20 years old already?

Two days ago the 20th anniversary edition DVD of the movie Witness was released. I picked up my copy tonight, not only because I'm a Harrison Ford fan but because this is such an elegant movie for a "police - crime" drama. The middle part of the movie where the action is in Amish country is fascinating. From what little I know about Amish in the US, I think this movie portrays that culture very accurately. I think it is a very powerful story and one of Harrison Ford's best roles in a career filled with them.

One thing I like about anniversary release DVDs is the documentary stuff that ususally comes with it. That was one of my reasons for buying the movie again. The other is converting my movie library from VHS to DVD (a slow process) and selling the VHS tapes (once I buy the DVD) to try and recoup some of my investment. With Witness, there is a five part documentary on the making of the film with recent interviews done by the cast, producer and director reflecting on the experience.

Next Tuesday the 15th Anniversary DVD of Pretty Woman will be released. Another must have sure to be filled with lots of extras.

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Regarding work, the last few days have been frustrating to say the least. On Tuesday we set up to run a certain part with a larger barrel. The last time we finished using this barrel I started to clean it - back in June. Then I got busy and the barrel sat for more than two months only partway cleaned. So I had to reclean it last week. I thoight it was clean. It looked clean. But it wasn't as the parts I ran on Wednesday were brown and full of particulates. These parts were so bad that we were not able to save anything and shut down early so that a) I could re-clean the equipment today and b) so that we wouldn't waste excess material, which is very expensive. As it turned out we wasted about 500g or about $1000 of material on purges and 73 start up shots.

I spent a good part of the day cleaning the barrel again only to find out in the late afternoon that this particular piece of equipment was taken out of active use about three years ago for some problem. Somehow the thing got put back in use when it shouldn't have. And there was a pristine looking barrel sitting right there on the shelf that I had to swap out with the old one. This meant that I had to take the old one apart, replace the barrel and put it back together again. What a pain in the %&^$*$$##*-. That also meant that I have to re-clean all of the parts that go with it - screw, screw tip, nozzle and nozzle body. Very time consuming. The goal is to run it again on Monday.

The good news in all of this is that we have two 1,200 piece runs to make of this part. These runs were originally separated by several weeks on the production schedule. I convinced my boss to let me run them on consecutive days to avoid extra work in breaking down and setting up the machine once instead of twice. The bad news is that once I run these parts, the whole thing has to be cleaned again since we only use this larger barrel for two parts that we make and we don't make them all that often.

Oh well, at least tomorrow is only a four hour workday.