An Update

Here’s what’s happened recently:

• My laptop broke (the biggest reason I’ve been writing here less). I had a bad stick of RAM which, I think, corrupted a system file. I replaced the RAM, but it still won’t boot without a BSOD, so I need to grab my files and reformat. Maybe I’ll try Ubuntu again.
• I have been keeping up with my reading resolution, just haven’t been posting the reviews. Cut me some slack, I haven’t had a working laptop!
• A friend just told me “I love your women stories”. I’m not sure what she meant, or if that’s a good thing, but I do have a lot of them. And I got a few more this weekend.
• Sid (a roommate) and Lacy got married on Saturday! Congrats you two! I’ll certainly miss Sid’s constant antics and Lacy’s frequent visits (she just lived a few houses down). Hopefully we still see each other often!
• Tristan (another roommate) and I walked down I-35 on Sunday while traffic was stopped because of an accident ahead. It was quite the experience.
• Slowly but surely, I’m starting to teach more in small group. Dieudonne is leaving in August, and our small group will continue. I’m learning how to lead better, with a lot of grace from the folks in our group.
• I’ve started a healthy questioning of  my engineering career. In a bid to avoid being limited by my expectations, I’m starting to explore what music production would entail.
• My (final) roommate Brian buzzed my head a few weeks ago. Don’t worry, I asked him to 🙂
• The Trinona is coming in less than two weeks! Let’s just say that my training regime hasn’t looked too different from last year.
• After asking how to cancel my Comcast account, they gave me faster service for $4/month less than what I was paying with my old promotion. But it’s $30/month less than what they wanted to charge me. Internet pricing is such a scam.
• I’m trying to convince Travis to move in with us. Sid being moved out, Tristan out traveling for work, and Brian having an opposite schedule really makes for a lonely house sometimes.
• Yardwork is ever looming…

So there you have it, the happening world of Scott.

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What I do at work

I do a number of things, so I’ll break it down a little:
1) I do testing: we make changes to a design or modify some part and then need to figure out how it changed things. So we test the important stuff, like how much noise is there in our system (radio frequency noise, I can explain more if you want me to). Our goal is to get our wireless radio working well enough to have reliable data transfer between the hearing aid and the programmer, between the hearing aid and another hearing aid, and between the hearing aid and a remote (to control the audio modes of the hearing aid).

2) I interpret the results of testing: We get a bunch of data and then we need to make decisions about it. First we need to figure out what the data is telling us, so often we make a bunch of graphs in excel or matlab (a math program) that make it easier to see trends.

3) I write code: this is not really part of my job, but I want to be prepared in case I ever do need to write code. So I’m learning a few programming languages (AutoHotKey and Python) in the hopes that I will be able to apply this knowledge to some problem I may have in the future. Most of the code I am trying to figure out will make doing numbers 1 and 2 a lot easier 🙂

4) I go to meetings: enough said

5) other stuff: I manage the website that my group is supposed to use (but doesn’t) to communicate with each other and store documents. I’ll talk about my observations of our system (the hearing aid+wireless stuff) with folks to get a better understanding of how everything works. that’s all i care to think of right now

Numbers 1 and 2 are the more important things that I do. Learning code is really boring when you don’t have some problem you’re trying to solve with it, so that part is sometimes exciting sometimes not. And I’m supposed to start helping another guy do work with antennas, which is really tough but really interesting.