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Kowalski Heat Treating News, Notes, and Valuable Information for Anyone Trying to Keep Their Metals & Alloys Hard, Flat, Straight or Sharp

Just in time.

November 20, 2020/0 Comments/in Friday Afternoon, Time, Trivia /by Steve Kowalski

It’s been a long week, take some time, read on.

Time. It just keeps ticking along. Over the weekend I was watching a couple of great NFL football games and was all caught up with the time clock. Last-minute heroics seem to be just part of the game these days. Managing the clock. Running the clock down. Taking a knee to end the game. It’s action-packed and keeps us on the edge of our seats. It got me to thinking about my awesome team at KHT, and how we manage our time. We estimate time for jobs, track delivery times and processing times, making sure your PIA (Pain in the @%$) Jobs! come out just right – time after time. Time is so important to how we live too – we do things at a specific time, “later on”, “suddenly”, “after a while”, or even “at the same time”. We use a timer to cook, the alarm to wake us up, and our stopwatch to end an event or finish a run. When a dear friend calls, we “make time” or disappoint them that we’re “out of time”. Today marks a special anniversary of Willard Bundy, the inventor of the time clock – way back in 1888. So, take a few minutes to “punch in”, gather up some trivia, and share with your co-workers during your next zoom chat before you (punch) log out. Thanks to ontheclock.com, Wikipedia, and YouTube for the info and amazing music videos. Enjoy!

If you “have time”, here are some fun songs to play while reading our post – and it’s ok to sing out loud – cause they are awesome!
The Doors – Love Me Two Times
Pink Floyd – Time
The Zombies – Time of the Season
Cindy Lauper – Time After Time
Chicago – Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?
Jim Croche – Time In A Bottle

The sundial represents the first relatively accurate method of tracking the time of day. The earliest sundials can be traced back to 1500 BC from ancient Babylonian and Egyptian astronomy. Before humans could track time, workers were most likely paid by the day.
In Roman times, soldiers were paid a “salarium” or payment to buy salt, which was used as currency and was considered essential for living in the time. Along with the word salary (so that’s where it came from), many experts believe these roman origins are where the phrase “worth his salt,” comes from. (now you know!)
From Ancient Rome through the Second Industrial Revolution in 1930, the term salary referred to payment for services. In this case, a salary could mean a flat fee for work or hourly compensation. It wasn’t until the 1800s that employers started differentiating between flat pay and an hourly rate for work.
In the late 1800’s, while unions were protesting and lawmakers were debating working conditions, one man in New York was tinkering away in his jewelry shop. Willard Legrand Bundy, born and raised in Cayuga County, New York, opened a jewelry store and used his trade to develop multiple inventions, many of which are still used today. Bundy holds patents for multiple cash registers and calculating machines, but he is known for inventing the employee time clock. The patent for his time recorder was approved on November 20, 1888 and Bundy started a business manufacturing machines that would record when employees would clock in and clock out of work. A year later his brother, Harlow Bundy, organized the Bundy Manufacturing Company, and began mass-producing time clocks. (I love when families work together!!)
In 1889, the Bundy Manufacturing Recording Company opened in Binghamton with eight employees and $150,000 in capital. By 1898, the company expanded to 140 skilled workers and had sold more than 9,000 Bundy Time Recorders. These machines were sold as a solution for “vexatious questions of recording employee time.”
In the following years, as the time clock became commonplace in the American workplace, the Bundy Manufacturing Company merged with various other companies. It eventually became the International Time Recorder Company (ITR). In 1911, this business was incorporated in New York State as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which was the forerunner of IBM (International Business Machines Corporation)… (now you know!)
As manual punch clocks grew more common in the American workplace and across the world, not much changed throughout the mid-1900s. However, a few circles started to buzz about special calculating machines called computers and how they could revolutionize our society.
When computers started showing up in every home and business, the market expanded from a few select companies to millions of people across America. The software industry changed dramatically to the creation of tools sold for small amounts to large audiences, a model most SaaS companies still follow today. As the market for software evolved, developers created time clock tools that companies could buy and install on their computers, moving employee time tracking out of history and into its digital form.
One man, in particular, created an invention which many small businesses use today to balance their books and employee time sheets. Richard Mattessich is credited as the pioneer of the electronic spreadsheet, which allowed other develops to create some of the first mainstream accounting tools.
In 1978, Harvard Business School students Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston developed an interactive visible calculator called VisiCalc that could be used on personal computers. This way, anyone who had this computer and this program about track data and manipulate it for their accounting and analytical needs. While paper spreadsheets have been around for centuries, the digital option made it easy for accountants to enter data and have it calculated automatically.
In 1991, computer programmer Tim Berners-Lee debuted the World Wide Web. This “web of information,” was meant to do more than send files. It was supposed to provide information to people and connect data from all over the world.
Over the next decade, the Internet would continue to grow. Dial-up modems became the background noise of homes, more companies would start using computer technology, and people started to share information by a communication tool called “e-mail.” With these changes in technology, employee time tracking evolved, too. Microchips and employee identification cards meant team members could swipe in instead of physically placing a punch card into a machine. In some companies, employees could even clock in via computer.
The invention of the internet meant that employees could clock in online from their own devices instead of downloading software or using hardware in the employee break room. As long as team members had access to the web, they could clock in or out. This is all so convenient today with our current “at home” workforces.
This opened the door for remote workers to check in wherever they are — whether they are working from home or calling in from a villa in Aspen. In 2018 about 70 percent of workers reported working remotely at least one day per week – (today that’s likely about 99%).
Modern technology continues to change how we work, but a few things remain the same – such as employee time tracking as long as people get paid by the hour. Employee time tracking is certainly transitioning, especially as more employers embrace BYOD (bring your own device) culture and mobile time management, but the core of the employee time clock will remain the same.
With the mass market proliferation of mobile devices (smart phones, handheld devices), new types of self-calculating time tracking systems have been invented which allow a mobile workforce – such as painting companies, truckers and construction companies – to track employees ‘on’ and ‘off’ hours. This is generally accomplished through either a mobile application, or an IVR based phone call in system. Using a mobile device allows enterprises to better validate that their employees or suppliers are physically ‘clocking in’ at a specific location using the GPS functionality of a mobile phone for extra validation.
Biometric time clocks are a feature of more advanced time and attendance systems. Rather than using a key, code or chip to identify the user, they rely on a unique attribute of the user, such as a handprint, fingerprint, finger vein, palm vein, facial recognition, iris or retina. The user will have their attribute scanned into the system. Biometric readers are often used in conjunction with an access control system, granting the user access to a building, and at the same time clocking them in recording the time and date. These systems also attempt to cut down on “buddy clocking” or ghost employees’, where additional identities are added to payroll but don’t exist.
Wonder what the future holds … I guess time will tell. (sorry, I had too…)

