A typical misadventure.

When Twila was still here, she was out and about a lot, which made for good blogging. I don't go out much, but I did today, so I'll tell you about it.

A few weeks ago I ordered updated voice recognition software online. The package included a bluetooth headset. When the software arrived, the voice recognition part worked fairly well, but the headset did not work as it was supposed to. Apparently the bluetooth on my iMac - which I have to leave on because of a bluetooth thingy - interfered with the bluetooth adapter that Plantronics said would improve recognition. I didn't like the headset much, anyway, so I ordered a powered, wired headset. The second headset arrived and worked great, so I decided to return the software/headset package to Costco and repurchase the software alone, saving about $100.

I may have dawdled, but I resolved that today I would return the package to our local Costco, which is about 35 minutes from here. I repackaged everything, printed out the receipt, got things together, and headed out. I was on a freeway and well underway when I realized that I'd forgotten the software. ACK! So back to the apartment I went.

The software and headset were sitting near the door, so I grabbed them and started back to Costco. It was a somewhat frustrating trip due to stalled trucks, but finally I arrived. I stood in line, then placed the package and receipt on the counter. The clerk looked at the receipt and frowned. I was thinking, "Okay, I bought it online and I'm returning it here. What's the big deal?"

She was still staring at the receipt, so I looked to see what the problem possibly could be. Oops. The receipt said, Amazon.com. I grinned, picked up my things, and left.

I really shouldn't be allowed out without supervision.

Bug brothers.

I must confess - I didn't actually squish that bug. I almost killed him, accidentally. I rolled my chair over him. I wasn't in the chair at the time, fortunately, but I thought he was a goner. He was lying on his side, motionless, so close to death that I'm sure he saw the light. I was hovering over him like, "OH MY FROG!" But then he stood up and resumed pacing back and forth.

The last couple of days there have been numerous bugs in the lab, most of them of the squished (but not by me) persuasion. They even climb up on my table. Maybe it's just a buggy season around here, but what are they doing flying around when the temperature is below 20?

We have a buggy season in Loveland - Miller Moths. They migrate over us in the spring in one direction, then fewer of them in the other direction in the fall. Many of them stop in our house to rest in our vacuum cleaner. Even though Twila goes into Panic Mode when she sees one, they're harmless. They don't eat polyester, so my wardrobe is safe.

The red and black bugs in our lab now look a little like Love Bugs, who make a buggy season in Florida. You should try to experience them, if you can. They're called Love Bugs because they do give a flying... well, they mate in the air. There are all these coupled bugs everywhere, and you actually have to use your windshield wipers if you're driving. It's gross, I confess. But Florida stations people at highway rest areas who clean your windshields while you squirt. How cool is that?

One other buggy season I remember is Water Beetles in Las Vegas. They're big, black things that look exactly like beetles, which isn't so strange, I suppose. During the season they're everywhere. They cover the sidewalks, they get in your luggage, you can't escape them. The weird thing is that they just drop out of the air. Like if you're playing blackjack, they'll drop on your table, and the dealer just flicks them off. Maybe it's Frog's punishment for Vegas being Vegas.

Respect life.

A Colorado license plate series says "Respect Life" at the bottom. The first time I saw it, I thought, "Oh. Is that one of those anti-choice people?" I wondered if it was someone who thinks a blob of cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence is an actual human being Then I decided to be more optimistic and more generous. Colorado is beautiful and open and is wild in many places. Maybe the driver of the car was one of those outdoorsy types who populate our great state. Like a hunter. With a guilty conscience.

Anyway, I was in the cocoon of the optics lab this morning, mindlessly loading strongbacks, when from the corner of my eye I saw a speck. A bug was crawling across the floor. It was a black and red bug, probably some kind of beetle. It was really ugly. Well, to be fair, to its peers it might very well have been a prince. Or a princess. I couldn't tell which gender it was - there was no way I could get my eye that close to the floor.

I don't like to kill anything, so I said hi to the bug and resumed my work. The bug was something I needed to respect, because it had life. I really didn't know anything about that bug. Maybe it was searching for food for its family. Maybe it had a really hard life. Why would I ever want to kill it?

As I worked my mind wandered and eventually came back to the bug, who was still walking back and forth on the floor. It occurred to me that the bug probably had no brain to speak of. It didn't have to go to work. It didn't have to worry about putting its kids through school. It probably didn't lie awake at night fretting about being eaten by a bird. Really, it most likely had a very easy life.

The bug didn't seem to want to leave the area, and it was becoming distracting, so I got up and squished it.

Easy, but short.

Guest Post 2: A Question of Balance.

There have been some recent articles in Slate concerning women writers, including how often their works are reviewed by the NY Times (there, that was the NY connection), and how many articles by women appear in magazines:
http://www.slate.com/id/2265910/
http://www.slate.com/id/2283605/

The upshot of these articles is that it's still a male-dominated world, with the dominance falling somewhere between 60% and 90% depending on what and how you measure. I haven't tallied the comments on this blog, but my impression is that if you did categorize them, you'd find a similar level of male dominance. The male dominance in guest blogs is (as of this writing) absolute. However, in the main blog, it's clear that before her return to Col-o-rah-dah, Twila was slightly dominant.

