Today was my last day with my current employer (big company, lots of employees in the Pacific Northwest, currently pissing off the NLRB). I was hired initially to do structural finite element analysis, which I found odd since I didn’t have a ton of FEA experience, but that was OK, because they really didn’t need someone to do FEA, but rather, someone who can write scripts that perform canned FEA routines. Not a lot of engineering judgment required for that, and not a lot of experience to be had. Although I did have fun updating some of their scripts into FORTRAN77 (shoot me now…). Still, they paid to move me here, so there is that.
Got tired of that after two years, and switched to a group that promised me I could do Computational Fluid Dynamics work, which, funnily enough, was what I wrote my Master’s Thesis on (using Java multi-threading to solve Navier-Stokes on a 3D mesh using explicit finite volume techniques), so I was excited. After 3 years with that group, despite telling my management multiple times that I want CFD work, I had done one CFD project, and spent the bulk of my time first using handbook methods to do aerodynamic analysis, and then converting a collection of spreadsheets into a stand-alone Java application (that was actually fun, as no one else knew how to write code, so I got to be as creative as I wanted without having ‘people who know better’ telling me ‘that’s not how we do it here’).
sigh…
On a whim, my wife sent me a job posting for a technical marketing engineer for a CFD software company. I thought, what the hell, and applied. Then I saw a link for other jobs at the company, checked the listings, and saw a posting for an application support engineer. I dropped my app on that one too. That was on a Sunday.
Monday morning I got a call back. Thursday that same week I was interviewing for the application support engineer position, and by the next Tuesday, I was being offered the job (which I accepted). Always amazing how quickly life can just turn on a dime.
The new job sounds like fun. Spend the first six months learning the software inside & out, then start getting assigned customers who hold licenses. If they have trouble getting the software to work, I help them. If they have trouble getting their mesh setup, or their solution to run, or their results to post-process, I help them. If someone needs a one-off job run and is not interested in a license agreement, I run their geometry on the cluster back at the office (for a nominal fee, of course). The customers run the gamut of industries, from automotive, to petroleum, to wind/water turbines, to HVAC, to acoustic analysis.
Basically, I get to be a CFD Jedi.
Only one downside. There is about an 80% chance (I’ll know for certain in October) that I’ll get relocated to the office in Irvine, CA. I’m not terribly thrilled at that prospect, as it means we’ll have to sell the house in this market, and I’ll have to sell or somehow store most of my guns (I only have 5) because the safe isn’t coming with us, and we have no intentions of buying property in CA (and I anchor safes to the floor/walls, permanently). Still, the experience I’ll gain, and the networking & contacts I’ll gain, and the opportunity to make a name for myself, is just too much to pass up.
So if anyone in the Seattle-ish area wants a Mosin long rifle, or a Glenfield lever action in 30-30, or a Bersa Thunder in .380ACP, they are all available. I’ll most likely keep the Judge and the Mossberg 500, although if anyone wants to offer me space in their safe, I’ll be happy to leave you with use of the guns and all the ammo I have for them.
Congrats, sounds like a fun gig.
CFD, eh? Is that sort of the same thing seen here on Varmint Al’s pages?
http://www.varmintal.com/aengr.htm
http://www.varmintal.com/abat85.htm
http://www.varmintal.com/abolt.htm
The RNS family of safes will gladly accept storage of your boomsticks, MadRock.
As for the others, I’ll ask around IRL as well.
I’m over in Redmond, I have a few spaces left in my gun safe if you need storage, my home is alarmed and the safe is hidden. Give me a shout at my e-mail if you need free storage.
Fortran77, believe me it could be worse, it could be F’n assembly.
As for safe space, drop me a line if the RNS family can’t fill your needs. I just cleared out a couple slots in mine from storing for someone else.
I do think that the guns you’ve listed are all CA approved, or at least, not on the naughty list. Don’t know why you wouldn’t want to take ’em with you. After all, you’d be in the lands of Rodney King riots and such.
