To finish with a pun, it’s just nuts to do it any other way.

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The Trauma That Is Life


Jul 27

Posted: under Personal.

What a day. I started off trying to deal more with refinancing our house. To sum up the over all trouble, no one seems to want to do a 30 year loan and we can’t get cash back on our equity because we don’t own our land. We can get savings on what we pay every month with a 20 year loan, but obviously nowhere near what we could get with a 30. The equity thing is also rather important. This is all important for us to be able to actually adopt. I’m certainly not done looking, and I’m looking at other loans, but it’s tough to find something that works that we can actually pay for. Anyways, I thought I had found a place that would give us some cash back, but I just found out that they want your equity level to be at 35%, and ours is more like 25%.

Then, we went to try to get the second cell phone. The hangup is here is that we’re doing a number transfer. This isn’t working out easily. The trouble is that our main phone is still in Milenka’s name, and the cell is in mine, so they won’t do the transfer. I originally tried to get the phone a few weeks ago, and found this all out. I called up Verizon, and they supposedly put my name on the account, but when we just got our latest bill, I’m nowhere to be found. I called them back, and they account had Milenka’s name, and my SSN. I called back, and supposedly everything is OK now, but Alltel wouldn’t transfer because the bill doesn’t have my name. Apparently they don’t care what the account says, just the bill….come to think of it, I should just scan the damn thing, edit it, and print it back out….anyways, Verizon is supposed to be mailing us something detailing the change, so hopefully Alltel will recognize that. I’ll certainly try a different location…..the place we went to is located in Walmart and the lady was just dumb. Like, you’d tell her something, and then she’d ask you a question that you had just answered with what you told her….I asked if I could have Verizon fax the changes to her, and she just said that she might not get it because the person who mans the fax might not know where it goes, and she was unwilling to help beyond that.

It was all such good fun, that I declared myself sick and am spending the night with Milenka. Not that it really matters, my work out and out declares that it’s my time and they don’t care why I’m using it. We’ve started off by blogging, so I figured I’d write an entry and do some major revamping of how everything looks….I might even make some graphics, which should be interesting considering I can’t draw. I actually had this silly idea many years ago that perhaps I could draw if I were using a computer…..given, I was trying to do ASCII art for a BBS(does anyone else remember cool, multi-page ASCII drawings that would flow down the screen?), but I can say that it really didn’t work out. On the other hand, I think that doing that was probably a lot harder than using paint shop pro….I’ll give ‘er a go.

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Dead Weight


Jul 23

Posted: under Movies.


Milenka moved a good part of our DVD’s to a storage case yesterday. We actually have two of them, although we need more since these ones only hold 208 discs and we have more than 516 DVD’s, not to mention the fact that we need to do this for CD’s as well (although I might just spindle most of them since they won’t get used). Talk about a huge difference. What used to take up tons of space (the empty cases fill two garbage bags) no takes up no more room than a couple of folded up towels. What good are the cases anyways? They’re essentially just shipping material as far as I’m concerned. I must admit that I felt bad as I threw them away though. It seemed like I was tossing actual movies. Also, some of the cases are shiny and cool looking, but I can’t really see any point in keeping them around. Furthermore, it will be much easier to browse through the movies now that they’re in a smaller, portable storage unit. The weight is interesting as well. I calculated that there are actually 7 pounds of discs in each case. The empty cases that filled two trash bags came in at 41 pounds.

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Lost Ideas


Jul 20

Posted: under General.

I keep on coming up with all kinds of ideas of things to write about while I’m at work. I’ll think about various topics in some detail and they’d work out just perfectly to post. Lately, I’ve been thinking about adoption, copyrights, creative freedom in general, and politics. The last item I find especially sad, because I actually hate politics. For the most part, everything I think to (and do) write about is just a rant (this is actually true of most of my posts…I need to get rid of the rant category, I stopped using it awhile ago once I realized this fact  ) Anyways, my point is, that I think of so many things, that by the end of the day, and particularly by the next morning, I’ve pretty much forgotten exactly what I wanted to say. I remember things in general, but I usually end up thinking about specific points, and when I go back to write about the subject, I end up forgetting to include one or more points (which then occurs to me later in the day at work…). Then again, I forget even when it isn’t something I thought about at work. Take my mentioning of The 4400 the other day. I had briefly decided not to mention the EMP from the nukes they used at the start of the pilot. Then I decided that I would mention it, but I forgot. I’ll make the correction here. (it also occurs to me that they might not have explicitly said they were nuclear…) Particularly with so many of them, nuclear weapons detonated in the atmosphere would fry nearly every piece of electronic equipment in the country. I couldn’t begin to speculate on the range, but it would be in the hundreds of miles, at least. This is a point movies ALWAYS miss. I suppose it’s less dramatic if everyone is suddenly completely unable to deal with the crisis in any way because nothing works anymore. Anyways…

I end up thinking too much at work because I don’t really do anything. When I say that, I don’t mean that I’m not busy, I just mean my mind isn’t. I pretty much just run some machines and make sure the parts coming out are OK. There’s more to it then that, but that’s how the majority of my day goes anyways. There are occasional times when something breaks or otherwise isn’t working correctly when I have to actually concentrate on what’s going on, otherwise it doesn’t take much. I remember that once I was checking some parts to make sure that they were OK and there was a calculator in front of me. I started to play with it a little bit and make some rough speculations about the inner workings of the thing. That’s pretty sad in my opinion. Admittedly, the inspiration comes from a class that I wouldn’t have taken if it wasn’t required and that I probably will never put to any good practical use, but still, sad. Work is exciting, really.

Speaking of forgetting ideas, I need to spit a couple of things out before I do so. We have an fund raiser going to raise money for our adoption. Information is available on Milenka’s main page. There was one person who was nice enough to buy somewheres around $150 worth of stuff. I thought that was nice and that I’d mention it. Also, we are now ebay free, and I’m very proud of she who is responsible for as much.

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