Update on a merger

Back on March 1, 2007, I went on a rant about the pending merger of Sirius satellite radio and XM satellite radio. I was complaining that in spite of the fact that the merged company would be the only satellite radio company (is that called a monopoly?), [updated - they were arguing that] they should be allowed to merge because they had a lot of competition from free (although commercial) radio which would force them to keep their prices low. They said that merging would make them stronger to meet such competition. Well, I guess it didn't work.

I heard this morning that the combined company may be forced to file for bankruptcy. I guess they weren't stronger after all. You could just chalk it all up to the recession we find ourselves in but the chief executive had said that the weakening economy wouldn't affect them. I wonder if they had stayed separate if this would be happening? We'll probably never know. I wonder how long it will take them to blame the government for allowing them to merge?

I do have to admit that the purpose of my rant two years ago seems to have been wrong, though. According to the New York Times article the link above points to, "But satellite radio failed to win over many younger listeners, and competition from other sources slowed subscriber growth." So, I guess they were competing with free radio after all. Or were they competing with the Internet. Or maybe they were competing with TV. Or maybe even people who decide to read books. Or maybe...

A funny, geeky story

When I first started to learn the C programming language, like almost everyone, I read The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Richie (the link points to a later version than I used). After programming in C for a while, I bought another book which had a great section near the back covering common mistakes C programmers often make. I found this valuable as a way to look at my programs and see problems coming before they happened. I wish I still had that book but I gave it away (surprisingly, to the precocious son of one of my co-workers who was writing programs with one hand as he clutched his teddy bear with the other). I don't even remember the title or author.

But the one thing I remember from it was this line, "You'll find that as you learn more about the C programming language and write more advanced programs, the errors you make will be more subtle and hard to find."

I remember, at first, being surprised by this statement. "What a strange thing to say in a book that is supposed to be helping me learn a programming language", I thought. Then I realized what it meant and I laughed. In a sense, this isn't really a geek joke but a universal truth. It's also a little like my earlier article about the difference between two-wheel drive vehicles and four-wheel drive vehicles. As we learn to ride a bike better, the further we go on our trips. As we get more wheels driving our vehicle, we tend to go further off the road. As we gain more faith, we try to live our life more in line with the teachings of Jesus and attempt bolder projects in His name. Hopefully, we're constantly learning, getting better and reaching further. We just need to be prepared that the problems we face are going to be tougher to solve and more subtle to see. But we're better, too!

Charlie's birthday

Yesterday, we celebrated our dog Charlie's birthday. He is ten years old. This is a picture of him enjoying one of his birthday treats. He's a funny old dog, though. He kept looking around and whining. When we didn't respond correctly, he got up and headed for the door. He wanted to go out and enjoy his treat without needing to worry if the cats or anyone else in the family was going to bother him. Plus, he was probably already planning where he was going to bury it.

No matter how domesticated we think our pets are, it is often surprising to us that they are still not human. They are animals. The cats have never gotten to the point where they really trust us, either. If they think we're not carrying them to the window sill correctly, they'll claw their way to the window in the way that minimizes their worry. Not the way that hurts us the least. And Charlie, while he is a very well behaved dog and is an extremely loyal one, will take off like a shot (no matter who is in his way) if a rabbit runs out of the underbrush in front of him. They can't help it. They're still animals. And I think that's part of the fascination of having pets. There is a sense of having a wolf or a tiger living in your house! There is a sense of having something not quite tame around. We're a little bit closer to nature when they are around.

A problem is easy to fix

I was reading an electronics trade magazine recently and one of the articles really hit home. The magazine, EDN (I think it used to be called Electronics Design News), has a regular feature called Tales from the Cube. They are stories about interesting problems that readers have had and their solutions to the problems. All in one page. The article I read that got me to write this was called "All fail down" and it was about an electronic product that failed in areas that are dry (that is, they had low humidity - not that they restricted alcoholic beverages). This is usually a sign that static build-up is getting from the case of the device to the electronics and this causes the a malfunction. The writer of the article was brought in as a consultant and he'd seen things like this before but as he looked over the design of the product and offered suggestions, the engineers would just say, "We already tried that. We've tried everything." He puzzled over it for a long time until he realized that the company's engineers had tried each one of the fixes and then removed it to try the next fix. So, our consultant hero realized that there was really more than one problem that had the same result. When he applied all six of the fixes at once, everything worked. Then it was time to remove the fixes to see which ones were needed to solve this problem and it turned out that only two of the six fixes were needed to solve the problem. But the fact that it was two problems was what made this such a tough thing to solve.

