Ewwwww!! Sharing Germs At The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas

Note:  I have a ton of half-written posts, so I'm going to try to finish up and post some of them.  Here's something from the start of 2017...

I stayed at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas while I was at CES in January, and noticed something really gross...

The water glass in the bathroom had a layer of crud in the bottom of it.  Maybe it was just hard water residue, maybe it was toothpaste film from some prior guest.  Whatever it was, I wasn't going to use the glass.  But I decided to take a picture of the crud for posterity, and then I set the glass back down next to the sink:

Bathroom Drinking Glass Jan 6

That, however was not the really gross part.  This morning I noticed that there were two "new" glasses, upside down, in the corner.  I decided to check if the new ones were any cleaner.  That's when I saw this:

Bathroom Drinking Glass Jan 7

Ewwwwww!  The same stain is still partially there.  But only partially.  And that's horrifying.  Because it means that housekeeping must have "washed out" the original glass, there in the bathroom, and then put it back.  And there is no scenario in which the person cleaning the bathroom also washing the glassware is a good thing.

When I checked out shortly after this, I spoke with a manager.  She said that the policy is that the glassware is replaced in the rooms if it has been used.  Clearly this isn't what happened.   She also suggested that perhaps this was two different glasses, but if you look at the shape of the blob in the upper left corner of both photos, it is clearly the same mark:

This original blob is clearly the same stain...

... as this one that had been partially washed off the next day.

Had I known that I would be doing "before and after" comparisons, I would have tried harder to get a better image for the original picture.  Nonetheless, I'm completely confident that this is evidence of a really disgusting housekeeping practices, at least between January 6 and 7 in my room, at the Venetian.

WTH?! Kingsman - "Shoot the dog."

This weekend I watched "Kingsman: The Secret Service" on HBO.  It was a generally fun, over-the-top spy movie with tons of absurd situations about which I happily suspended disbelief and just went with the story.  One thing in it, however, really rubbed me the wrong way.  The lead character Eggsy, a candidate to join this super-elite spy organization, has been given a dog to train and raise as part of his own spy training.  The last test of his readiness to become a Kingsman is when he is handed a pistol and told, "Shoot the dog."  He is unable to, and is summarily dismissed, then upbraided by his mentor and told that he's thrown away this amazing opportunity.  The gun, it turns out, held only a blank, but he didn't know that.  Wait? What?  What, exactly, was the point of this test?  If every other member of this organization has "passed" this test, then they are all either psychopaths, or pathologically willing to follow nonsensical orders. In either case, they probably shouldn't be running around the planet with weapons and the autonomy to do horrible things at will.  I sincerely thought, as I watched the scene, that it was a test of character, and that the "correct" answer was to refuse to shoot the dog.  After all, they've spent much of the film up to this point emphasizing that these agents are "gentlemen."  But nope, apparently they want psychopathic gentlemen.  It really damaged my enjoyment of the entire film.

As an aside, at point-blank range, even a blank can cause injury or death.

So I Want to Manufacture in China... Who Should I Use?

A friend recently asked me on behalf of a client if I had any recommendations about finding a contract manufacturer (CM) in China. Here's the lightly edited version of what I wrote back to her:

This is (as you know) a massively involved question.  It depends enormously on the nature of the product...  Volumes?  BOM cost?  Level of Tech?  The CM you'd use to make 10,000,000 greeting card modules on paper one-layer boards is very different than you'd want to make 1,000 pieces of a 19" x 19" 20-layer HDI PCB with $20,000 worth of parts on it.  In between is an entire spectrum of possibilities. China is also so entirely about relationships that you REALLY need to have an introduction and preferably some prior contact with anyone you want to work with.  You should also plan to have boots on the ground there often or even continuously, especially early in the process.  Ideally that representative is someone Chinese who speaks the language and knows the culture, and has relevant relationships already in place.  Although you then also need to be careful that those pre-existing relationships don't mean that "your" guy is more loyal to your vendor than to you.  A good place to start that I just heard about last week from a co-worker of mine, and which sounds interesting is Dragon Innovation.  I should emphasize that I have not used them myself, but I've heard good things about them...

