[Humourl3ss]

My turn...

I'm a production analyst for a woodworking company. We do all the interior furnishings for a couple of large American and Canadian bookstores, a big US electronics retailer, some clothing stores, convenience stores, etc.

How would I characterise my job? Stressful, far too political and none too remunerative. I don't particularly know why I stay, other than the fact that I'm damn good at what I do.

-CW

[Humourl3ss]

Quote:

Originally posted by paulmon
However all that being said, everyone is welcome in Canada.

.... with preference given to 18-29 year old females of high libido and questionable morals.

-CW

[paulmon]

Quote:

Originally posted by Humourl3ss
My turn...

I'm a production analyst for a woodworking company. We do all the interior furnishings for a couple of large American and Canadian bookstores, a big US electronics retailer, some clothing stores, convenience stores, etc.

How would I characterise my job? Stressful, far too political and none too remunerative. I don't particularly know why I stay, other than the fact that I'm damn good at what I do.

-CW

A large Canadian bookstore chain? hrm, I wonder who that could be considering the book selling business in Canada is a virutal monopoly.

What exactly does a production analyst do? Don't say "analyzes production."

Paul

[paulmon]

Quote:

Originally posted by Humourl3ss
.... with preference given to 18-29 year old females of high libido and questionable morals.

-CW

That's always implied isn't it?

Paul

[ruthie]

Quote:

Originally posted by paulmon
Several of us got together here in Toronto a few weeks ago but as MINI lovers normally do we ended up driving more than talking. I thought it was a way to get to know some of the locals. I also know that a similar thread was started ages ago in the "General" forum and I think it got to be pretty huge so this was just my way of narrowing the field a little. However as it has been mentioned the "view new posts" button seems to be making the actual forum titles pointless, I love that button.

However all that being said, everyone is welcome in Canada.

Paul

So true! I was recently in Vancouver and I found the people there to be wonderfully friendly, intelligent and fun. And, what a gorgeous city!

[Humourl3ss]

Quote:

Originally posted by paulmon
A large Canadian bookstore chain? hrm, I wonder who that could be considering the book selling business in Canada is a virutal monopoly.

My lips are sealed. They aren't expanding these days, so they've ceased to be a major customer.

Quote:

What exactly does a production analyst do? Don't say "analyzes production."

I take a look at incoming orders, determine production lead times, optimize material usage, direct purchasing on buyout items, schedule and issue shop orders, crack the whip in the engineering department for shop drawings and cutlists, duke it out with salesmen who make unreasonable requests, etc etc. I wear a lot of different hats, you might say.

-CW

[Humourl3ss]

Quote:

Originally posted by paulmon
That's always implied isn't it?

Implied? I state it baldly and boldly.

-CW

[Jayomatic]

haha. Jesus. Talk about a large thread already!! Full of IT and Beer and Women and Wood. Kind of leads to one another! haha. Brutal.

I have always wanted to get into that damn programming stuff. My brain works on the other side though so that is why I am in design and not programming.

I am an art director at Maclaren McCann Interactive and I come up with concepts and designs for Canadian divisions of General Motors and some Nestle.

How funny is that. Driving a mini and having to put up each day with that boring general motors product. o well. Perhaps they will learn what people actually want instead of what they do now.

[aircanuck]

Quote:

Originally posted by paulmon

Aircanuck, what are you doing to keep your flight hours up? Taking any local planes out for spin? I make a great co-pilot "Hey watch out for that cow!"
Paul

Yep that's what it's about right now. I just go out to Hamilton. I always need a good co, just provide your own parachute!

Neil

[scott321172]

I am at the moment studying a General Management degree at University.
I would like after University has finished next year to specialise in Management Consultancy.
However my options are open unless any of you fellow mini owners have any ideas?

[sniece]

OK, so here I am representing the non-IT side of the Southern Ontario Mini Club. First a quick comment about some of the previous posts...Blue, Canadian, and Golden are not real beers, I'm sorry if that offends anyone, but it's the truth. I'm partial to Guinness myself...the beer that eats like a meal!

