Recently, I wanted to buy some adapter cables for my phone. Having made the leap to a phone with a USB-C charging cable, my old travel-charging setup could use some tweaking and I wanted to get some adapters to go from USB-C (female) to Micro-USB and Lightning (male) so that everything could plug into the same double-ended USB-C cables. I looked around my various local stores and couldn't find what I wanted, so it was time to go to the internet. But I'm trying to see how little I can use Amazon and its like. Amazon takes roughly half of the selling price in fees before it passes revenue on to its various suppliers , and I'd rather give my money to the people who actually make the product. For small-value items like cable adapters, it's very hard to find things not on Amazon. Normal methods My go-to method is pick a brand that I would buy from anyway and go to their website. I tried Belkin and Anker and they didn't have what I wanted. So now what do I do? In a...

I was reading through this week's Economist (4/21) magazine and saw the article " Unlike everyone else, Americans and Britons still shun the office ". As someone who worked remotely 1-2 days per week from the mid-2010s and was 100% remote starting in early 2020, I've got a perspective on working remotely. What caught my eye from the Economist was the penultimate paragraph because it hit home: Maybe, then, the problem with working from home is not its economic impact, but its social one. Put simply, Americans do not seem to be making the most of the time they are no longer spending on their commutes. Socialising and volunteering are both now less common than in 2019; meanwhile, people spend more time “relaxing” and playing video games. All told, the average American spends half an hour longer alone than pre-2020. Using the commute time I definitely experienced this issue when working remotely. My "no-longer-commute" time went to additional childcare in the...

A little silly today: a comparison of the "Danger Zone" introductions of the two Top Gun movies (1986 and 2022) and PLEASE, let the shots breathe! When I first saw Top Gun: Maverick (on Blu-Ray via a library rental), I had a moment where I had to confirm that I'd rented the correct movie. And then I wondered why the modernized opening credits didn't grab me as hard as the original's. I would love to credit the YouTube video that helped me realize why, but I can't find it anymore so I'll work with some similar ones that don't illustrate things quite as well. Side-by-side (both audios, original speeds): https://youtu.be/NGRzqkMyTHs   Minor Items Here are a few issues that I'm pretty sure are not the reason why I bounced off the new version, but can't have helped. Timing I'm sure that the cinematographers were working under tight restrictions on what they could film and when they could film it, but the lighting is so much more dramatic in...

I’m back from my vacation and so it’s time to get back on schedule. Today we’re talking about supply chain resiliency and industrialized warfare. I’ll address the “why industry matters” first and then talk about resiliency. Full Mobilization Since February 2022 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, industrialized warfare has become relevant again in a way not since the end of the Second World War. Around 2010 I remember reading through a book of military aircraft through history which noted total production numbers for each type. Just one aircraft, the P-51 Mustang, totaled over 15,000 aircraft produced over only four years. I compared that to the F-35, which was noted for being a gigantic modern program , had a total planned production of 5,000 aircraft over decades. Even accounting for additional complexity on the F-35, clearly the US is not engaged in wartime production. More recently (2021) I had another reminder of the power of industry in warfare. Shattered Sword by Johnathan...

Update schedule change: I'm on hiatus next week and my next post will be April 21.   This is the latest of a series of posts about tools I've built or used to make life easier. I've iterated on these sorts of tools several times, and this particular tool started life as a method to stop SAP from logging me off and losing my information and then evolved into a tool that others could use for complete reporting. Previous posts in the series: Overlap tool Follow-up through Outlook, OneNote, and To Do RFQ / CBF SAP tool Change Board All of these tools in their current iterations are the property of my former employer, but I built them once and I could build them again. This shortage report included Excel formulas, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code, and SAP macros. Headline improvement: from 2 years past-due to within 90 days of on-time delivery In late 2023, my boss's boss asked me to help out on analyzing and expediting one of our largest military products. Land...

Update schedule change: I'm dropping my Friday updates going forward: with my childcare duties and having burned through much of the backlog of items I wanted to blog about, I'll be updating only two days per week: Monday and Wednesday. All of us use our communication tools in different ways. Some people live and breathe their social media; I'm only on Facebook in case someone from high school wants to send out information about a reunion. I'm not judging. Assuming that your intent in communication is to communicate, then what matters more is matching the expectations of how and when to communicate with whomever you're talking to; let's call them your "partner" because communication is a group effort. Email is not urgent For some people it is, but for me if I need something urgently (or someone needs it from me), email is not the right tool. I check my email at least once per day, but sometimes only that often, and it might be a glance on my pho...

Update schedule change: I'm dropping my Friday updates going forward: with my childcare duties and having burned through much of the backlog of items I wanted to blog about, I'll be updating only two days per week: Monday and Wednesday. Now on to the (last?) Friday musing: Inauspicious Beginning This post was inspired by poor phrasing: on March 6, 2025, Aviation Week quoted General Randall Reed , the chief of the US Air Force Transportation Command, as stating that for the brand-new B-21 Raider bomber, “it’s going to be a little bit higher requirement specifically in the fuel transfer”. At the time, Aviation Week reported that meant that the B-21 would require a faster fuel-transfer rate, i.e. that a single aerial refueling tanker could deliver X gallons per minute more than it could today. Later, Transportation Command clarified they meant that the US Air Force needed more tanker aircraft, not a faster pump. I had a whole rant planned on how something had to be horribly...

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my follow-up methods using Outlook and related parts of the Microsoft Office suite . Those tools work well for day-to-day tasks and following up, but what about the bigger long-term tasks? When you look back at your month or year, did you get done what you wanted? The key for this is "leader standard work". Inspirations Much of my "leader standard work" was inspired by work I did at my previous company after a small group of us (EV, GR) read Creating a Lean Culture by David Mann , although I later stumbled into a different concept. We adopted the term "leader standard work" from his book, where it tackled the items that team leaders should be performing on a regular basis. This might include walking the production floor (or office area) to check the associated status boards, daily stand-up meetings, and the like. The other inspiration came after I had a lot in-place, but reassured me I was on the right track and helped...