This is what I've seen in my work, too. Usually, fixing one problem is fairly simple. It's when you have two or more problems that interact that you have a real problem. I recently found and fixed a problem in our products that appeared to be one problem but turned out to be two things that weren't really mistakes - most of the time. I was called in because one of our devices failed to run because our software couldn't read information from it correctly. It looked like a bug in our software. But when I tracked it down, it turned out that the information in our device was incorrect. But when the hardware guys loaded a new copy of that information into the device, it continued to fail. How did our devices ever work? The same information worked when loaded into brand new devices. It turned out that the information was slightly wrong but it didn't matter when it was loaded into a brand new device. But when it was loaded into a device that had some other slightly wrong information in it (from a power glitch or mishandling), it failed. The original information was never meant to be used in anything but a brand new unit. It took the interacting problems of the slight error in the original information, the unit that failed in a certain way and the using of the original information in the wrong circumstance to cause the problem.

These kinds of problems are what keep engineers up at night. And it is the solving of these kinds of problems that gives engineering the satisfaction that makes it exciting to come to work each day.

I'm sorry if this was boring. I'm working on trying to get more stories on engineering into this blog. After all, I call it "Adventures in Engineering". I want to make the explanations understandable by non-engineers but detailed enough to give the real story. It's not easy but I will be a better engineer if I can balance these two things.

February does not bring an end to winter

We had some more snow on Tuesday and into Wednesday. I didn't get out for my walk on Wednesday but I did get out today. It certainly is lovely but it's cold and the wind is picking up. Here is a picture showing that, although the snow was light, we continue to get thawing and freezing cycles that allow the snow to build up on the trees making them bend. As with all the pictures in my blog, just click on it to get a larger view.

Notice that there are no footsteps in the snow here. I was the first to pass this way today. I find it exciting to be the first one to walk a path. I think it makes me feel like I'm one of the intrepid people who first explored our country and opened it up to the others. Of course, I'm nothing like those guys and I'm one of the "others". I take my exploring and suffering in half hour doses. I take hardship for, at most, a week at a time. I enjoy getting back to my warm house and eating the delicious food my wife prepares. I like my easy life too much to be a real explorer.

Almost made the Third Mistake

I've read lots of stories about people in peril. They get caught in a flash flood or they see a car barreling down on them. Perhaps they are in a burning building or they see a dog running at them ready to attack. It seems that whenever you hear these stories, the people who survive tell about having to make decisions many times during the experience and if they'd made the wrong decisions, they wouldn't have lived to tell the story. Well, my experience today wasn't nearly that dramatic but I could have gotten myself into a mess.

We've been having dramatic changes in temperature recently where we get snow one day then warm weather the next. But there has not been enough warmth to completely melt the snow and it has been freezing at night. So, there is a lot of ice around. I went out for my walk in the woods today and noticed that the paths were icy. I made the first mistake: I ignored the bad conditions and went anyway.

As I walked, I slipped and nearly fell many times. Also, I found myself in mud in a few places and that was treacherous, too. I wasn't really able to enjoy my walk like I normally do because I had to look at the ground the entire time. This led, partly, to my making the second mistake: I assumed the conditions would get better up ahead.

I stopped from time to time to see if there was anything worth a picture but the woods were completely silent. No birds, no rustling in the underbrush to indicate squirrels or chipmunks were around. I kept going. Then, it finally dawned on me that I was close to making the third mistake: I was going to have to go back through all the mess I had already walked through.

I stopped and decided not to make that third mistake. I took a picture of the path ahead of me (the top picture) and on my way back, took a close-up of the path I had come through to get to this point (the bottom picture to the left). That was enough excitement for me. It felt good to get back on solid footing and into a warm office. The birds will be coming back to the woods soon enough and the path will be much easier to walk.

Walking is free exercise

I had one of those moments tonight that annoy me. After work, I was running a little late to get into the post office before they closed. I normally don't look for a parking spot as close as possible to where I'm going. I don't mind walking and actually like getting a little extra exercise by parking away from the building I'm going to. But tonight, every second mattered as I was trying to get to the post office before they closed. I didn't make it because I had to park too far away.

There is a health club in the same building as the post office. All the spots close to the building were taken up by the people who joined the health club as their New Year's resolution. Isn't it strange that people who are going to the health club for exercise have to take all the parking spots as close to the building as possible? This is why they need to join a club to get exercise - they're not capable of getting their own exercise. They wouldn't need the health club as much if they would change their lifestyle a little bit. Park a little further away from buildings. Take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator. Lay off the snacks. But they'd rather spend money to get their exercise.