Anyway, I work for a company called Wescam that has recently been bought out, for good or bad, by a large 'merican conglomerate. We build gyro-stabilized camera systems for TV stations, movies, Police forces, and the military. If you see any of the aerial shots from 'Survivor' or 'Eco Challenge' we filmed 'em. If you watch the Global TV commercials (sorry to non-Canadians, it's a network up here), and they show a picture of their black helicopter with a white ball hanging off the bottom, well...we make the ball. Bascially, the ball stabilizes the image so that it isn't jumping around on account of all the vibration in the helicopter. Oh yeah, and at Wescam I'm doing more or less a supervisory role in our Customer Service Group where I used to be a technician (see the world from the inside of a hotel room), and where I now do very little with what I went to school for (mechanical engineering technology)

So to review, I work at Wescam, drink Guinness, and drive a Cooper. The End.

Steve

[HarryHBMCC]

Molson Canadian was the beer I drank when I was underage but now I find it too mild for my tastes. Guinness and Smithwicks are what I like if I'm having a pint but I'm usually having a dram of whisky instead, preferably Scotch though there are some good Irish and Canadian whiskies too.

Wescam. I think one of my mother's overly activist friends wants to picket that company, thinking they have something to do with the war on Iraq due to the military portion of their contracts.

Harry

[Humourl3ss]

Amen to the fellow beer snobs.

I started drinking Guinness because, I quickly realized, no fellow teenager will ever steal from the fridge if you bring it to a house party. That was 14 years ago. After a while, you just develop a taste for it. Now it's my #1 choice. Stella, Heineken, Creemore Springs and Urquell also rate highly in my books. Newcastle Brown would too, except for the fact that it leaves me with whopping massive headaches the next day.

-CW

[paulmon]

Quote:

Originally posted by sniece

Anyway, I work for a company called Wescam that has recently been bought out, for good or bad, by a large 'merican conglomerate. We build gyro-stabilized camera systems for TV stations, movies, Police forces, and the military. If you see any of the aerial shots from 'Survivor' or 'Eco Challenge' we filmed 'em. If you watch the Global TV commercials (sorry to non-Canadians, it's a network up here), and they show a picture of their black helicopter with a white ball hanging off the bottom, well...we make the ball. Bascially, the ball stabilizes the image so that it isn't jumping around on account of all the vibration in the helicopter. Oh yeah, and at Wescam I'm doing more or less a supervisory role in our Customer Service Group where I used to be a technician (see the world from the inside of a hotel room), and where I now do very little with what I went to school for (mechanical engineering technology)

Steve out of curiosity how to you quell the vibrations that the gyro can't help with? I mean that the gyro will help with the general change of direction of the helicopter or whatever but the helicopter will have a natural vibration. How is that absorbed? Some sort of propritary gel like substance? Curious.

Now onto a more serious topic... Can I buy one of these for my MCS? Just something small that I can fit a 3-CCD MiniDV camera on, need something to stabilize a run down snake road.



Paul

[paulmon]

Quote:

Originally posted by HarryIndiBlue
Molson Canadian was the beer I drank when I was underage but now I find it too mild for my tastes. Guinness and Smithwicks are what I like if I'm having a pint but I'm usually having a dram of whisky instead, preferably Scotch though there are some good Irish and Canadian whiskies too.

Now this is what I like to hear! Smithwicks and Kilkenny are the two beers that will fill my pint however I too like a nice scotch. Single malt is a must! In fact I have one glass left of the 18 year old Macallan waiting for me upstairs and I'm keeping it for a special occasion to end the bottle. That bottle of scotch was worth every penny! Damn I'm drooling just thinking about it.

For those that have not wet the palate with a good single malt scotch you're missing a treat. Like anything you only start to appreciate the subtle, and some not so subtle, differences once you've experienced several different single malts from different regions in Scotland. It only takes 3 or 4 different malts from different areas to start to suddenly undertand the different flavours. Smokey, Peatty, Oakey, all suddenly make sense. Yummy!

That would be a nice idea for a meet if there was a convienient bar with a decent scotch menu close to all of us. Granted no driving after that one.

Paul

[sniece]

OK, so a quick and dirty lesson on gyro stabilization (or what I'm allowed to tell you) follows. The old way of doing it was to have big, heavy gyros that not only stabilized the motion, but as you say Paul, were used to turn the system. It takes a fair amount of time for the gyros to spin up, and they're pretty mechanically intensive. While this is still exceptionally stable, and the machine of choice for filming movies, for the ENG and surveillance end of things, those days are gone. The gyros are now used for feedback rather than the stablization itself. Basically, you spin the gyros up, and use the feeback from them to detect movement, and then use that feedback to actuate motors that counter the vibration. There is also some purely mechanical springs and damping that are involved, but that's mainly for low frequency stuff. Basically, our best (read: most expensive) technology will stabilize the image to within 5 microradians of movement. If I recall the conversion correctly (a long week has made me incapable of math), it means that looking from Toronto to Kingston, you would see an object move back and forth by roughly a meter. Pretty darned good, and it has to be considering some of the focal lengths involved (1000mm+)

So Paul, yes, we can hook you up, but it's going to run you about a quarter million, and I'm afraid that the big ball on the roof of your MCS will ruin the aerodynamics and the appearance...plus all that extra weight.

