Ben’s Weblog

The folks over at ESPN think it would be un-American for the Cubs to win the World Series. I’m with them on that - “World Champion Chicago Cubs” just doesn’t sound right to me.

It took a while, but it sounds like a deal has finally been inked to have Kraft pack and distribute Starbucks coffee for the Tassimo system. Congrats to my former colleagues for making it work!

In-N-Out, originally uploaded by bdjohnson79.

Here’s one good reason. Can’t find this within 1500 miles of Chicago.

…an iPhone today. I am getting a Blackjack from work though, so now I can be one of those self-important folks who sit in airports and bang away at the tiny little keyboards, responding to those earth-shatteringly important messages.

It will be nice to end a travel day without having unread mail piling up. I try to work with the “Getting Things Done” system, which advocates the virtues of an empty inbox - do it (if it can be done in <2 minutes), defer it (to a known time, and actually follow through), or dump it. Except for vacations, I’ve never had my mailbox break ~200 messages in the last year.

So, the new job sent me out to the Central Valley region of California all last week. Coincidentally, this was to the same plant that Marcie’s been going to for the past month and a half. We decide to take full advantage of this and stretched the trip out over the weekend so that we could visit Yosemite. The traffic in the park was a serious mess as you’d expect for a summer weekend, but we took a few nice hikes and I got a few good shots in. Here’s a sampling:

Half Dome, Ansel Adams style…

Vernal Falls

See the whole Yosemite set at Flickr. I’m having a few issues with my own gallery at the moment, so it’s not there yet.

So, now I can let the cat out of the bag. Effective in a couple of weeks, I’ll have a new job at Kraft - I’ll be working as a Program Leader in our “Lean Manufacturing” group. In plain English, my job will be work with our production sites to improve the efficiency of their people and equipment, using a lot of different best practices from multiple manufacturing industries (most of the ideas come from Toyota, but we’ll shamelessly adapt good ideas from anyone).

I’m looking forward to this change - it’s a big step up in responsibility, the work is the kind of thing I already enjoy doing, and I’ll get to travel to a lot of places (in theory, anywhere in the world that Kraft has a plant). I’ve been looking around for a new position over the past few months as my Tassimo work has been wrapping up, and this job just seemed like a great thing to do. Now I’ll be in a job that has basically nothing to do with my degree…but it’s not like milk and petrochemicals had a lot of overlap anyhow.

As a random aside, all of a sudden, it seems like a huge chunk of my high school graduating class has been linking up over on Facebook. I was originally thinking that I’d blow off the 10-year reunion, but now I want to catch up with everyone from EHS…

Found on Flickr…

The Reading Lamp - Self Portrait, originally uploaded by sumrow.

The sacrifices some people make for art:

“One Vivitar 283 ball-bungied to my head w/ a coffee filter diffuser….The ball bungie took a few hairs with it.”

Ok, I’ve got some pictures from our Utah trip up in the gallery now. Hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them…

So, John McCain and a bunch of Presidential hopefuls have set up MySpace pages in order to connect with the oh-so-cool younger voters. It seems that one of McCain’s staffers decided to use a nice-looking template for his page. Said staffer made a little whoopsie though - they linked back to the template designer’s images. For those not familiar with web design etiquette, this is generally considered to be in poor taste - you’re stealing another guy’s bandwidth.

Hilarity ensues.

McCain loves the hot girl-on-girl action, apparently.

Don’t hotlink images.

Class dismissed.

I went outside this morning to take the trash and recycling out. Since it was early, I wasn’t really paying attention to my surroundings. I stood up and stabbed myself in the top of the head with an icicle. Ouch.

Wow…2006 went by in a hurry…so fast, in fact, that it’s already 2007 and I’m just now writing something. If you were on our Christmas letter list, some of this probably isn’t news to you. If not, read on…

I’ve spent the last 18 months working on the Tassimo coffee system. Specifically, I’ve been working on the liquid milk concentrate that we use for cappuccino and latte. Late last year, we started to set up a line to make the product in the US. So, I went into full-blown road warrior mode, making 32 trips to scenic Allentown, PA in 2006 to support the project. Along the way, I accumulated a lot of frequent flyer miles, hotel points, rental car points, etc, and my butt has been forcibly shaped to pair with a coach seat on United. Fortunately, it wasn’t “all work and no play”. Had a lot of fun with my team outside the plant. Had my first flaming Sambuca shot. My liver works better now than it did in college. Still made it into the 7am team meeting every day.

