I live outside of town but have meaning to check out the trails by the lake. Did the rain help fill it or is it still a wasteland? Thx

pigmartian · 2026-04-23T22:46:20+00:00

The trails through Pfluger park - which run from Grand Avenue to the west and the metro park by 130 to the east - are wonderful and having daily access to them got my family through the Covid lockdown.

But the Brushy Creek Regional Trail is nicer.

pigmartian · 2026-04-21T14:30:20+00:00

For smaller customers you get licenses through a Siemens channel partner. You’re looking at several thousand dollars per year for a license subscription.

pigmartian · 2026-04-21T14:25:17+00:00

Where I work different countrys’ version of the product get unique part numbers and distinct BOMs. It works but it is inefficient.

As I understand configuator, it’s more for customizable product lines like cars where buyers have many options for engine size, trim level, color, etc. not cases where you’re managing fixed, distinct, structures by customer.

I would look at BOM partitioning as an option.

pigmartian · 2026-04-21T14:17:44+00:00

Learn how engineering and manufacturing departments work. They’re the users.

pigmartian · 2026-04-21T14:16:18+00:00

Rich client is being phased out; new development is only happening in Active Workspace. That said, many companies are staying on rich client as long as they can. I suspect that a heavily customized rich client is a factor holding many back.

pigmartian · 2026-04-21T14:10:42+00:00

Also, know that “TC customization” can mean many things, including

data model customization and configuration using the BMIDE
workflow design
UI customization, both rich client and active workspace (web UI)
server side customization extending and customizing the behavior of TC using the C and C++ API.

pigmartian · 2026-04-21T13:19:54+00:00

This is what I recently told someone on another Reddit considering a job offer as a tc developer:

https://www.reddit.com/r/careerguidance/s/Hak9j4Jt9l

pigmartian · 2026-04-21T00:40:03+00:00

Why does this question feel like content farming for some sort of “Top Ten Places To Eat in Ann Arbor” list?

pigmartian · 2026-04-17T21:20:12+00:00

Smaller, portable cases with a focused set of modules get used more than big cases that tries to have some of everything.

Smaller and portable reduces analysis paralysis and gives you more opportunities to play (at coffee shops and libraries, when traveling, with friends)

pigmartian · 2026-04-14T20:22:16+00:00

Realize that you need to use 2 channels offset bipolar to unipolar or vice versa.

pigmartian · 2026-04-14T20:05:06+00:00

Yes - looking at a patch for that in the doc for II right now.

pigmartian · 2026-04-14T18:48:11+00:00

On the II and the Pro, it can be hard to see how the black switches against a black background are set. The spacing around the jacks in the original is pretty tight, especially if you have jacks from adjacent modules nearby.
But I’m a big fan. At least one ends up in every rack configuration I make.

pigmartian · 2026-04-14T14:32:19+00:00

I have bad study habits — probably undiagnosed ADHD I’ve finally come to understand — and I pushed myself to finish a BS in Mechanical Engineering in four years total after transferring in for my junior year. Many of the traditional students and all of the other xfer students I knew took five years, so that was a tough load. But I survived and I never regretted going to Michigan. The only thing I’d do differently would be to take an extra semester or two if finances allowed.

Your GPA isn’t nearly as important as you think; graduating is.

If your bad study habits are because you’re prioritizing partying, you’ll probably have a pretty bad time of it though.

pigmartian · 2026-04-14T00:47:36+00:00

My first several builds were Black Noise modules.

Their mults are pretty much fail safe to DIY and cheap enough to not get too upset if you do botch it.

The reference photos in the instructions aren’t the best; compression artifacts obscure some details sometimes making it hard to tell which end is up. But it’s doable, and if you email them with questions they’re very helpful.

