hazelchaz | ...Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future. Time keeps on slippin', slippin'... (Reply)

How long until they put the mail drops back into the airports? And don't tell me it's a TSA rule keeping them out. I flew by way of Denver to Indianapolis in August. At Denver, there's a post office in one of the terminals, and mail drops here and there. I had put together some "meeting soon!" postcards when I was in Orange County waiting for the first plane, and mailed them in Denver. I bought some more postcards there, and mailed them at the mail drop in Indianapolis in the baggage claim area. That's right, in one city it's inside the secured area, in another it's on the outside. Apparently the local airport USPS people have figured out how to make it work.

And don't get me started about them taking out the post office at Chicago O'Hara but leaving it marked on the direction signs!

So what's keeping the mail drops out of the post office? I guess I should write to the local postmaster and also to the airports, and see who'll authorize putting them back in. I remember seeing this closed-off mailbox at LAX in 2003 where it said

Due to the National Security Crisis, we are temporarily not accepting deposits of mail in our Postal Mail Boxes throughout the Airport. This will be effective immediately as of September 19, 2001.

The notice is on USPS stationery, so I suppose I should start with them.

But that wasn't the big deal with my Indianapolis trip, oh no. The trip was helpful for my animelosangeles plans, as it turns out, because I stayed in a Hilton-brand hotel while I was there which put me over the top for a free room night in Lancaster.

One of the interesting things I saw on that trip was this machine, which is a "pick and place" machine assembling surface-mount circuit boards. What does that mean in English? It means that all of the electronic parts are mounted in tubes or reels (like those round things on the left), and the computerized machine picks up each part and places it exactly where it needs to go. The parts are very tiny -- take apart any modern piece of electronics and you'll see the sort of tiny square and rectangular chips that it uses.

It doesn't use "through-hole" mounting, where the little legs on the parts are stuck through tiny holes in the board and soldered on the other side. (You can see that kind of electronics assembly in sufficiently-old or sufficently old-design products. Easy to recognize, if you pick it up and rest it on the palm of your hand there are zillions of tiny pins sticking into you; move the wrong way and they'll draw blood. Unmistakeable.)

The machine can place the little flat parts closer together than is feasible for a human being to take it apart and repair it, even with a magnifying glass. This has implications for whether something can be repaired or whether it's just thrown away and replaced if it fails (or is assembled wrong or with bad parts). It also has implications for hobbyists -- old-school wanna-be engineers find it harder to scavenge parts off of old electronics.

On the other hand, protoyping new designs with all these automatic machines is easier and quicker now. So it's a trade-off. Here you can see Ellen and Gerald watching the machine. Both of them are EEs -- one of them's seen this all the time, the other has decades of experience with through-hole boards and maybe five or ten years working with SMT designs. On the right you can see the microscope used to visually inspect the boards for minor correctable flaws.

Ellen and Jason (not pictured) are the two young engineers that I get along with best. I say "young" because I'm older than either of them (though, thankfully, not older than both of them put together) and "engineers" because Jason writes firmware, Ellen designs hardware. So Ellen's like a young Gerald, Jason's like me. While I was there, we all went to El Torito Grill. For the benefit of the out-of-towners, El Torito Grill is an upscale Mexican restaurant with locations in Southern California and Indiana. In other words, yeah, I've been to ETG, the Manhattan Beach, Brea, and Yorba Linda locations, mostly.

I suggested we start with the tableside-prepared guacamole. (Unfortunately, they couldn't roll the cart into the room we were in, so we didn't get the full made-to-order experience.) The local beer-drinkers ordered Dos Equis or Corona Extra. I had a Negra Modelo, which they didn't recognize. It's one of the darker Mexican beers, and it's basically a Vienna-style Lager. You know about all of the Austrian and German immigrants to Mexico, who brought their brewing traditions and their oompah music? Have a Mexican beer and listen to some Norteño music with the accordions, and tell me you don't hear Oktoberfest. Ellen tried a bit, and decided to get one herself. In conversation, I learned that she likes the sweeter beers. Do you shop at Trader Joe's? No? Well, let's stop by after dinner.

We got there shortly before they closed, and picked one each of some of the fruity beers they have there (e.g. apricot flavor) and a cider or two. You can pick just one bottle out of a six-pack, so it was easy to get a mix-pack for her to take. And we picked up a box of chocolate croissants. I told her to take them home, let them rise overnight and bake them in the morning, and be sure to eat one while they're still fresh. We had decided to look there for dessert, and hit on the 4-pack of assorted chocolate ice creams. All of them straight chocolate, but "varietal" -- each was made with cacao from Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Borneo (Kalimantan), or Ghana. (Choctál, look from them at the local TJ'S.) We also got some of the Fruit Floes.

We went back to the shop (they have a freezer there) and sampled the chocolate ice creams. I think the Kalimantan (Borneo) is my favorite, but I really need to go and try another taste-test. Maybe with library_lynn, although of late she hasn't been having the super-premium chocolate ice cream as much as before. Anyhow, Ellen took the croissants home but she didn't follow my instructions... she let them cool off and nobody had one until I joined them. No, no, eat them when they're warm! Perhaps she'll go back to Trader Joe's, get more of the beer she likes and try the croissants again.