Bill And Dave Are Dead – Updates

This page will be used for tracking recent additions, edits, and other changes to posts on Bill And Dave Are Dead.

11-5-09 Added post “Indian Wedding Jewelry Care Package.” Can’t remember if I already wrote about this, and I do not seem to be able to find a previous post about it so here it is. And so begins my adventure with the crazy redhead…

10-18-09 Updated the link for Positive Ape Index to the new WordPress site. Blogspot sucks. Haven’t checked out Positive Ape Index yet? It’s Coop, famous Los Angeles artist and hot-rodder. I dig his shit in a big way. He does record covers for bands like The Lords Of Acid and Bad Religion. The man is all about hot rod culture, sexy bitches, and Satan. Drop by his ‘blog and give him a double devil horn salute for me if you get the chance…

10-4-09 Writing about my past while trying to keep everything organized with regard to chronology has been difficult at best. It is confusing. I mean, there’s a lot of things that happened between 1991 and 2005. At the beginning of the project as I was leading in to my job at Bill and Dave’s I mentioned a few other previous tech employers. I was cautious, revealing too many details about those companies may have been dangerous for my career path so I chose to be vague. They were mentioned only as “The Optical Lab” or “TDS.” Looking back on it now I feel pretty comfortable divulging some more details on who those companies were.

“The Optical Lab” was Optical Coating Laboratories Inc. otherwise known locally as “OCLI.” They were eventually bought out by JDS Uniphase. My OCLI experience overall was bizarre and pretty much I don’t have anything positive to say about the people I worked with there. Especially the supervision team. The technology on the other hand was truly amazing. If my immediate team of coworkers was different, if they had not been such a bunch of goofballs and weirdos I might have stayed on for a few years. At OCLI my job was processing color-shifting pigment to be used as an anti-counterfeit agent for money. I suppose the most ironic thing about that product was the U.S. Government originally bankrolled the R&D phase of the product in the mid-1980s and then promptly backed out of a business deal with OCLI. With no customer they shopped the pigment around to the Swiss. Until recent years the Swiss were the only users, for printing European currency in eighteen countries. Counterfeit U.S. dollars was a rising problem through the 1990s, the redesign of our money finally incorporated OCLI’s color-shifting pigment many years too late. The funny thing is Uncle Sam could have had it in place more than a decade ago; drastically reducing the counterfeit problem. The Government never learns…

“TDS” was the acronym I chose for Textron Defense Systems. While I worked at Textron I built and tested sophisticated smart weapons systems for the U.S Army and the Air Force. My main gig was working on the Sensor Fuzed Weapon (BLU-108/CBU-97) cluster munition. I also was involved working on seekers for the Stinger missile, a hybrid of the SFW dubbed “Hornet,” and some other specialized military weapon systems. The SFW program has come to an end and production ceased a while back. Textron doesn’t seem to be in very good financial shape these days. They’ve sold off a bunch of their commercial interests to foreign investors and their defense section appears to be in the toilet. Back when I was working for them in the mid-1990s I felt they would not be a company I could retire from. Meaning they probably wouldn’t last that long. I think I saw the writing on the wall and called it correctly. I have a bunch of great stories from my experience at Textron though, and a few of my coworkers are now some of my closest friends.

Anyway if you’re interested you can use the search feature on the main page to filter by “The Optical Lab” or “TDS” and come up with a better time line of those stories in chronological order.

6-17-09 Added post “Conversation With A Black Belt.” Six Sigma is lame. Trust me on that one.

6-14-09 Added post “Jacinda Jukebox.” Edited “White Belt Bullshit.” Added 3 photographs to “The Zaca.” 1) Zaca at Nunes Brothers shipyard in 1929 Sausalito, California. 2) Zaca at Morea with Chris Craft in foreground. 3) Zaca at Papeete. 2 and 3 from 1931 around the world cruise.