Harry, your mother isn't one of the 'Singing Grannies' is she? We were protested a while ago on International Human Rights Day, and the singing grannies were a part of that. Yes, we build miliary technology, but we don't build 'weapons' as a lot of people seem to think. Our equipment all goes on a lot of Search and Rescue aircraft (US Coast Guard in particular), is used for drug interdiction, police forces, etc.

But on to more serious stuff...beer! Mmmm, beer! I admit that I didn't drink good beer back in my early college days either, but now that I drink for quality and not quantity, and so it's a different story. Has anyone had the opportunity to try a beer called 'Bishops Finger'? I got it from the LCBO once, and loved it, then couldn't find it again. Much research led me to discover that they don't carry it anymore, but I did get the name of the distributor...I just haven't screwed up the courage to import a case of it...it took me quite some time to find a way to get it, and I don't want to get a whole case if my memory of the taste isn't what I expect. Can't say that I've got into the whole scotch thing, but I do have an interesting story about scotch that a friend of mine told me...I'll save it for another time.

Anyway, enough rambling.
Steve

[paulmon]

Very cool, so the Gyro is only used to detect the movement and vibration but not actually used to counter it. Impressive. What's the smallest "ball" that you make?

Now back to the beer, bishops finger? Never heard of it but if you do decided to try and import a case I'd love to try one. Where does it hail from?

I must admitt that there is one beer that I hate more than any other on the planet and that is most non-exported (read LCBO only) belgian beer. Ick, tastes like hot dog water!

Paul

[minimc]

Paulmon,

Your appreciation for single malt & your MINI ownership bring to mind a possible road trip. …Could be a day trip for some and others could spend a night.

Just North of Hockley Valley lays Mono Mills Township & the Mono Cliffs Restaurant/Pub/Inn. The Pub holds single-malt scotch nosing evenings several times annually. While I can't remember just when these occur I believe the timing is late summer/fall.

Aside from single-malt scotch the restaurant has on staff a Swiss-trained chef whom prepares excellent meals. I normally eat in the pub, which is small but has great character. The pub is complete with potbelly stove and board games + they've got Creemore Springs on tap.

If one were to go up for the nosing staying at the Inn would be a necessity (as I think I recall 6 or 8 drams 1 of each single malt per person). ...And the price was a bargain!

There are numerous good roads out that way which would lend them selves to a Mini.

Hope I’m not straying too far – didn’t wanna hijack the thread – it just came to mind. ...And now back to our regularly scheduled programming..

best,
mc

[paulmon]

Quote:

Originally posted by minimc
Paulmon,

Your appreciation for single malt & your MINI ownership bring to mind a possible road trip. …Could be a day trip for some and others could spend a night.

Just North of Hockley Valley lays Mono Mills Township & the Mono Cliffs Restaurant/Pub/Inn. The Pub holds single-malt scotch nosing evenings several times annually. While I can't remember just when these occur I believe the timing is late summer/fall.

Aside from single-malt scotch the restaurant has on staff a Swiss-trained chef whom prepares excellent meals. I normally eat in the pub, which is small but has great character. The pub is complete with potbelly stove and board games + they've got Creemore Springs on tap.

If one were to go up for the nosing staying at the Inn would be a necessity (as I think I recall 6 or 8 drams 1 of each single malt per person). ...And the price was a bargain!

There are numerous good roads out that way which would lend them selves to a Mini.

Hope I’m not straying too far – didn’t wanna hijack the thread – it just came to mind. ...And now back to our regularly scheduled programming..

best,
mc

Mike, this sounds like a great idea! How about you float this idea in a new thread and see what interest there would be? Once we've got a few people interested we could then look into the details of there tastings. I know this sounds like just the thing for Harry and I'm sure others would like this too.

Cheers,

Paul

[supercuper]

Hey guys,

Well I'm a graphic designer and web developer. Funny, I have a degree in Illustration but work as a designer. In the sp**** time that I have, I work on the book I'm hoping to get published one day. Who knows? Good to see lots of tech guys here

Alex