In the time I have run this blog, I have developed a following of a lot of really great people, many of whom I’ve had the great pleasure to meet, and a couple of total whackjobs.
Sir Fredrick, who has whined at length here, has whined his last whine.

First of all, Sir Fredrick, I am not a workman. As I said, you ignorant ball of pus, you have no idea who I am, nor of what I do. I am an engineer. The engineering has come to me via a combination of study and personal experience. I have no degree.

I find that I am in excellent company.

During my career as an engineer, I have accomplished a few things. Small things, for certain, but I’m quite proud of them.

Here’s one. I developed a system that uses robots to manufacture a certain kind of drill, used to manufacture- well, everything. From transmission parts to engine blocks. Pretty much, if it is made of metal, and it has a hole in it, these drills are used. The manufacture of these drills has been a long and closely guarded secret at that company for a long time, and I was made privy as to why. They had one old timer that could do the job of manufacturing them. he was about to retire. I wrote code that exceeded what anyone thought a robot could do, and made a robot do the job. Theoretically impossible- in fact, a highly paid engineer at the robot manufacturer assured me “it can’t be done”. That was over ten years ago. It has been running every day since. Did I invent the robot? (No, but I know the man who did) What I did, was I combined technologies in a way they had never been combined before, to create a process that had never existed before, which is now the industry standard for that type of manufacture.

here’s another: I designed, built, and programmed systems to deburr aviation equipment. Gears used in airplanes, jets, helicopters have incredibly stringent tolerances for allowed deviation, and for a hundred years, the gear manufacturers would pour money into a metal blank until they had a finely machined aviation gear. Then hand that gear, now worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars, to a guy to deburr. That guy often removed too much or too little and scrapped the part. Plus, he was doing a dangerous, dirty, difficult job. I developed a system that is now in use in many major aircraft manufacturing plants nationwide. I was installing one, in fact, the weekend I met Dick and the second time I met the Du Toits.

I’ve worked, over the last fifteen years, in a very wide variety of industries, using robotics and other automation solutions to do some very creative things. Systems I designed or helped design or programmed are hard at work making the things you see every day. Have steel entry doors at your office? One of my customers. Sleep on martha stewart sheets? We packaged them. Eat Slim Jims? Barilla Pasta? we bag ’em and tag ’em. Wipe your ass with Charmin? robots my company provided package the stuff, and do so with incredible speed and accuracy.(if you don’t think accuracy is important in packaging asswipe, try watching a line running at 3000 rolls per second when a single roll gets out fo place) Drive a Ford Focus? Visteon uses robots I programmed to load gear blanks into lathes. Another division uses robots to load the finished gears into heat treat machines. Drive an American made Honda? my robots clean and deburr all the axle castings. I wrote all the code, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of hours of a system I designed, programmed, and implemented, and never a hiccup.

I also developed a standard interface to automation systems that is in use all over the country these days, and I’m now applying that concept to other, non automation type equipment.

No, I’m not a “degreed” engineer. I wouldn’t consider myself one, because with rare exception, most engineers I know couldn’t find their ass with a geiger counter.

As for the ‘tradesmen” you see, Jimmy boy, “Hanging around the unemployment office”, if they’re any good they’re working, simple as that. Ever make a kitchen cabinet, Jim? hang a sheet of drywall? wire an electrical outlet? Change a water pump? Lay a hardwood floor? You can’t wipe your ass without the “tradesmen” you scoff at.

Let’s look at some of the uneducated, unwashed masses, shall we?

Here’s a guy you probably don’t know a thing about, named Oliver Heaviside. Heaviside was almost entirely self taught, left school in the sixth grade. Wait, he’s even stupider than those eight graders you mention, Jim! He’s so stupid that by calculation alone he predicted the existence of a layer of the iopnosphere that now bears his name. He’s so damned dumb that he invented Vector Calculus. Simpleton stuff, really.

Lest we forget those from other continents, feast your eyes upon Srinivasa Ramanujan. A guy who, had he lived, might have figured out the Unified Field.

Then there’s this guy, Harry Pope, who made the finest rifle barrels in the world, at the time- barrels which are still highly prized and sought after. Self taught.

Another grade school dropout you might know: who worked for this
insignificant fool…. He was probably just addled. They bought steel made by the bessemer process, developed by another self taught man.

Now, I dislike Vonnegut as much as the next guy, for the most part, but I have to quote him here:

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”

There are a lot of autodidacts out there, though not as many as before. Some think this is a sign of the way the world has gone.
I think it just makes those of us who are, rarer and more valuable.

So pound sand, Sir Fredric James. I’m not sure what you’ve done with your life, but I bet you can’t open your eyes without encountering something my technology has touched or improved, in some way.

Oh, and by the way? As for the

“Not much to darken these days, if ya ask me.”

Where’s YOUR blog, fuckwit?