Is it possible, at least in part, that Twila has chosen, in general, to cease creating new entries because she has sensed the unbalance in this blog compared to the rest of the literary world and is seeking to correct it?

-cad

The infamous Gillette incident.

Before I launch into this story, I'd like to mention that one of the readers of this blog is my old friend, Ed. Wait, I should rephrase that. I meant that Ed is a person who has been my friend for a long time, more than 30 years. Our careers aligned coincidentally, and we often worked at the same companies doing essentially the same jobs. Ed is now at Lam Research, where he's worked for 25 years (I got out after 17), but he has a family to support. Anyway, Ed, feel free to jump in and offer corrections and/or additions.

In the mid-'70s, I (and Ed) worked at Timex. No, I never met John Cameron Swayze. The facility was in Cupertino, CA, right across the street from Apple, and was dedicated to research and the development of liquid crystal displays. To say that the atmosphere there was relaxed would be an understatement. Our manager was an engineer promoted (I question that word in this context) far beyond his abilities who was more interested in rearranging his office and flirting with a cute tech than actually doing any R&D. We, the workers, had a lot of latitude, especially in the morning before the engineers and managers arrived.

In a previous blog I described using an evaporator for coating. My favorite deposition equipment at Timex was a sputter machine. It looked like a very large tuna fish can with a porthole. Items to be coated are placed on a rotating metal plate, similar to the doodad that goes around on the bottom of a microwave oven. On the underside of the top of the can is fastened a target, which is the deposition source. The target can be a number of materials, from silver to quartz.

To sputter, the sputterer is pumped to vacuum, and then a gas or a mixture of gases is introduced and voltage is applied to the platen and target. That causes the gases to ionize and bombard the target with molecules, which then knock atoms from the target that are drawn to the platen and coat the substrate. That's the end of the complicated part.

I thought the sputterer was really cool, and I often played with it in the mornings. Different gases result in different colors when they're ionized. A nitrogen plasma is particularly nice, IMO, a deep crimson. So I tried different gases to see what colors they'd be. I even did a hydrogen-oxygen mixture once, which might not have been the brightest idea. I think the plasma was pale blue, but I don't really remember.

The '70s are notable mostly for following the '60s, and life was still more relaxed than it is today. So I wasn't really surprised when one of my friends (not Ed) asked me for a favor. To do it, I installed a 99.9999% pure gold target in the sputterer. Around the outer edge of the platen I placed a pack of safety razor blades. I lit it up a couple of times and… TAH DAH!… gold-plated razor blades. But I was a bit horrified to see that the images of the razor blades remained on the now gold-coated platen. It was too late to do anything about it but hope for the best.

The deposition engineer was a guy named Dave. He was a really good guy and a good engineer, but completely oblivious to the underlying dramas of the lab. On the razor blade morning, Dave came in and opened the sputterer, looked at the platen, looked at me, and said, "Please install the quartz target. I'll be back after I have my coffee."

And that was that.

Coatings.

NuSTAR glass atop cylindrical quartz mandrels being placed into an oven at Goddard Space Flight Center.

The NuSTAR team has developed a novel approach to building these optics, focusing on a light-weight design. The mirror substrates are thin sheets of flexible glass, akin to laptop and cellular phone displays, which start out as flat sheets. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the glass is heated in an oven and slumped over precision polished cylindrical quartz mandrels to achieve the right curvature. The slumped mirror segments are then deposited with a multilayer coating at the DTU-Space at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen.

The optics are built from the inside out, shell upon shell, spaced apart by graphite spacers and held together by nothing but epoxy. This precision assemblage is done at Columbia University's Nevis Laboratory outside New York City and provides very light and flexible optics.

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That's all from the NuSTAR webpage. The most interesting part to me is the coating. How do you suppose they deposit multilayer coatings on the glass? Funny you should ask, because when I was demoted from pinball repairman to semiconductor line maintenance technician, I was luckily assigned to high vacuum equipment. It proved to be fascinating in many ways.

The first machine I worked on was an RDI evaporator that was probably close to obsolete even then. That machine evaporated aluminum onto wafers. How did that work? Good question! The RDI was a cylinder with a clamshell top. The top contained a rotating planetary to which wafers were attached.

The fun part was getting the metal onto the wafers. I put aluminum pellets into a water-cooled copper crucible. Attached to the crucible was a source that contained a filament, similar to those you see in incandescent lightbulbs, but much larger. After all of the components were prepared, the clamshell was closed.

Needless to say, air would muck up a lot of things. For one, the filament would burn out in a second. So the chamber was pumped to high vacuum, which I might say something about later. When the air was removed, voltage was applied to the filament, creating an electron beam. Using both permanent and variable magnets, the electron beam left the source and was bent 270 degrees and directed upon the aluminum, which, TAH DAH, evaporated!

Line dollies loaded and unloaded the RDI, and I operated and maintained it.

I thought that was way cool!

Anniversary.

When I was a freshman in high school, I ran away from my mother to go live with my father. I was shoveling the driveway and I just left. That was 50 years ago today. Two and a half years later my dad married and moved to Arizona, and I went back to live with my mom during my senior year. That was a great year, both at home and otherwise.