Back home, Marcie and I did a lot of work on the house. The kitchen renovation we started last fall got done in early 2006. Then, we built a cedar fence in the backyard (from scratch, no less!) over Memorial Day weekend. If you need any cedar planks for smoking food on, just let me know…I’ve got about 400 1-foot pieces of cedar in the shed. Toward the end of the summer, we started on renovation of our 2nd bathroom. We tore everything down to the studs, expanded the shower (which included building a custom shower pan), redid everything in porcelain tile, new fixtures, the works. Unfortunately, my 4-5 days/week on the road made it slow going, so we wrapped that one up in November finally. I also managed to slice off part of the tip of my thumb - knife accident while scoring cement backerboard. Fortunately, the only lasting result was that the tip of my thumb is now slightly asymmetric.

Now, 2007 is a blank slate. Around the house, I don’t have any major projects on my plate. At work, my part of Tassimo is wrapping up, so I’ll probably be getting into something new. We’ll see what this year brings…

We’ve been on a roll the past week or two on the house.  Got all of the tiling and grounting done.  (It figures, I ran out of grout about 3 pounds before I was done and had to buy another bag and mix another batch).  Toilet has been installed, and once I get a diamond-crusted bit that can drill through the porcelain tiles, we’ll have a sink and the shower door installed.  Shower plumbing is already done, so in theory, with a curtain, the shower is usable.  Electrical’s done, so I’ve only go another day of work before we have a functional bathroom.  (nb: installing trim is not required to make bathroom functional, but more aesthetically pleasing)  Now, I get to move on to some smaller projects on the “honey-do” list.

Rolling right along at work too.  Nearly all of my work out in PA is done.  It’s been a busy year and a half, but Tassimo has been by far the best project I’ve been on in Kraft.  What’s made it good?  Really, a combination of several things.  First, the work I’ve been doing is exactly the kind of thing I like (process commercialization, with a bit of engineering work). Second, it was a change of routine from the work I’d been doing for the last 4 years in cream cheese.  Third, I’ve been working on Kraft’s biggest new product launch, which means that the work I do really matters.  Fourth, we had a great team of people working on the project.  I can’t say enough good about the people I’ve been working for/with on this.  A group that’s great to be around both on and off the job makes those long days more bearable.

Seriously?  2 months since my last blog post?  I keep slacking off at this whole personal webpage thing.

First, the excuses part.  Now, we’re renovating our bathroom.  We’ve been pretty productive as of late.  We completely tore out the old bathroom except for a small part of the wall.  Included in the effort are a bunch of things I’ve never done before in the realm of reconstruction.  Thanks to my dad, I now know how to solder copper pipe.  One afternoon, I got the pleasure of building a new shower pan out of about 200 lbs of mortar.  Another afternoon, I sliced clean off part of the tip of my thumb while scoring a sheet of drywall.  Whoops.  Fortunately, it wasn’t quite big enough to merit an ER visit, and Marcie stepped up to help me cut/hang drywall and cement board.  Cement board is a royal pain to cut, too, so I can’t give her enough credit.

Now, we’re into tiling and grouting.  Tiling’s been ok, aside from the one batch of thinset mortar that refused to hold the tiles up right, and we had to hold them in place with duct tape until the mortar set.  If you work right behind a tile saw, you look like you wet yourself.  :%  Then, there’s grout.  Maybe it’s just my technique (or lack), but I think I lose about 10% of every batch I make to the floor.

I know…I sound negative about it…but that’s just me exercising my God-given right to gripe.  Really, though, I’m happy with how it’s all coming together.  The walls look great, and we’re getting ready to move on to the floors.  The homestretch is in sight, though…after the floors, fixtures go in, and we’ve got a functional 2nd bathroom again (and I think even nicer than the upstairs bathroom).

My travel schedule’s become a little more reasonable as of late too, which has made the bathroom work move along quicker.  I’m typing from my hotel room in lovely Allentown, PA, but I’ve only got another week or two of this left, I think.  Nothing like making 35 trips to the same place over the course of 10 months.

