Corporate Expense Reduction Strategy: Procurement

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by Lisa

We have a 3D printer, and have an evolving list of things to 3D print. Custom design work comprises most of the list now. Originally, I anticipated printing a whole bunch of little plastic bits that are seriously overpriced in retail stores. The bobbins for embroidery thread come to mind — 20 cents a piece (although I’ve subsequently found them at Walmart for 10 cents a piece). They weigh practically nothing. 3D printer filament runs between one and a half cent per gram and four cents per gram (not getting into pricey exotic stuff which doesn’t make sense to use as a base for winding embroidery threads!). I can print six for Walmart’s super cheap price!

And then I thought to check AliExpress – two cents a piece. I can buy 100 for less than the price of 28 at Walmart. Material cost would be a little lower printing with the cheapest filament. But there’s electricity and time to consider as well. I ended up ordering the things shipped from China.

But in the process started wondering if companies use either of these techniques for reducing expenses. 3D printing would be an interesting endeavor – include the company logo, make items the *exact* size needed for an application. But direct ordering from overseas manufacturers has a larger opportunity for expense reduction. Pens for a cent or two each. Ten thousand staples for five bucks. Paper clips, wires and cords, clip boards … there are all manner of random little consumable things companies buy. Start running low on staples, order another ten thousand. So what it takes six weeks to arrive? You’re just refilling a supply closet.

Lion Costume – Mask

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by Lisa

I started making Anya’s costume – this year, she wants to be a lion (took a while explaining that once we order fabric and stuff you cannot change your mind) with a mask on her face. Specifically, she wants a mask. Very important. So I had to figure out how to make a lion mask. I used Pepakura Designer to create a 3D model of a lion face and then unfold it into a series of printable shapes.

After printing the design, I clipped the paper to half-back (thin cardboard) that I use to store fabric. A straight-edge and x-acto knife helped in accurately cutting the pieces. They’re still a pain to assemble – a couple of extra hands would have helped. Problem is it needs so much tape to keep its shape, I have no idea how to paint the thing.

I’m thinking of using the cardboard mask as a base to apply papier-mâché. Then we’ll have a consistent surface to paint.

Halloween 2017: Lion Costume – Tail

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by Lisa

To make Anya’s lion tail, I started with an elongated trapezoidal piece of furry fabric — not quite a rectangle because I wanted it thicker at the base of the tail and thinner at the end. I folded it in half length-wise, with the right sides together, and used the serger make a fabric tube. Turned it right side out and stitched the ‘tip’ of the tail closed. I used a bunch of poly-fil and slowly stuffed the tail (using big wads to stuff the tail made it look lumpy. I took small pinches of the stuff and pushed it to make a firm filling.). Then I hand-stitched a strip of long fur around the tip.

I wanted something Anya could put on by herself, so clipping the tail onto her clothes wouldn’t work. I decided to use an elastic band – cut a 4″ wide strip of the lion fur fabric about 6″ longer than Anya’s waist circumference, folded it in right sides together, and serged it into a tube but left a few inches at the end. I then inserted the tail into the tube and folded it so the top fabric of the tail was aligned with the top fabric of edges of the waistband fabric and finished serging the strip. I then turned the whole thing right-side out — so the tail was firmly held into the band and dangled down. I measured out a strip of elastic about 2″ bigger than Anya’s waist, threaded it through the band, and sewed the elastic together with a lot of overlap. My hypothesis is that I’ll be able to open the seam and make her bands bigger as she grows. Once I confirmed it was tight enough to hold the tail up on her waist, I hand-stitched the tube together at the ends to make a band. Voila, one lion tail!

Equal Time

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by Lisa

Before Trump decides to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine (mind you Reagan is the one who eliminated the thing in the first place) … maybe he should consider the practical implication. You wouldn’t have two different late-night shows where the liberal dude had even days and the conservative dude took odd days. Market demand drives what we get – and, yeah, there’s enough of a market to sustain one conservative channel (see: Fox News). What you’d get is a fairly liberal guy eviscerating conservatives for their logically inconsistent and hypocritical positions.

No one, under any circumstances {except my mistress, that’s another story} should abort a pregnancy. Now, you’re on your own paying for medical care during pregnancy. People gave birth at home all the time, so hospital care is a luxury you should not anticipate. Immunizations and checkups for your kid? You’ve got to be kidding. Fund public schools and job training programs so you kid can get a halfway decent job? Seriously?!?

OnStar Basic

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by Lisa

We used the free OnStar that came with our Chevy Volt for the first time today. Anya had brought the snack for her preschool class today, so I had a large metal serving tray and container of apple cider along with the other phones / bags / purses / random junk I usually carry. Set stuff down on passenger seat, and she wanted food now. Conveniently, I had sent a few extra little tangerine pumpkins — so we had two left over.  So I handed her one and opened her door. “I cannot eat in the car” says the kid who has no problem eating all manner of other things whilst in the car. But I didn’t really want to get sticky juice all over the car either. Shut her door and went to open the front door again to retrieve my stuff. Except BEEP and the car locked itself. Ack!