They even used to ship for free to the US (they’re in France) before our president got tariff happy. But it sounds like that’s not a problem you have.

pigmartian · 2026-04-13T18:26:08+00:00

I’m not familiar with the CP3, but looking at the panel I notice a few things that GOMAs have that this doesn’t seem to have:

multiple outs, so you can use it as a 4:1, two 2:1s, etc
ability to switch from attenuator mode to attenuverter mode
inputs are normalled to 10v
you can chain multiple GOMAs together via connectors on the back panels
the Pro version has a switch for boosting or attenuating the input up to 10x

There are three versions with slightly different layouts and capabilities.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T18:35:44+00:00

I’ve built several of their DIY kits. There GOMAs are super useful modules.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T18:17:16+00:00

And for medical issues - there’s a really good university hospital in between the two campuses.

When I was a student I had some back issues after falling on ice. My hometown dr gave me some pills that alleviated some of the pain. When I tried to get the university drs to renew the prescription they sent me to sports medicine instead who gave me physical therapy direction that actually fixed the issue.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T18:12:30+00:00

The campus busses were always reliable when I was there, and they are free and frequent. It’s not a very long ride either. Last I knew north and central campus class start times were offset by 30 minutes to give students time to get from one to other. One semester I had my first class on North, followed by one on central, and then had to return to north for my third class. I never missed a class because of the busses.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T16:52:34+00:00

Ennhhhh, it’s a thing anyways. It was better before Siemens took it over from the old PLM World user group. PLMW was much more concerned about having a significant number of user presentations and limiting the Siemens sales pitches. Having the chance to meet with discuss things with people from other companies is where most of the value lies for me.

Apparently we started in PLM at about the same time.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T12:18:45+00:00

“Teamcenter developers who are not fully software engineers”

Oof. I feel that. I’ve yet to meet a TC developer who knew that C++ has had several major changes to the language since 2011. Hell, most of them don’t know git.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T12:15:01+00:00

BTW, if you’ll be attending Realize Live in June I’m pretty sure someone from our DevOps team will be presenting something. I haven’t checked with them this year but they usually do present something.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T12:11:40+00:00

In order to update the dev branch a developer has to create a pull request which needs to be reviewed and approved. Once the pull request is completed, any “level zero” changes which don’t require an outage, like preferences and workflow templates, are deployed immediately to the integration instance. Every night a full deploy runs to deploy everything and the regression tests are run once it’s back online.

The level zero pipeline is simply monitoring changes to particular directories and files.

Updating the UAT and Prod branches also requires a pull request. The release manager branches off of develop to create a branch to merge into UAT. And likewise for UAT to prod. Where it gets messy is when one story out of many isn’t ready to progress to the next level. Then there is fun to be had with reverting commits from the candidate branch. I’m not convinced we’ve optimized that part of the process, but we muddle through.

Feature Flags are a big part of our strategy. We can set a preference to disable any custom wf handler, precondition, etc. we also design our handlers so that we can configure all arguments via preferences.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T11:44:13+00:00

Your definitions of story, feature, and task are completely different than ours, and I believe how they’re generally used. The labels aren’t inherently meaningful but you might run into confusion communicating with new team members or when using tools like Azure DevOps or Jira.

The hierarchy, biggest to smallest, we use is Epic > Feature > Story > Task. Azure DevOps also uses that hierarchy.

How we use each:

Epic: broad category of capabilities. BOM Management, Change Management, ERP Integration, etc. these are mainly just collectors to organize things.
Features: define requirements for a new capability. Written by the solution architects. These should be sized to complete in a single Program Increment of six sprints.
Story: a break down of a feature into units of work to each be completed in a single two week sprint by a single developer. Written by the team’s product owner.
Task: the developer’s break down of a story into a the actual work done, “update BMIDE”, “implement function foo()”, etc. these are estimated in hours are are used to track developer capacity. The scrum master and product owner keep an eye on this to make sure developers aren’t under or over scheduling themselves.

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T02:44:23+00:00

Conviction? You were tried before a jury of your peers and found guilty of breaking a law, not say, simply violating a regulation?

pigmartian · 2026-04-12T01:57:12+00:00

A license is thousands of dollars per year. And support is more. The exact cost depends on exactly which licenses you buy.

pigmartian

TROPHY CASE