What you should read when you feel like reading and don't know what

This is one of those, I feel like I should blog, but I don't know what about " days.  So let's go off the top of my head... hey, that reminds me of a headline I stored a while back for just such a time...


First successful human head transplant carried out on a corpse, surgeon Sergio Canavero claims


Now, just how successful could it have been when done to a corpse?  "Well, it all went together and I didn't have any leftover parts"?    Would it be, if really successful, something that would lead the Doctor on a quickie North Pole vacation?  And how does he know it's successful if at the end of it, he's still got a corpse?  The sub-heading was just about as disturbing:

The controversial surgeon says he is now preparing to perform the procedure for real.

"The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done," Canavero told a conference in Vienna, according to The Telegraph. "A full head-swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage. And that is the final step for the formal head transplant for a medical condition which is imminent."


Final step?  IDK, maybe you might wanna try on, like, Ted Williams or something first.


I do have one more head shaker in the news bin, of a bit more recent vintage.


Police say a tractor driver who went on a rampage in Germany knocked down six speed cameras, causing hundreds of thousands of euros worth of damage.  Police say the 63-year-old intentionally aimed at the cameras in the small town of Gernsheim in the Hesse region on Monday night and Tuesday morning.  The cameras were several miles apart in the town on the Rhine river, 50km (30 miles) from Frankfurt.

The man's motive is not yet clear.  A police spokesman said the driver had no alcohol in his system.


However it is unlikely that he had been issued with a ticket when previously driving the tractor, which could only drive at six km/h (4mph).

"Speed cameras destroyed by driver going 4 MPH".  Wow.


As I have no other stories of international note, let me tell you about how my day began.  Let me preface by saying, in the interest of collecting data, our new quality guy ("Reggie") has developed a log for us (read "me", as my partner tends to shrug off such endeavors) to fill out, covering virtually any happenstance that slows us down cutting fabric.  As we have several issues with engineering, fabric, and a 40-year old cutting apparatus powered by Windows XP, It tends to fill out quite fast.  But never as fast as cover #1 I cut today.

1)  The fabric roll I was about to use wasn't cut straight by the vendor.  Pretty much an "as usual" problem, in which I straighten it on the table before turning the vacuum on and hope for the best.  I have a 5- yard table and the cutting head starts at yard #2, which means I have three yards of room to get it to straighten out.  And I knew right off the top this would not be one that would straighten out that quick, and I would have to stop and adjust after the first panel cut.

2) When I scanned it into the computer, it told me it couldn't find the marker.  This is because of a problem with the BOM, AKA bill of materials.  In this case, it was because it was looking for (5-digit number)A.gen, and some idiot had put it into the marker system as (5DN) A1.gen.

3) This one's a bit harder to explain, so I'll try to make it make sense.  I had to bring the marker up manually, and when I did, I got a "something is too big for the operation" error.  This can come up for many different specific reasons, but two main ones- either the engineer screwed up, or the system isn't reading it right.  In this case, it was the system.  I had to close the marker I opened, find it again, and re-open it.  Which doesn't sound so bad, except several months ago they did something to the system which made it so that if you type the marker into the address bar (like you should be able to), the system goes into catatonia and you either power off and reboot or look at a white screen for 8-10 minutes.  So you have to scroll through the hundreds of marker numbers until you hit it.

Fortunately, closing and finding and opening again did the trick- this time.  Ready to cut now!

4) So I start the machine going, and try to get 1-3 recorded on the log.  Which makes me forget about the fabric being potentially crooked, and sure enough, it moved about an inch which meant that panel two was ruined because I was filling out the damn log while trying to cut it.


So you go through what you have to to re-set the marker, fire it on it's way again, tell the issuing system that you just wasted about 2 3/4 yards of fabric, and then...


5) ...then you hit the flaw in the fabric about two yards down.  Now technically, the fabric vendors are supposed to "flag" any defects so you can catch them.  But their idea of flagging things includes three very important principles. A), they only flag the stuff they can see from the bad side.  And it has to be pretty glaring.  So if they fubared a big patch of the water resistant coating on the bad side, they'll flag it.  If they have a run in the fabric, they ignore it unless it is double wide and down about 10 yards worth of fabric.  B) They have not yet mastered the concept that the flag should be in front of the defect as I unroll it, not in front of the defect as THEY roll it up.  C) their concept of a flag is a 1 1/2 X 1 1/2 inch piece of fabric which they attach to the fabric by no means other than to let it roll up as they roll- with the consequence that 80 % of their flags fall off the roll and onto the floor before I ever see them.


6) so now you reset, tell the computer how much more fabric you wasted, fire it up again, go to record this latest incident, and then...


...then comes the one thing all rolls from this vendor have in common- a split in the fabric.  Where something got douched beyond hope of recovery, and they cut it out, wrapped the new end onto the roll, and continued rolling with varying degrees of straightness.  So I finish writing up the flaw, look up, and see no fabric at the end of the table, the machine merrily cutting and drawing nothing, and, yes, there's the flag... hanging from the new end on the roll.

And that is how I put six entries on the log in a little under a half-hour.


Later I would really crown the day by getting a whole pallet of the fabric put on hold because somehow or another they managed to get the rolls wrinkled beyond my wildest daydreams of destruction.  I couldn't even begin to get an edge to line up, it was that bad.  Now the latest shipment has been full of similarly wrinkled fabric, going 30-40 yards deep on a 125-yd roll.  But this was above and beyond.  I imagine that will put a slight dent into that "best inventory ever" our Plant Manager is praying for next week.