Talking About Work

I have not specifically addressed this topic with an entire article. It’s a shame that this post should rectify. Let us begin.

Who’s intellectual property is it? If I write something at work does my employer own it? Yes, at least I think so. If I say something at work does my employer own it? I don’t know. If I think something at work does my employer own it? I hope not. I mean, of course not, or at least they would have a hard time finding evidence they own it. Plus, they probably don't want to own every evil thought in my head. But it’s really an interesting process, from idea to written communication I lose ownership of my idea. My work is no longer my work but the company’s work. 

That’s pretty much the basis of the whole argument.

So my dilemma every week when I write my weekly summary is that of elation about the problem solving that I did, and terror that I will say too much and get fired. I do fully expect at some point in my life to lose a position of economic income because of what I say on my blog and also I expect one or more times to gain an economic income for the fact that I do say things on my blog. In other words, Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki get paid a lot doing traditional things like consulting and strategizing for traditional companies even though they convey a lot of information to scores of thousands of people. On the other hand, people get fired for things posted on Facebook and other sites. 

When I was younger I always thought I would go into the aerospace defense industry and work on secret projects that I could not tell anyone about. I did the stint at Sikorsky, but my project had nothing to do with any product for national defense. Rather, anyone with the money can buy the products I work on and look at the work that I do. Frankly you can probably buy a little 1/32nd scale model and still see much of the work that I do with gussets, tails and radii. Or at least in about two years you will be able to see it. 

So the rules I set out for myself are:

• If the work I did is related to production I don’t show it. In other words, I’m not going to show some strain contour plots of a brand new boom. Honestly, I might never show strain contour plots of any assembly because inevitably a crack will show up in a place where we didn’t predict it would. 
• If the work is related to a failure I don’t show it because I would probably get fired for admitting that things fail during the warranty period (regardless of the fact that we probably fail far less in the warranty period than the competition). 
• Nobody else at work agreed to the terms I did to blog about my life. Therefore I will not name names or discuss others work. If I can somehow claim that I am responsible, both for the credit and the blame, than I might discuss it. Otherwise, you will not hear about it from me. Most of the time this is not a problem because I usually don’t know what other people are working on and I often spend 35+ hours alone working on a project just to turn around and spend eight minutes presenting it. It’s not that I want authority, but I do enjoy accountability.

So that is where I stand. Am I too open? Some would say so. However, unlike the weekly changes to the privacy policies of Google and Facebook I am all I have to work with. I have done what I have done, both right and wrong. I certainly don’t want you to know everything, but given the choice between unlimited sharing and absolutely no sharing or communication I choose the sharing. Should I share more? Some would say so. Secrets are a strange thing. We all have things from our past we did wrong. General Petraus had a mistress and affair and he was supposed to be the leader of the CIA.  

It interests me that articles about Abaqus and Ansys continually rate as my most viewed, yet most of them I wrote in 2009. I am so much better at finite element analysis now than I was back then. I read the struggling comments and see the page views, and I want to help! I want to make the world a better place!

What does that leave to talk about? Abstract business concept discussions, show pictures of "science projects" that I work on when work is slow, and when I am learning new skills that are probably unrelated to my daily job. Also, it leaves running, which is why I talk about running so much. I bet a lot of people go home and don't really think about work, it's almost 9 at night and I'm thinking about learning Optistruct. And I want to share that with people. My contributions to Wikipedia and Squidoo only satisfy me so far. I want to tell people how awesome finite element analysis is! I want to recruit new engineers from middle school! I want to show animations!!!

The Life of a Contract Engineer: Week 7

Seven weeks! It is still surreal that I have the opportunity to go to work and get paid for doing something that I enjoy. I spent the majority of my week learning how to use HyperMesh, which is part of the HyperWorks finite element suite. This is the third finite element software that I have learned. First it took me a year (working part time) to understand Abaqus and DANTE, then it took me a month to understand ANSYS and in less than a week using HyperMesh I have made significant progress. I now feel more valuable as a finite element engineer than I ever did in graduate school. I just need CATIA and NASTRAN to round out my repertoire and I'll be more qualified than most of the tech support for all of those companies.

Secondly at work, I enjoy the people I work with. I think that is an important factor. I have never really been in a bad working situation, but I can imagine and I have heard stories. Even five minutes of socializing with my coworkers per day is a nice mental boost.