Ok, 6am is going to come way too soon…

Once again, there’s an article in the Trib about speeding up the boarding process on airlines. Their suggestion - ban carryons.

I wrote about airline carry-on rules a little while back here. The same arguments I made there hold true. Unless the airlines are willing to take full financial responsibility for lost/damaged luggage without delays in reimbursement, it won’t fly. Too many people travel with valuable objects (laptops, nice cameras, etc.) to allow this to happen.

Actually, to that point, I discovered recently that the TSA and/or FAA have a policy which supercedes the airlines - you’re allowed to carryon a bag of photographic equipment (subject to the normal weight/size limits) in addition to the “1+1″ currently in place. The rule is deisgned to allow working photographers and vacationers with good camera gear the ability to ensure that their valuable equipment is on their person. In the case of a working pro, they could easily be carrying a backpack or roll-aboard with over $20K of equipment (say a pro DSLR + lenses and a digital MF system).

I think the boarding process is something that can only be optimized so much because of the human factors. I like United’s policy because as a traveler with status, I get “seating area 1″. The problem comes, I think, from a couple of areas: First, the less-than-courteous folks who herd around the gate and try to get on the plane before its their turn. Those are the same ones who’ll put all their stuff in the overhead and none under their seat. I try to be as quick as possible in getting on the plane and in my seat with a couple tricks. First, my bags aren’t overpacked - they usually go easily into the overhead or under my seat. Second, for the stuff I want with me in my seat (iPod, books, etc), I have a little pouch in my laptop bag pre-packed with it. Just pull it out, drop in the seat, and I’m done.

Then, there’s the infrequent travelers with weird-ly sized bags, shopping bags as baggage, etc. Easy solution is those sizer templates you see to check the size of your bag. Doesn’t fit in the template, you can’t take it (ie, ditch the “45 linear inches (LxWxD)” policy). Also, if you can’t completely close the bag, it doesn’t fly - this gets rid of shopping bags. Further, if you’re unable to lift the bag overhead by yourself, don’t pack so much (obviously, this doesn’t apply to elderly/disabled). Every now and then, I see a reasonably fit person trying to load a carryon which must contain nothing but wine bottles. Crazy…

Every so often, I tell myself that I’ll do a better job keeping this page updated. Then, I visit the site and see my last posting came a month and a half ago. Such a slacker…

So, here comes the obligatory part where I make excuses about how busy I’ve been, which is at least kind of true. We spent Memorial Day weekend putting up a new fence in our backyard. (by we, myself, my dad, and Marcie’s dad and brother) It was a fair bit of labor, thanks to a few factors. First, we had to remove the old chain-link fence. Second, we couldn’t use pre-fab panels, because in a spurt of pure genius, the Village of Arlington Heights requires that fences not exceed 5 feet tall, and all pre-fab panels come 6′ tall. Third, those pre-fab panels are all 8′ long, and our old fence was on 10′ posts.

We ended up with the following:
380 1×6x6′ cedar dogear pickets
16 4×4x8′ cedar posts
32 2×4x10′ boards
1 nail gun (woo-hoo!)
32 bags concrete
About a gallon of Gatorade per guy per day (90 degrees every day)

Net result - 1 great looking shadowbox fence. Pictures to follow, naturally.

It’s also been wedding season around here - last two weekends in a row, actually. Marcie’s brother got married last weekend up in Madison, and one of Marcie’s friends from work got married this weekend. We’re on wedding hiatus for a little over a month before we head to Maine for one of Marcie’s cousins in early August.

And, it wouldn’t be my life if I wasn’t traveling like crazy…but, I did get a week off over Memorial Day, and I’m off the hook this week for a change. Good news is that the end may be finally in sight on this project.

It’s been raining most of the weekend here in the lovely Chicago ‘burbs. Payback for the perfect weather we had here last weekend, I suppose. Yesterday was a Board of Directors meeting for Y&G, so between the meeting and driving down and back from Champaign, I pretty much shot the entire day. Today’s just an around-the-house kind of day - I popped out to get an overdue haircut, and I’ve been doing a little bit of laundry. Every week, I bring home a suitcase of dirty laundry, wash it, and re-load most of the same stuff, since I wear uniform shirts at the plant - this lets me avoid wearing a lab coat over my usual workday polo+dockers.

