(Pardon the corny music)

 

... I believe it was supposed to be the new HQ for "****" before they went out of business (due to lack of performance).

 

Jeebus!

I got to watch one of the engines being installed into a cruise ship, before they assembled the rest of the ship on top of it, while I was working on the outfitting of the DCL Dream. I assumed that the engines were pretty much there for the life of the hull, and that if one ever experienced a catastrophic failure, they'd just say "Meh", turn it off, isolate it from the switchboard, and forget about it.

 

We have a rigging / remove and replace job coming up that will be a little bigger than that but nowhere near as tight / close quarters. All that rigging makes me want to pull my hair out.
I wonder if i should find a way to time lapse it. I think that would be really cool. I'm not sure i have the equipment capable of a task like that. I do believe my action camera has that function, but i'm not sure it would last 12 hours a day for 14 days or so.


Here is what the stray current in our process solution does to the internal pump surfaces. That's 316ss. Electrolysis is a son of a gun. This is why we have sacrificial plumbing grounded to earth.

 

While somewhat impressive, that is actually kind of a small engine for ship propulsion. From the size I would say that is a generator engine, if the ship is diesel electric then there would be multiple engines of that size. I'll have to see if I can find pictures of the crankcase of the engine from my last ship. It was a slow speed MAN diesel fired with diesel and LNG.

 

heres a machining video of one of the larger ones. just look up "bost" on youtube. When the lathe is so big you ride it in a control room.

 

Although I did not get to see them being installed, my recollection is that the DCL Dream and Fantasy, which are fairly sizable cruise ships, each had 5 engines of similar size (it's difficult to have a sense of scale while you're inside a ship's engine room.) They were made by MAN, and installed into the hull once layup had reached the level of the engine room, after which the rest of the ship was constructed on top of them.

Found a picture (not taken by me) of the drydock where Dream was constructed. I have some really fond memories of that place.



For perspective, this is a building which has two cruise ships inside of it, plus enough space overhead for a gantry crane which clears both of them, plus enough space behind the camera for parts of a third ship. I remember googling it years ago, and it's like the 3rd or 4th largest building in the world, behind NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building and the Boeing plant in Seattle.

 

OK, serious question time. Three, actually.

(Questions to follow.)

This morning, after getting off the red line train downtown, I stopped into McDonalds for a cup of coffee while on my way to Hancock. While there, I observed this woman, who ordered quite a lot more than just a coffee, then went back to the counter to complain about some perceived inadequacy in the fulfillment of said order. (I didn't overhear the details.)





1: Is it possible that she does not recognize the relationship between her food choices and the resultant morbid obesity?

2: It it possible that she simply does not care?

3: How is it physically possible for her to fit into those jeans? I'm not kidding here. I am a college-educated engineer, who has studied Properties of Materials, and I literally cannot understand how denim is able to elastically deform in such a way that the knee-section was able to fit over the calf.

 

1) Ignorance is bliss.
2) See #1.
3) Apparently you haven't seen the latest Old Navy ads where they are touting their stretch jeans. Women of all different shapes are dancing around shaking their groove thing. You would be amazed to see what denim is forced to suffer.

 

OH NO . . . did you just assume its gender?




To address one of your questions: SPANDEX !

 

 

^^
"This note is to verify that LYCRA® elastane fiber manufactured by DuPont does not contain any natural latex or rubber. ... LYCRA® is DuPont's brand of elastane, or spandex. The word "spandex" is used only in the United States while "elastane" is recognized worldwide, so we tend to use the more widely known term."

 

Ironically, the microfibers from stretch pants are also bad for ocean whales.

 

I just bought some stretchy jeans. so comfortable -- basically jeggings.

 

Clearly Joe, McDonalds is responsible for making her fat.. not her choice.

I always wondered how people get to that size and THEN decide they want to lose weight.. Do you just eat until you get to +500lb and then go to the dr and then start losing weight when they tell you you'll die if you dont change your life?

Those jeans might be those stretchy maternity material jeans or something.

Murica!!

click to play

click to play

 

Personally, I waited until I was about 220lbs. At 6'2" that's not exactly obese, but it's still what it took to make me realize "you gotta start making better choices or else you're gonna wind up a fatty."

I specifically remember the carefully-staged selfie (with tripod and time-delay) I'd taken and uploaded to this site a few years ago which was the wake-up call. I'd just extracted a very stubborn broken bolt, and the photo was of me, with a cigar, holding up the bolt in a vise-grip, wearing cut-off camo shorts. I looked at that photo, realized I was fat, and decided to change that.

 

Thats the thing, 220 isnt too much. Like to get to 500lb.. it will take you at least some years.. how do people not see that and act on it..

 

Springs?

click to play

 

I am bothered by the fact that Tom Hanks is now old enough to plausibly portray Mr. Rogers.



And also by the fact that Mr. Rogers is long dead, and that the 4th dimension continues to progress linearly at a rate of exactly one second per second, and also by a lot of other stuff, not the least of which is that automatic transmissions have become totally normalized in North America, and manual transmissions are now commonly viewed as anomalous.

 

Ok, some really weird **** just happened.

At some point between 11:30pm last night and 10am this morning, someone entered my locked office and either washed my coffee cup or replaced it with a new one.



I have not washed that cup in over a year. It's supposed to be very solidly stained brown on the inside. When I got into the office this morning and picked it up, it really threw me off.