That said, if sell you must, then do kindly drop me a line about the Glenfield .30-30? And yes, I’d pay the shipping to my local FFL, etc.
Frankly though, you really ought not sell ’em, not with all those offers of storage here. I’d wager that one day, you’d be glad to regain possession of those treasures.
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
David – That is FEA, not CFD. Same concept, different equations to be solved for (take unsolvable 2nd Order Partial Differential Equations and spproximate a solution using tiny pieces you can solve for). FEA is what my first position was supposed to be doing, but all I was doing was taking meshed geometry someone else had put together, running it through canned routines to generate the FEA solution, then passing those results onto someone else. FEA is no fun if you can’t post-process the results and play with the pretty pictures. Same with CFD.
If you folks want me get further into the weeds on FEA or CFD, you just let me know.
Phil – I may take you up on that. I’ll let you know in October
Jim – If I can keep the lever action, I will. Gonna depend on a lot of factors though. The move, if it happens, will leave us tight for a while, so it may be that every dollar will count & lever action rifles will be a luxury (shotguns, on the other hand, are as necessary as fire extinguishers). Still, if I need to sell the Glenfield, you’ll have first right of refusal.
Barron – I don’t know Assembly, I don’t want to know Assembly, I’m pretty certain I couldn’t be paid enough to want to learn Assembly. Same goes for COBOL. Hell, the only reason I learned FORTRAN was so I could lift the algorithms from old FORTRAN code & parse them into Java or C++.
I’m very much an Object-Oriented kinda guy.
If by chance you keep the Judge, either store it outside Cali or be very very careful who you show it to; it’s a prohibited short-barreled shotgun under Cali Penal Code. Unless by chance it’s a Rossi Circuit Judge; that’s legal!
See: http://www.hoffmang.com/firearms/Sacramento-PD-Bulletin-Circuit-Judge-2011-03-31.pdf
The list of handguns that you can buy or sell in CA is here: http://certguns.doj.ca.gov/
I’m not sure about the laws concerning bringing handguns you already own into the state with you. I think you can keep them, but expect to be told that you will have to register them. There is currently no long gun registration in CA. However EBRs and 50 cals are retricted or prohibited.
I also would suggest that you move the safe and keep the guns. Irvine is a pretty nice area, but it is in the LA basin, and you never know when someone or something is going to stir up that cesspool.
Note most single dwelling residences in CA are slab and frame construction because it’s fairly earth quake tolerant. The few holes in the concrete you will need to anchor a safe, can be patched when you move.
Congrats on the new job, and welcome to the front lines of the war against your right to keep and bear arms.
You can build your own AR in CA, or just buy a S&W M&P model now that the whole gray-list AR-receiver thing is blown wide-open enough to drive a S&W truck through.
Irvine is kinda warm, but there’s a CMP club down in Brea just 20-minutes away(Brea Rifle & Pistol Club, Lytle Creek, http://www.brearifleandpistolclub.org), and a M1 Garand is a fun CA-legal rifle and you can get one if you just shoot for score. Enjoy the beach!
I’m in Seattle and would be potentially interested in either the Glenfield or the Bursa, if they end up for sale.
Congrats on the new job! I did a bunch of structural analysis programming as a research assistant in college. (This is before I got lured away to the green, halcyon fields of embedded and handheld device programming.) Definitely wouldn’t mind getting into the more mathematical / modeling oriented programming some day.
Well, please to remember that California could turn into a shitstorm at any given moment. Fires, earthquake, floods, civil disorder, etc. A REAL GOOD bug-out bag(s) would be in order for everybody in the family. And the prospects of Kalipornia being forced into the “shall issue” world are good. There are several forums on concealed carry and the everchanging laws over there. And the state WILL go bankrupt shortly.
Good luck and keep the powder dry.
Irvine is my neck of the woods. I could use the company, but I can’t say it’s good for a gunny in any way.
At least you’ll be behind the orange curtain. Orage County is known as the last bastion (close enough) of SoCal conservatism. Ask David for my contact info if you feel so inclined.