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DO YOU LIKE CONTESTS?
Me, too.
As you may know the Kowalski Heat Treating logo finds its way
into the visuals of my Friday posts.
I. Love. My. Logo.
One week there could be three logos.
The next week there could be 15 logos.
And sometimes the logo is very small or just a partial logo showing.
But there are always logos in some of the pictures.
So, I challenge you, my beloved readers, to count them and send me a
quick email with the total number of logos in the Friday post.
On the following Tuesday I’ll pick a winner from the correct answers
and send that lucky person some great KHT swag.
So, start counting and good luck!
Oh, and the logos at the very top header don’t count.
Got it? Good. :-))))
Have fun!!

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Nostalgia or the Future

November 13, 2020/0 Comments/in Food, Friday Afternoon, TV Dinners, Uncategorized /by Steve Kowalski

I admit, I’ll eat anything. And these babies are no exception. Never met a frozen dinner I didn’t like.

Growing up my Mom was simply amazing. 18 kids (yep that’s right) all needed to be fed, bathed, clothed, schooled, nurtured and loved. Never complaining – just a constant outpouring of “Mom love.” I was reading an article the other day, and it sent me back to one of my favorite Mom treats as a kid …TV dinners. Those amazing inventions of meat, gravy, veggies and dessert, all organized into a foil plate. Every once in a while, as a treat, we got to use our folding TV tables, (remember those great inventions) and watch our favorite shows while eating dinner! I can remember later on having those thin rectangular boxes stacked up in the freezer with the name displayed (having to turn my head sideways to read which one of them I wanted next!) And I have to admit it – to this day, I still love the taste of them – the standard pre-packed Swanson specials, like turkey and stuffing, along with the multitude of frozen goodies we can find at the grocery store. With the advances in freezers, packaging and processing, there are so many things we can find in the frozen food aisle – including international foods. Special thanks to Smithsonian and Wikipedia for the info and YouTube for the video. Enjoy the trip down memory lane for those of you who can relate – and shoot me a message as to your personal favorite. YUM!!

