This video is doing numbers on TikTok, but I wanted to share it here because I am so proud. The man being featured is my uncle Steve Smith.
Steve has been building drag racers & custom cars his entire life.
My grandma before passing away would tell the story of how when he was 10 or 11 years old - she came home to him taking apart the engine in her secondary vehicle (reserved for fancy outings).
She asked him why & he said he wanted to know how it worked outside of a schematic. & she told him that as long as he put it back together the way he found it, it was fine by her. & what's more - he put it back together from memory without even looking at a diagram!
If anything went wrong with the car, my grandma had him fix the car & it was that way until my grandma passed away. She never paid for a mechanic in her life again.
When Steve was a teenager he spent most of his time at the OKC Racetrack & raced with drag racers he built himself.
Also, as a teen he won the Bethany, OK wheelie championship by riding over a mile nonstop on his motorcycle on a single wheelie position.
All throughout my childhood he always had cars around in various stages of fixing up.
The city of Bethany refused to sell him the property next to his house to open his own auto garage. He had worked for Diffee Motors most of my life up until then. So he moved out in the country & opened his own garage.
Steve has been on several mainstream auto shows being featured for his custom work. He also built a custom car for one of the guys on Duck Dynasty. He was also offered a permanent role on an auto TV show, but he turned it down because it required moving out of state.
My uncle Steve is one of the sweetest, kindest & most generous people you will ever meet in your lifetime. He's as smart as a whip, has never met a stranger & gives the best hugs!
It just makes me so happy to see him getting the recognition he deserves.
The picture below is of him at a family function sitting next to his wife, Nancy.
Just realised that I can accurately calculate the probability of two Vulcans going into Pon Farr in a Five year mission using my limited knowledge in Statgraphics and statistics
I can even make a tiny graph about it
How many do you think the average starship has? To make the Poisson distribution.
This is a continuation of the last piece I wrote on the weird shit that happens in classified facilities.
The building I work in has somewhere around 30-35 people in it. It also has around 20 fridges. There's kind of a saga that goes into this, so I'll start with the first part: The Hoarding.
The building has an insane overabundance of space. They just keep adding new rooms every time an old room needs an update, so it just sprawls on forever. There's also an extremely limited ability to get anyone who does not work full time in the building, into the building. This means that while we work on missiles, we also clean our own desks and vacuum the floors and mop and all of those other tasks that most places would consider "non-engineer work." This is fine if it's something anyone with a body can do, but this causes problems when you're looking at the physical limits of engineers. Namely, we are not very muscular people.
Thus, if something needs to get manhandled into a space, it gets manhandled by whatever group of nerds you can bribe, threaten, or guilt into joining you. When a fridge dies, it is a motherfucker to remove it from the building, so they often just...didn't. What they did instead was get the fridges onto dolleys, which isn't too bad, wheel those dolleys to the elevator, and then park them in a relatively empty part of the basement that we shall call The Graveyard of Fridges. This wasn't originally meant to be a permanent solution, but when you have space but lack muscles, it can become permanent really fast. Eventually, someone realized that you can padlock the fronts of the fridges and use them as document storage, which has the added perk of meaning that the people on site don't have to assemble more filing cabinets. Everyone here hates assembling filing cabinets. It's fucking terrible.
(It is worth noting that in this era, you would occasionally get directions to a secret file that looked like "1970's model, lime green, left crisper.")
We will call this the peak of the Hoarding Era. It is followed by the Mechanical Engineering Era.
Around 2015, it was realized that the group needed engineers familiar with industrial machinery, and not just standard electronics, so mechanical engineers (MEs) began to get hired. The new ME's made it a sort of rite of passage for proceeding new hires to repair an old fridge. So the site went from having 4 functioning fridges and 15ish being used for document storage to around 15 functioning fridges and 4 used for file storage.
Every time a fridge got fixed, people just put them back on the dolley, wheeled them back in the elevator, and got them wedged in their personal office spaces. If you were a bigwig, you might be able to get dibs on your own personal fridge, and if you were a new guy confined to the cubicle jungle you might have to share one with four or five other guys. But it was still a ludicrous amount of fridge space.
And that is how a base with 35 people on it wound up with 15 fridges.
Have you heard of the show "Undercover Boss"? Where the CEOs of companies disguise themselves as entry level newbies to see what goes on under their noses?
I know the show itself is spiced up for TV drama, but I can definitely imagine this premise in a DPxDC scenario.
Picture Bruce Wayne (or Lucius Fox) disguised as a new hire within the aerospace division of Wayne Enterprises, with young mechanic Danny Fenton showing him around.
been having a run of just, absolutely shitty luck with technology (bike car computer phone screen phone charger…) so I was trying to find out if there’s a patron saint of technology I can do a devotional to before I give up and just start sacrificing to Hephaestus or something
And uh
bad technology luck continues: I now have Google AI Answers.
“Isidore was the bishop of Seville in 600 AD, a few years before the internet was invented.” Well you sure could say it that way!