Trainee

Still on the writing kick. Only read three of my favorite political blogs last night. After thirty minutes of writing. Today no political blogs yet and it is 7:30 pm. Has to be some kind of a record for me.

This morning before work I spent reading about blogging and internet marketing. Went grocery shopping first thing after work. Then took Janice over to one of her Avon customers. We went scrounging for fire wood. Cooked and ate supper after unloading the wood.

Now it is time for my half hour of writing. A few more things about my day and then I think I will start another piece on some other topic.

I have worked for the last ten years as a machinist. It is a job were you must get good at working with the computers that control the lathes and machining centers. Also gauging (measuring) the parts, reading prints, making adjustments, and reading and understanding the machining programs. For the last three days I have been training someone else to run the lathes. The guy has been working with the machining centers for 4 years, so this is not all brand new to to him just a bunch of it. He is struggling with most every aspect of lathes except for deburring the parts. I imagine (hope) he is as frustrated as I am. There is a whole lot of repetition and not a lot of retention. I would be less concerned about his lack of progress except there are things on the machining centers that he still needs someone to walk him through every time after four years.

I need to think of this as a training exercise for me and a chance for me to up grade my skills as a trainer. One positive is that I believe he has no idea just how frustrated and worried I am. Second positive is that he does ask a lot of questions (again and again). Some people when they are not sure will just bull ahead and run a bunch of scrap before someone notices what they are doing and gets them stopped. Or crash a machine. Asking a lot of questions is a whole lot better. The worry on my part is because if he makes any bad mistakes I will be responsible for them. Questions and caution on his part are a good thing!

When I get done writing this evening I need to do some research on teaching & training.

Well no research was done was done. I went to bed instead. As usual I woke up about three times in the night. One of those times as I was drifting back to sleep I had some thoughts on some helps for the trainee.

I believe that controls on our machines and our machines are physically ten years old and the design of the Fanuc controls are fifteen years or older. They date from a time when memory and other resources of any computer were expensive and very limited. They will hold between ten and twenty programs for ten or twenty different parts. That is less than half of our parts and we occasionally need delete a program and download a new program. We have a floppy disk that holds all thirty of our lathe programs.

Error messages are very cryptic. 2015-A which you look up in a Fanuc manual. The paragraph may or may not help you. It has ten Hard keys off to the side of the screen. They have little pictograms on them that are very faded. Each key will bring up a related group of functions and screens. Under the screen there are the Soft keys and their function varies depending on what hard key function it is in. The screen above labels each key.

This written description would't be much help if you where trying to learn. I need to use PowerPoint to build a map of where things are at. My linux system has Open Office installed and I will try OO Presentation. We will see if I can come up with something that will help a trainee. Also see if I can get it into a web page, blog page.

It is five am and I have not been to a political blog for 36 hours, a current record which is about to end because I'm heading off to check my three favorites now.

Contingency management, further thoughts

After thinking about yesterdays post I believe that Internet use is a bit too general as a reward for after writing. I have bookmarked fourteen political blogs that I read every day. At ten minutes apiece that adds up to two hours and twenty minutes a day. Sounds about right. Some days it eats up even more time than that when there are a bunch of interesting links for me to follow up.

Need to cut back the number of hours a day spent on political blogs if I really want to get some of my projects done. I will rearrange my bookmark folders. There are three blogs that I plan to read every day after my writing block. The rest will be spread out and read every third or fourth day.

Writing

Jim Gibbon.com � Blog Archive � One Simple Technique to Help You Overcome Procrastination and Start Writing Now

This blog post by Jim Gibbon recommends that you write for 30 minutes every day. My contingency management, a reward that I get only get after I write for the day will be not reading and researching on the net.

This evening I started a folder in my bookmarks labeled Tomorrows Posts for anything that I might later want to use Blog This with. If I have nothing in mind to blog about I will be using Text Editor to write notes and ideas. I might try mailing the not ready for prime time ramblings to myself at my G-mail account. It would make them private & searchable.

The post talks about

Contingency management has been around for years, but I just learned about it in a great book by Robert Boice called Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing.

I checked and the local college library doesn't have this book although it does have four of Robert Boice's other books. For $13.57 I should just buy the book from Amazon.com.