In 1925, the Brooklyn-born entrepreneur Clarence Birdseye invented a machine for freezing packaged fish that would revolutionize the storage and preparation of food. Maxson Food Systems of Long Island used Birdseye’s technology, the double-belt freezer, to sell the first complete frozen dinners to airlines in 1945.
Plans to offer those meals in supermarkets were canceled after the death of the company’s founder, William L. Maxson. Ultimately, it was the Swanson company that transformed how Americans ate dinner – and it all came about, the story goes, because of Thanksgiving turkey.
According to the most widely accepted account, a Swanson salesman named Gerry Thomas conceived the company’s frozen dinners in late 1953 when he saw that the company had 260 tons of frozen turkey left over after Thanksgiving, sitting in ten refrigerated railroad cars. (The train’s refrigeration worked only when the cars were moving, so Swanson had the trains travel back and forth between its Nebraska headquarters and the East Coast “until panicked executives could figure out what to do”). Thomas had the idea to add other holiday staples such as cornbread stuffing and sweet potatoes, and to serve them alongside the bird in frozen, partitioned aluminum trays designed to be heated in the oven.
Betty Cronin, Swanson’s bacteriologist, helped the meals succeed with her research into how to heat the meat and vegetables at the same time while killing any food-borne germs. Her history is a bit different – saying that Gilbert and Clarke Swanson, sons of company founder Carl Swanson, came up with the idea for the frozen-meal-on-a-tray. Whoever provided the spark, this new American convenience was a commercial triumph.
In 1954, the first full year of production, Swanson sold ten million trays. Banquet Foods and Morton Frozen Foods soon brought out their own offerings, winning over more and more middle-class households across the country. Initially called “Strato-Plates,” America was introduced to its “TV dinner” at a time when the concept was guaranteed to be lucrative: As millions of women entered the workforce in the early 1950s, Mom was no longer always at home to cook elaborate meals—but now the question of what to eat for dinner had a prepared answer.
Frustrated, some men wrote angry letters to the Swanson company complaining about the loss of home-cooked meals. But for most, TV dinners were just the ticket. Pop them in the oven, and 25 minutes later, you could have a full supper while enjoying the new national pastime: television. The top shows in ’55 were The $64,000 Question, I Love Lucy and The Ed Sullivan Show… (can you remember the name of the mouse puppet on the show?)
In 1950, only 9 percent of U.S. households had television sets—but by 1955, the number had risen to more than 64 percent, and by 1960, to more than 87 percent. Swanson took full advantage of this trend, with TV advertisements that depicted elegant, modern women serving these novel meals to their families, or enjoying one themselves. “The best fried chicken I know comes with a TV dinner,” Barbra Streisand told the New Yorker in 1962.
By the 1970s, competition among the frozen food giants spurred some menu innovation, including such questionable options as Swanson’s take on a “Polynesian Style Dinner,” which doesn’t resemble any meal you will see in Polynesia. Tastemakers, of course, sniffed, like the New York Times food critic who observed that TV dinner consumers had no taste, but later found another niche audience in dieters, who were glad for the built-in portion control.
With the help of Pittsburg Steelers “Mean Joe Green”, Hungry Man dinners were introduced – for those with larger appetites – (made me smile J)
The next big breakthrough came in 1986, with the Campbell Soup Company’s invention of microwave-safe trays, which cut meal preparation to mere minutes. Convenience food was now too convenient for some diners, as one columnist lamented: “Progress is wonderful, but I will still miss those steaming, crinkly aluminum TV trays.”
The production process of TV dinners is highly automated and undergoes three major steps – food preparation, tray loading, and freezing. During food preparation, vegetables and fruits are usually placed on a movable belt and washed, then are placed into a container to be steamed or boiled for 1–3 minutes. This process is referred to as blanching and is used as a method to destroy enzymes in the food that can cause chemical changes negatively affecting overall flavor and color of the fruit and vegetables. As for meats, prior to cooking, they are trimmed of fat and cut into proper sizes. Fish is usually cleaned and cut into fillets, and poultry is usually washed thoroughly and dressed.
Meats are then seasoned, placed on trays, and are cooked in an oven for a predetermined amount of time. After all the food is ready to be packaged, it is sent to the filling lines. The food is placed in its compartments as the trays pass under numerous filling machines; to ensure that every packaged dinner gets an equal amount of food, the filling devices are strictly regulated.
The food undergoes a process of cryogenic freezing with liquid nitrogen. After the food is placed on the conveyor belt, it is sprayed with liquid nitrogen that boils on contact with the freezing food. This method of flash-freezing fresh foods is used to retain natural quality of the food. When the food is chilled through cryogenic freezing, small ice crystals are formed throughout the food that, in theory, can preserve the food indefinitely if stored safely.
Cryogenic freezing is widely used as it is a method for rapid freezing, requires almost no dehydration, excludes oxygen thus decreasing oxidative spoilage, and causes less damage to individual freezing pieces. Due to the fact that the cost of operating cryogenic freezing is high, it is commonly used for high-value food products such as TV dinners, which is a $4.5 billion industry a year that is continuing to grow with the constant introduction of new technology.
Following this, the dinners are either covered with aluminum foil or paper, and the product is tightly packed with a partial vacuum created to ensure no evaporation takes place that can cause the food to dry out. Then the packaged dinners are placed in a refrigerated storage facility, transported by refrigerated truck, and stored in the grocer’s freezer. TV dinners prepared with the aforementioned steps—that is, frozen and packaged properly—can remain in near-perfect condition for a long time, so long as they are stored at -18 °C during shipping and storage.
This past year, approximately 130 million Americans consumed a TV dinner.
With restaurants closed during Covid-19, Americans are again snapping up frozen meals, spending nearly 50 percent more on them in April 2020 over April 2019, says the American Frozen Food Institute. Specialty stores like Williams Sonoma now stock gourmet TV dinners. Ipsa Provisions, a high-end frozen-food company launched this past February in New York, specializes in “artisanal frozen dishes for a civilized meal any night of the week”—a slogan right out of the 1950s. Restaurants from Detroit to Colorado Springs to Los Angeles are offering frozen versions of their dishes for carryout, a practice that some experts predict will continue beyond the pandemic.

