My main stack during days right now has been a single loop of BILLionaire (terminus) and LimitlessQ.
Since I overloaded myself so much last weekend.
Dreams haven’t been over-the-top this past week.
I’ve noticed myself thinking of something which I’m actually pleased with. THIS is what subs are doing to/for me lately.
Cue 2 really lengthy stories.
Story 1 (My Navy Days)
In my days in the Navy, I was on submarines (I got out in 2005).
I was an electronics technician specializing in communications gear.
One of my “jobs” at sea was to stand a RADAR operator watch when we were on the surface (or the rare times we’d stick the RADAR mast out while still at periscope depth).
One of the functions of the RADAR operator is, when pinged by the navigation people, to get the ranges to 3 known landmarks in the vicinity to aid in getting a RADAR-obtained position fix, which involves drawing range circles on the charts from each of the landmarks to establish position based on RADAR ranges.
The navigation peeps also used GPS position fixes, as well as a few other methods, for redundancy.
They always had to log the “offset” of each method as compared to GPS.
I consistently had a 0-yard offset. Basically what my RADAR ranges got for our position was dead-nuts right on with what GPS had.
Everyone else was about 300 yards off when they ran the RADAR.
This was enough so, even the Captain (CO) asked me how I consistently got zero-offset RADAR fixes.
Also, a person from the submarine squadron who was a full-bird Captain at the time was a “rider” on the boat. He was there to gauge our battle-readiness.
This guy would go to different watch stations, ask people questions he felt they should be able to answer either right away (knowing it) or knowing where to find the answer. He had a real reputation for being a bit of a dickhead/asshole.
Really, though, the guy just had a certain expectation as to how people should do their jobs and be preparing themselves in “downtime.”
Due to my zero-offset position fixes, and how I answered his questions (I didn’t treat him like a celebrity like the rest did), I got a rare compliment from him which he wrote up for the CO to present to me as a letter of commendation as being the “best RADAR operator on the waterfront.”
My secret to the zero-offset fixes? The modern RADAR stacks have a certain number of “tracking allocations” you can assign to targets on the screen. It’s useful for tracking other boats, certain planes, without having to keep an eye on them each second. We affectionately called them tracking bugs.
Most RADAR operators would just assign a tracker to each of the 3 landmarks used and read those off when the Nav peeps asked for the ranges.
I got 300-yard-offset ranges at the start like everybody else.
But one shift, I was out of tracking bugs and so used the manual range finding, where you just put your finger on the thing being looked at. and it gives the range.
I read off THOSE ranges since I had no tracking bugs left.
A few minutes later, the nav peeps said “You got a zero-offset from RADAR to GPS! Bet you can’t do THAT again”…and I’ve never looked back.
The thing there was when you assign the trackers to an item, it only updates about once every few seconds. Could be 5 or could be 30, depending on conditions and how many items are being tracked.
I was giving actual ranges and not ranges that were already old a few seconds later due to us moving through the water!
Story 2 (at my current job)
With this job I’m in now, we use an app called TextExpander on Macs which you can assign abbreviations to larger snippets of text you might use fairly often over and over. It saves a TON of time typing those same things.
Anyway, a couple of years ago, we had a specialty queue I got assigned to with a bunch of my coworkers regarding some battery issues with certain products.
We all started using TextExpander and with TE you can assign actual keystrokes like the TAB key…so they made us a snippet to use which would tab through a few of the fields and drop the repetitive text in each field.
After a day of 2, they realized that notes were being saved incorrectly because stuff was in the wrong fields.
They forbade us to use TextExpander for this particular queue any longer. Basically said without warning “TE is now VERBOTEN for this because of the errors.”
I knew why the errors were happening. Some of the software they use for the other parts of the job and run in the background…they tend to interfere with certain apps, one of which was TE. It’d cause it to hang up…and the way TE works is by swapping data in and out of the clipboard.
I made it work by adding in brief pauses of 150 milliseconds between each field. So it ran slow enough the stuff went into the right fields 100% of the time. Not slow enough as to make it the same as typing stuff over and over myself.
Yes, they wanted us to cut/paste the same things from the same fields from each account that came up and do that over and over. So cumbersome.
No, I chose not to do that, since I found a better way. I didn’t tell THEM of course, since they had no vision lol.
I got pulled aside by a couple of managers a few days after this specialty queue was wrapped up.
They said, “I don’t know how you managed to do it, but you’re among the top producers for that queue. Your cases-handled-per-hour metric was almost off the charts. Here’s a $1K bonus for all you did to help us out here!”
SCORE
I keep thinking about those 2 experiences as examples in my life of “The way everybody else does something isn’t always the best.”
I’m an INNOVATOR!
I think perhaps the healing aspects of Limitless maybe helping BILLionaire along. The only real “healing” I have in BILLionaire is Rebirth, Limit Destroyer, and Wealth Limit Destroyer.
” to them.