So here’s the first problem with OnStar — you need to communicate via the Internet. And for some reason my phone has been going into emergency call only or no Internet but weak cell signal in the preschool carpark for the last week or so. D’oh. So I called Scott – three password resets later (and a whole new app, the My Chevy wasn’t letting us log in even with a reset password so he got the OnStar app. Once that was installed, logged onto, and verified … WooHoo, one click and the car is unlocked.

Back when I worked for a cellular company and cellular data was just becoming a thing, it was slow. But I remember the sales guy saying getting online and doing whatever on your super slow phone connection was going to be way quicker than driving back to the office, getting on your computer there, doing your thing, getting back out to the site … yeah, he had a point. I’m sure it won’t be a thirty minute ordeal if we get locked out again … but even if it is, it would be about the same amount of time as waiting for a locksmith to come jimmy the thing. Or for someone to drive the spare key out.

Random Trivia

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by Lisa

Anya randomly asked how many footballers it would take to make the weight of the Earth. Well, that’s quick enough to calculate. Average footballer is just under 80 kg … rounded up because the number is going to be so huge anyway.

That would be just over 74 sextillion footballers.  74,650,000,000,000,000,000,000! Which is a lot of people. To get an idea of order of magnitude, I divided by the population of Earth. We’re talking ten trillion times more people that we’ve got today.

The moon, on the other hand, is a mere 123 billion times more people than we’ve got today.

Alternative Fact: Compassion

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by Lisa

Alternative Fact: Courtesy of Trump at some meeting with military sorts and discussing North Korea: “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm”

Real Fact: It is literally after the storm in several devastated areas of the country. Trump’s comment was irresponsible viewed from a military or diplomatic perspective. But from the perspective of a compassionate person whose memory spans two news cycles? Probably better not to mention storms at all.

Setting Up DNSSEC

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by Lisa

Last time I played around with the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), the root and .com zones were not signed. Which meant you had to manually establish trusts before there was any sort of validation happening. Since the corporate standard image didn’t support DNSSEC anyway … wasn’t much point on either the server or client side. I saw ICANN postponed a key rollover for root a few days ago, and realized hey, root is signed now. D’oh, way to keep up, huh?

So we’re going to sign the company zones and make sure our clients are actually looking at zone signatures when they exist. Step #1 – signing our test zone. I do this in a screen session because it can take a long time to generate a key. If the process gets interrupted for whatever reason, you get to start ALL OVER. I am using ISC Bind – how to do this on any other platform, well LMGTFY 🙂

# Start a screen session
screen -S LJR-DNSSEC-KeyGen
# Use dnssec-keygen to create a zone signing key (ZSK) – bit value is personal preference
dnssec-keygen -a NSEC3RSASHA1 -b 2048 -n ZONE rushworth.us
# Then use dnssec-keygen to create a key signing key (KSK) – bit value is still personal preference
dnssec-keygen -f KSK -a NSEC3RSASHA1 -b 4096 -n ZONE rushworth.us

Grab the content of the *.key files and append them to your zone

Apache HTTP Sandbox With Docker

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by Lisa

I set up a quick Apache HTTPD sandbox — primarily to test authentication configurations — in Docker today. It was an amazingly quick process.

Install an image that has an Apache HTTPD server:    docker pull httpd
Create a local file system for Apache config files (c:\docker\httpd\httpd.conf for main config, c:\docker\httpd\conf.d for all of the extras like ssl.conf and php.conf, plus web sites), and c:\docker\httpd\vhtml for the web site content)
Launch the container: docker run -detach –publish 80:80 –publish 443:443 –name ApacheWebServer –restart always -v /c/docker/httpd/httpd.conf:/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:ro -v /c/docker/httpd/conf.d/:/etc/httpd/conf.d/:ro -v /c/docker/httpd/vhtml/:/var/www/vhtml/:ro httpd

Shell into it (docker exec -it ApacheWebServer bash) to look around, or just access http://localhost from the Docker host.

On The NRA

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by Lisa

I read an astute assessment of the NRA from Esquire tonight:

“the NRA’s agenda is not your own. The NRA is the lobbying arm of the armaments industry. It has that industry’s interests at heart and not your own.”

If it’s too soon to discuss gun control or not, it would behoove us to stop acting like industry lobbyists of any sort are there to defend public opinion, civil liberties, or constitutional rights. No one thinks industry-affiliated advertising agencies are there to promote public health or well-being. Sure, a marketing campaign may say a particular food needs to be consumed daily for your health. But marketing campaigns are about making money. It is purely happenstance if using the product actually enhances your life in some way.

Industry lobbyists are there to force a regulatory / legal environment where their industry can make more money. Objecting to a waiting period and background checks makes purchasing their products convenient (i.e. they make money). Selling a wide array of weapons provides repeat sales opportunities (they make more money) and allows the product to appeal to a wide variety of customers (hey, look … they make more money). If making money happens to speak to your interpretation of the second amendment … awesome. But lets be honest about their intentions.

There are plenty of weapon magazines I can read. I’m sure there are even citizen-based second amendment associations I could join. But why are American citizens even partially funding the armament industry’s lobbyists?