VIDEO: Make your own TV dinner!
Swanson 1958 commercial. Wow!

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DO YOU LIKE CONTESTS?
Me, too.
As you may know the Kowalski Heat Treating logo finds its way
into the visuals of my Friday posts.
I. Love. My. Logo.
One week there could be three logos.
The next week there could be 15 logos.
And sometimes the logo is very small or just a partial logo showing.
But there are always logos in some of the pictures.
So, I challenge you, my beloved readers, to count them and send me a
quick email with the total number of logos in the Friday post.
On the following Tuesday I’ll pick a winner from the correct answers
and send that lucky person some great KHT swag.
So, start counting and good luck!
Oh, and the logos at the very top header don’t count.
Got it? Good. :-))))
Have fun!!

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And a One, And a Two…

November 6, 2020/0 Comments/in Counting, Friday Afternoon, numbers, Trillion, Trivia /by Steve Kowalski

There is nothing we do that doesn’t require counting somehow. You can count on that. And you can count on me to brighten your Friday afternoons. Relax, and count your blessings. :))

What a week. With all the effort, time and money that went into the election, we find ourselves relying on a basic human skill – something that goes back thousands and thousands of years … counting. It’s something that is so natural, we seldom think about its origins or how we learned to count in the first place. As a youngster, I was privileged to watch Sesame Street, and enjoy one of my favorite characters, The Count. Putting numbers to music was brilliant, and I still enjoy the songs and the number of the day especially with my granddaughter. There are expressions we use here at KHT all the time, when it comes to solving your PIA (pain in the @%$) Jobs! – like “you can count on me”, “you can count on it”. Many of us say “count me in/out” and “down for the count”. We “count our calories”, “lose count” and know “it’s the thought that counts”. I’m often “counting my blessings” when I think of my wife, children, grandkids, friends, vendors and amazing customers and the gang here at KHT. I’m also blessed to have married a counting savant. Jackie’s natural abilities astound me, as she can organize numbers and things WAY better than I can even imagine – (if you could see my sock drawer I might have a chance!). Here’s some history and trivia – and a song from The Count – enjoy! Special thanks to Wikipedia and transom.org for the info.