My running injury just took a ginormous (that is an actual word!) leap forward! I went to a massage therapist and had fingers and thumbs pressed into my knots to the point that I was in significant pain and the knots started to release. I continued to do my exercises and I even bought a foam roller so that I could work on rolling out my tight muscles. In total I ran about 77 miles including a 3.3 mile tempo at 5:54 pace and a 12 mile and 10 mile run at 6:55 and 6:50 pace respectively. Those are three very pleasing runs compared to the amount of pain that I was in for two weeks.

Foam Roller

In other news I started an account with mint.com at the recommendation of a friend who is traveling in Laos right now. It is pretty cool. It updates all of my account information every time that I log in so that I can see how my net worth or paying off my loans is going. I am worth negative tens of thousands of dollars. That's old news, but it's nice to see it change for the less negative. For me simply seeing the numbers helps me make the numbers a little less terrible to look at by applying money where it makes the most difference.

Additionally relating to money, I've done some reading about history and it is not that hard to make substantial profits in the stock market. From a mathematical point of view there are a number of quarterly published variables which indicate that certain stocks are worth more than the price that you have to pay for them. It's not physics, so you will not get the same reaction every time. However, it is statistics, and if you play the numbers in enough quantity for long enough, according to the history of the stock market, you will make money. I'll write more on that in the future.

I hit a deer with my van. It has a huge dent in it and I would take a picture except that it's dark out right now. I'll do a post about the six accidents I have had in the last nine years.

Finally, in news relating to the book I am writing, I passed 48,000 words and 100 pages this week. That's 100 pages of single spaced writing with only four pictures and four pages of contents and title stuff. I am very excited about how well that is going. Although, I don't have an agent, much less a publisher, and I have not done any speaking engagements yet. So I have a long way to go, but I feel I am on the right path. My goal is to have a rough draft finished in the next few weeks. I do not have too much more left to add. I am sure that things that I have written thus far could be a huge help to others in their early 20s tackling unemployment, underemployment and misemployment.

Oh and one more note along the investing lines, about a year ago I solicited investors for Janzen Gear. I had a few bites but did not reel in the kind of investor that I was looking for. I am thankful that I did not find an investor at that point in my life. I learned a lot about product costs and failure. The hangboards are a much better situation. I am able to fund the costs out of my own pocket, and thus will put all the profits back into my pocket, or rather into manufacturing more. This product has a much greater ability to generate profits from batch one (ten hangboards). The ice axe would require huge batches (hundreds and ideally thousands) and even lower profit margins (although not much lower) and required safety testing. I just did not understand all of those challenges a year ago, yet it makes a huge difference in business. Also, running this as my second job allows me to think small. I am not relying on Janzen Gear to pay my bills. It allows me to deal in smaller volumes with lower profits than the big boys. Which means a high value product for the price and the prestige of limited quantities.

Ansys: The Pinball Region

Bonded Details (Pinball Region)

When specifying a contact between two bodies or two surfaces such as Bonded, No Separation, Frictional, or Frictionless you can specify the distance that the contact surface, line, or point and the target line or surface. The way that you specific the distance is either Program Controlled, Automatic Detection Value, or Pinball Region.

The Pinball Region allows you to specify a distance and view a little blue ball so that you know if the Contact will actually find the Target. This is important because in manufacturing geometric design and tolerance of parts means that in a CAD model the parts will not actually touch, and may be rather separated, even though in real life they may be welded or bolted together. Additionally, many assemblies are modeled as mid-surface extractions because that drastically reduces the number of elements in the simulation as well as allowing the user to quickly change the thickness, which means different designs can quickly be tried to find the thinest gage of steel or other metal used, and thus reduce cost. Mid-surfaces further separate the surfaces, or lines, for desired contact so that a larger pinball region is necessary. Parts can sometimes be separated by up to half an inch after mid-surfacing!

In the Automatic Detection Value below you can see that the distance in all directions from the Contact Surface reach those of the target surface (the thin line on the left of the green surface). This is what you desire. In this case the Program Controlled or Automatic Detection Value detected the the target surface and no further modification was needed.

Automatic Detection Value (Acceptable Pinball Region)

Adjusting the Pinball region manually in this case to .1 inches allowed the contact sphere (pinball region) to shrink so that the contract surface would not find the target surface. If you saw this happen when you were using Program Controlled or Automatic Detection you would have to adjust the pinball region to a larger number.

A pinball region that is too small for the contact surface to reach the target surface

For clarification, a diagonal view of the two mid-surface extractions show the two small circles that are bonded in this case with the Automatic Detection Value shown. 

Diagonal view of Automatic Detection Pinball Region with two circular contact surfaces shown

The program used for this tutorial was ANSYS Workbench v11.0.