Another question I would ask is "Are they sure that they want / need to manufacture in China?"  The benefits of building there are shrinking, especially at the lower end of the volume scale.  I have found more and more CMs in the U.S. that are willing to take on medium volume manufacturing at lower cost if you can give them lead time.  They use those jobs to fill in gaps in their "primary" quick-turn prototype assembly.  One place here in the Seattle area that I use for protos but which also does smaller end production work is Out of the Box Manufacturing.  I use them to assemble boards, but they can also do full final product assembly and test.  You can also "split the difference," and do the more commodity aspects of your manufacturing (e.g. bare PCB fab, or PCB fab + assembly, or shooting plastics) overseas, and then do final assembly, calibration, and test here in the U.S. You can also look into working with U.S. firms that have subsidiaries or partners in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America.

A local design-and-project management firm that we use for a lot of stuff, and with whom I've had good luck, is Monsoon Solutions. They have relationships with fab houses and assembly houses in the US as well as internationally, and can help you find the right balance of cost, speed, and international entanglement.  They will also maintain inventories of part kits and help actually design products as well, if you want.  Of course, you pay for their expertise, but I've found it to be valuable.  Obviously I've got a current bias for Seattle sources.  Many of my Bay Area leads for this stuff are somewhat stale, since over the last few years my employers have either had direct relations with industry-specific ODM firms in China (hence my frequent travel!) or didn't manufacture in China at all...  There's also a fairly recent profusion of manufacturing consultants on all this stuff, arguably making it much easier to get started in HW production.

Anyway, this only touches on some of the myriad issues.  It doesn't even mention issues of Chinese vs. U.S. law , intellectual property protection, supply chain integrity, international shipping, and so on. As usual, the correct answer is "get expert help with this, because it's a monumental undertaking, and it's worth getting right."  Good Luck!

The Evil (Non-)Phonetic Alphabet

I am a big fan of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet when reading character strings to people, especially over the phone or radio. It was designed for optimal intelligibility, and is a standard that most people are at least vaguely familiar with from movies and television.  Plus you get to sound like a secret agent or military scout calling for air support.  When I was talking with my dad the other day, though, he mentioned hearing someone on the radio say, jokingly, "'C' as in 'Chanukah'."  This got me thinking about what an optimally bad / confusing / ambiguous phonetic alphabet would look like.

This is a work in progress, but here's what I've go so far:

Aisle
Bdellium
Czar
Djibouti
Euphrates
Fjord
Gnome
Herb
Isle
Jalapeno
Knee
Lladro
Mnemonic
Ngabu
Ouija Board
Pneumonia
Qatar
Rwanda
Sphygmomanometer
Tsunami
Uvula
Vraisemblance
Wrinkle
Xylophone
Ypsilanti
Zlotys

Have any suggestions for even better (worse) words to convey letters?  Comment below!

Maker Faire 2014!

I'm just home from Maker Faire 2014, and it was spectacular.  This is the first year that I've exhibited there, and I am exhausted, sore, sweaty, smelly, and immensely happy.  My exhibit was an LED Shutter Timer which allowed people to see the exposure time, shutter travel speed and shutter direction of their camera, whether it was the electronic rolling shutter on a camera phone, or the travelling-slit curtains of a DSLR.  I talked with people almost non-stop both yesterday and today, and I met an amazing collection of creative, friendly, engaging and engaged people.  If you're reading this because you saw the URL for this blog on my table, feel free to look around, and soon I'll have all the technical information about my project posted.  In the next 24 hours though I need to shower, sleep, and try to recover my voice!

If you went to Maker Faire this year, please leave me a comment and tell me the coolest thing you saw there!

"Fine, continue paying your debts!"