Counting is the process of determining the number of elements of a finite set of objects. The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a (mental or spoken) counter by a unit for every element of the set, in some order, while marking (or displacing) those elements to avoid visiting the same element more than once, until no unmarked elements are left; if the counter was set to one after the first object, the value after visiting the final object gives the desired number of elements. The related term enumeration refers to uniquely identifying the elements of a finite (combinatorial) set or infinite set by assigning a number to each element. (how’s that for an explanation!)
Counting sometimes involves numbers other than one; for example, when counting money, counting out change, “counting by twos” (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, …), or “counting by fives” (5, 10, 15, 20, 25, …).
There is archaeological evidence suggesting that humans have been counting for at least 50,000 years. Counting was primarily used by ancient cultures to keep track of social and economic data such as the number of group members, prey animals, property, or debts (that is, accountancy). Notched bones have been found in the Border Caves in South Africa that may suggest that the concept of counting was known to humans as far back as 44,000 BCE. The development of counting led to the development of mathematical notation, numeral systems, and writing.
Counting can also be in the form of tally marks, making a mark for each number and then counting all of the marks when done tallying. This is useful when counting objects over time, such as the number of times something occurs during the course of a day.
Tallying is base 1 counting; normal counting is done in base 10. Computers use base 2 counting (0s and 1s).
Counting can also be in the form of finger counting, especially when counting small numbers. This is often used by children to facilitate counting and simple mathematical operations. Finger-counting uses unary notation (one finger = one unit) and is thus limited to counting 10 (unless you start in with your toes). Older finger counting used the four fingers and the three bones in each finger (phalanges) to count to the number twelve. Other hand-gesture systems are also in use, for example the Chinese system by which one can count to 10 using only gestures of one hand. By using finger binary (base 2 counting), it is possible to keep a finger count up to 1023 = 210 − 1. This explanation makes me tired!
Various devices can also be used to facilitate counting, such as hand tally counters and abacuses. Computers at about 205 million per second. If the last value in the for loop is changed to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (the largest value that a 64 bit ulong can hold), this loop would take about 89,984,117,433 seconds which is about 1,041,483 days or 2,853 years! (would someone please call Jackie!)
Inclusive counting is usually encountered when dealing with time in the Romance languages. In exclusive counting languages such as English, when counting “8” days from Sunday, Monday will be day 1, Tuesday day 2, and the following Monday will be the eighth day. When counting “inclusively,” the Sunday (the start day) will be day 1 and therefore the following Sunday will be the eighth day. For example, the French phrase for “fortnight” is quinzaine (15 [days]), and similar words are present in Greek (δεκαπενθήμερο, dekapenthímero), Spanish (quincena) and Portuguese (quinzena). In contrast, the English word “fortnight” itself derives from “a fourteen-night”, as the archaic “sennight” does from “a seven-night”.
Names based on inclusive counting appear in other calendars as well: in the Roman calendar the nones (meaning “nine”) is 8 days before the ides; and in the Christian calendar Quinquagesima (meaning 50) is 49 days before Easter Sunday.
Musical terminology also uses inclusive counting of intervals between notes of the standard scale: going up one note is a second interval, going up two notes is a third interval, etc., and going up seven notes is an octave.
Learning to count is an important educational/developmental milestone in most cultures of the world, but some cultures in Amazonia and the Australian Outback do not count, and their languages do not have number words. (I think this is where the expression came: “be home before the street lights come on”)
Many children at just 2 years of age have some skill in reciting the count list (that is, saying “one, two, three, …”). They can also answer questions of ordinality for small numbers, for example, “What comes after three?”. They can even be skilled at pointing to each object in a set and reciting the words one after another. This leads many parents and educators to the conclusion that the child knows how to use counting to determine the size of a set. Research suggests that it takes about a year after learning these skills for a child to understand what they mean and why the procedures are performed
Counting takes longer than you think. To count to a trillion, a computer can get to one billion (9 zeros) rather fast – 15 seconds. But to get to one trillion (12 zeros) – the difference is amazing – 4 hours and 10 minutes.
If you love numbers, here’s some great trivia

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DO YOU LIKE CONTESTS?
Me, too.
As you may know the Kowalski Heat Treating logo finds its way
into the visuals of my Friday posts.
I. Love. My. Logo.
One week there could be three logos.
The next week there could be 15 logos.
And sometimes the logo is very small or just a partial logo showing.
But there are always logos in some of the pictures.
So, I challenge you, my beloved readers, to count them and send me
a quick email with the total number of logos in the Friday post.
On the following Tuesday I’ll pick a winner from the correct answers
and send that lucky person some great KHT swag.
So, start counting and good luck!
Oh, and the logos at the very top header don’t count.
Got it? Good. :-))))
Have fun!!

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