How Do You Afford This Addiction?

[WaterRat]

Mt. Washington Cog Railway

I was going to ask if that was the Cog (Smog ) on Washington. I was backpacking in from the North one time and about to cross the tracks with the train going up and the people on the train were taking pictures of me, lol!

 

[Smoke-Chem BBQ]

Exactly, lol . DuPont, BMS, Bayer, Gilead, couple small companies no one has ever heard of…

I'm a retired research chemist (if you say my screen name fast, it makes sense), started in Ag Chem right out of grad school, got a bunch of patents for products that never quite made it to market, then I switched to Pharma for most of my career. I was in NJ or just across the NY line the whole time. It really was the nation's medicine cabinet. In addition to the above list, Merck, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, Glaxo Smithkline, Roche, Sanofi, Regeneron, and a bunch of others are there. I was only in lab for a dozen years, migrated into computational chemistry/molecular design, then against my wishes got moved into research IT management for over 20 years. I was never an IT guy, but they needed someone who could work with the scientists then translate what they needed so the real IT pros could deliver it. So I got to see a lot more science, and I got to travel to a bunch of interesting places to support international labs

My very cool side gig was as a crew chief for a fireworks company. They use an army of subcontractors, mostly on July 4, but we did some other shows as well. Independence Day for me started with picking up the truck full of explosives early in the morning, working with a crew of 6-8 guys to set up and load hundreds and hundreds of mortars, fuse together the prenale and finale chains, shoot the show, then work well into the night breaking down the show, cleaning up the field, and loading everything back on the truck. It was usually a 20 hour day, for just over minimum wage, but it was REALLY fun running up and down the racks lighting fuses with highway flares for 20-25 minutes--our shows weren't quite big enough to be computer controlled and electrically fired, so we had a lot more fun firing manually. I'm proud that my crew never had an injury in 20 years of shooting. We had a couple of spectacular mishaps (quality control on big fireworks mortar shells isn't as good as you'd hope), but the safety protocols worked.,,

Last year I retired back to my home state of Idaho, on a lake, up in the panhandle. Loving it!

 

[GatorAGR]

I’m in a pretty nice area around 10miles or so SW of Rutgers and a little more N of Princeton. Not how I envisioned Jersey before moving here a bit over 3yrd ago.

I work from my home, but my office is in Edison. I lead a Japanese Ag Chem company for North America. Try to do our small part to keep our crops safe and free of pests.

 

[dsk]

We had a couple of spectacular mishaps

Probably not this spectacular. I traveled to SD annually to watch the Big Bay Boom, but this year the show was a bit short. ;)

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fox5sandiego.com

 

[Smoke-Chem BBQ]

Probably not this spectacular. I traveled to SD annually to watch the Big Bay Boom, but this year the show was a bit short. ;)

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fox5sandiego.com

Yeah, that one is legendary in the industry. A NJ fireworks company (not the one I shot for) had that contract. Computer-fired shows are composed on a PC, the 'notes' of each shell firing are matched up the the notes of the musical score that accompanies, with the software making the allowance for the rise time of the various shells, so they burst on-note. At the end of the show, a 'Fire All' note is used, to send a signal to every tube to fire, just in case a shell or two hadn't fired on cue. It reduces the chance that the crew has to deal with loaded tubes at the end of the night.

In the case of the spectacular failure in 2012, the guy composing the firing sequence had it finished, but wanted to try making some tweaks, so he copied the entire firing sequence to the end of the file, made a number of changes, and decided he liked that one better. So he deleted the initial firing sequence,..except he failed to delete that last 'Fire All' note, so now it appeared as the first note of the show. When the show started, every tube immediately fired. I wish I'd been there to see it...