I got a robo-call this morning from someone telemarketing their debt consolidation and reduction services. These places usually provide some combination of loan aggregation and paid negotiation with your current creditors to reduce your balance owed, at the cost of trashing your credit rating for a while.  When I have time I will sometimes play games with telemarketers, because I abhor their business model.  Sometimes I'll even try to convince the person with whom I'm speaking that they should quit and follow their higher aspirations in life, which I'm sure never included sitting in a boiler room call center selling random people things that they don't need.  Today, however, I was in a hurry, so I skipped straight to, "Do you check your calling list against the federal Do Not Call list, of which you are now in violation?"  The woman paused for a moment and said, in a snotty tone, "Fine, continue paying your debts!" And then hung up.

I was amused and somewhat disgusted that of all the things she could have said, she chose to insult me for being someone who continues to pay his debts.  I wonder if she's ever considered that the logical extension of her work and apparent world view is the fundamental breakdown of credit systems everywhere.  After all, there is an enormous amount of unsecured credit extended every day, to individuals and business, in order to keep the economy buzzing along.  Could we live without it?  Sure, but everyone would have to maintain a larger cash reserve, and all large purchases would have to wait until after the funds for the purchase were acquired. You'd also have to send payment for all purchases in advance, or at least through some sort of escrow transaction. Imagine if every time you ordered something online, you had to send payment before the seller shipped.  And it would have to be a check, or money order, or bank transfer, because in a world with no unsecured debt, there can be no credit cards or even charge cards.  But these excellent tools do exist to allow us to smooth money over time, because people, for the most part, continue paying their debts.

I understand that there are times when circumstances make paying debts impossible.  Risky investments, such as venture capital poured into start-ups, are made with the full understanding that the money very likely will never be paid back.  In that case, the investor is taking on substantial risk in exchange for substantial potential upside.  Sure, you're 90% likely to lose your investment, but it only takes one early investment in Google to pay for all your investments in pets.com.  But here I'm talking primarily about unsecured personal debt, such as credit cards.  And yes, if you owe more in interest each month than you're able to pay, the financial hole will just get deeper without bound. In that case, a negotiated reduction in interest rate is preferable to a settlement, which is preferable to bankruptcy.  And bankruptcy is far preferable to protracted destitution.  But writing down debts should be a last resort.  When possible, we should aspire to avoid unnecessary debt, and when it is a necessary and useful evil, we should then continue paying our debts.

A Bad Good Idea...

I am a fan of old 8-bit computers, so when I found an original TRS-80 in the surplus electronics store where I buy things like stepper motors, I had to take it over to the test bench and see if it actually worked.  It did power up, but while I was connecting it up, I discovered this:

There are three connectors on the back of the keyboard unit which are labelled, in raised black-on-black letters, TAPE, VIDEO, and POWER.  All three are identical 5-pin DIN connectors.  This means that any of the cables will fit into any of the connectors.  And they are on the back of the keyboard, so you're very likely to be plugging them in blind, by feel.  This means the chance of plugging the wrong cable into the wrong hole is pretty high.

As with all consumer products, the engineer that designed this computer was desperately trying to keep the cost as low as possible.  By using the same connector, there was only one unique external connector part number on the bill of materials, so their purchasing volumes for that connector were three times as high, meaning they get better volume pricing. They also needed to create only one connector footprint symbol for the printed circuit board.  But from a human factors point of view, this is a terrible decision.  It is absolutely certain that people are going to plug the wrong cable into the wrong connector sometimes, and their computer would be mysteriously not working.  Indeed, depending upon the pinout of the connectors, the computer might even be damaged.  If it is still under warranty, they'll be angry and demanding of a repair, replacement, or refund.  And if it is out of warranty, they'll be angry and they'll tell all their friends about your terrible quality.

When you design something, it's important to think carefully about all the ways it could be used incorrectly.  You can't always outwit someone who is determined to do something wrong, but you want to try to make the correct way of doing things the path of least resistance.