I’ve been playing around with macro photography the past few weeks since one of the best macro subjects (flowers) is at its peak right now around here. It’s a different sort of challenge from shoointg landscapes like I usually do. I got some extension tubes to facilitate getting up-close shots without springing for a $6-800 macro lens (which I’m sure the chief financial officer [aka Marcie] appreciates), but now I’ve got worry about ridiculously shallow depth-of field. I think I may need a new split-prism focusing screen for the camera, but that purchase will require CFO approval. As usual, once I get around to post-processing them, I’ll have some up on the website. I got a decent number of keepers from the St. Louis and Chicago Botanical Gardens, as well as Marcie’s own gardens here.

I’m a little bummed…I was hoping I’d get to head over to Germany for about a week for work, but my schedule got changed, and so I get to spend another couple of exciting weeks in Allentown. Woo hoo.
These weeks will probably be a little more dull, since my usual “partners in crime” out in Lehigh will be in Germany. On the plus side, it means my liver will probably get a few days of reprieve and I’ll get a little extra sleep each night.

For another random swing in conversation, I loaded some more new music into my iPod - had O.A.R. recommened to me by Kelly, one of my colleagues on the project out in Lehigh. They’ve been playing “Love and Memories” a lot in Chicago lately, but the rest of the CD’s worth a listen. It’s an interesting mix…kind of collision between a ska band, your standard pop band (matchbox twenty?), Dave Matthews Band, and maybe a little more. Just to contribute to the entropy of the iPod, I also loaded some mid-90s Oasis, some 80s (Huey Lewis and the News), some comedy from Mitch Hedberg, and a random selection of Elvis Costello.

By popular request (well, by request of the family), I’ve put up some pictures of our new kitchen in the photo gallery.

Before, the only counter space in the entire kitchen is in that first picture. Now, we have at least triple the available counter space, and I’d guess at minimum double the amount of cabinet space. New sink (with plumbing that doesn’t leak), new stove, new microwave/hood, undercabinet lighting…the works.

Finally got off my butt and uploaded my Hawaii pictures. Check them out over at my photo gallery section.

Here’s a couple of my favorites:

Kauai’s North Shore


Palm Trees at Poipu Beach


Windblown Palms and Clouds


Sunset on the Kohala Coast of the Big Island


Sunset and Cute Blonde

Let me know what you think!

Came across an interesting article about airline carryon limits.

To me, the fundamental problem is that you can’t trust the airlines to safely handle checked baggage, and they won’t guarantee the safety of your items in checked baggage (at least, without ridiculous charges). Airline baggage handlers seem to have sticky fingers, which is absolutely intolerable. Probably the only way to ensure the security of checked baggage would be to:

1) Increase airline liability to some “safe” amount that would cover, say, a bag of professional photographic equipment. That’d probably be $25,000. In the state that the baggage-handling world is today, that would probably cost the TSA and the airlines billions of dollars a year. right now, I think you get ~$2,000 on domestic flights, with no coverage for “valuables” like electronics, and you still get hassled if you make a claim. I’m not going to check a camera on vacation if there’s a chance I would be without it. About the only thing electronic that goes in my checked baggage are chargers.
2) Your bag would need to be under constant surveillance, and you would have the unquestioned right to personally review the surveillance of your bag with the airline/TSA in case of loss/damage. Unfortunately, this requires a video surveillance system like on “Las Vegas” - that is to say, totally unrealistic.
3) Anyone who touches baggage or has access to the baggage areas gets all of their personal belongings inspected every time they enter/leave the airport, like UPS does at their handling facilities. They also have a “1-strike” policy on theft, and are additionaly subject to criminal penalties if caught.

Of course, some of the fault lies with travelers. Some business folks will take their standard 21″ rollaboard bag as well as a wheeled laptop bag, which is usually 2/3 the size of the rollaboard. That should get them dinged. A shoulder-style laptop bag ahould be the upper limit for us. For the non-frequent travelers at the back of the bus, charge them for the oddly-shaped items that disrupt the nice orderly row of rollaboards.

Maybe only frequent travelers (Premier/Gold types) get 1+1 allowances. The infrequent flyers get 1 bag, or 2 bags that conform to the stricter European-type carryon allowances (8 kg / 18 lbs).

Ok…we now return you to your regularly scheduled useless information…