Hooo man, is having a Real Job different from… not.
I started my tenure at Sea Bird Electronics today, and am continually bewildered and impressed by all the things that it takes to make a Real Deal Business. Wow.
(Krakow Poland was neat as well, but I’m just too beat to go into it now. Later. This getting up at 6 to be at work on time is bullshit!)
On the first of July, my Dad comes to Portland/Seattle for some visiting and a folk music festival, along with of course I’ll be coming. After that, on Monday July 6th, I start my new job at Sea Bird Electronics and turn back into a working stiff.
So… um… crap, this is my chance to travel!
So Krakow Poland it is, ‘cuz why not? It was that or Istanbul Turkey, and I basically flipped a coin.
So, anybody been there? What should I make sure to see and do?
The short list:
Phew!
I’ll soon be the new “Sales/Application Engineer” at Sea Bird Electronics in Bellevue Washington.
They’re the world gold standard for oceanographic sensors of temperature and salinity, the two super-key parameters that seem to drive and be driven by Mysterious Macro Climatological Transport Phenomena, and thus super-important for trying to better understand just what the heck the global climate is doing, and what it will do.
(The ocean has 1000X the heat capacity of the atmosphere, so it has forever been “the elephant in the room” of meteorology.)
Given the supercomputers we have, they’re just needing the right data to be able to look ahead into rainfall predictions and recommend whether Indiana (or Oaxaca or Vietnam or Zambia, etc) should plant corn or beans next year, and why, and when. Atmospheric weather starts in the ocean, and this stuff is life and death for a lot of people, so better to see what’s coming as far ahead as possible.
(To add efficiency one must also add complexity, and the science of oceanography is the complexity in question here.)
What’s interesting is that this company was the first to deliver these sensors pre-calibrated to an almost baroquely exacting standard. I’ve seen their calibration facilties (10X more floor space than where they actually make the things), so I know. It’s like James Bond in there… low-budget fluorescent-lit worn-out-carpet James Bond.
So by being a source for perfectly-calibrated sensors, new scales of partnerships between institutions and governments are being made possible. Before, everybody bought cheap sensors and calibrated them in their own way, so no one trusted the other guy’s data. When the “other guy’s data” is also the “other 80% of the data available”, well that really Balkanized the science in a bad way.
But we’re fixing that. I’ll be helping these institutions figure out which sensors they need for various kinds of science they’re doing, and help them understand how to use it.
And another thing… I’m not coding software! Woohoo! Permanent vacation!
And it’s not weapons either! Get out!
A tear-jerking vignette yesterday as I walked across a public park to a barbecue with my church buddies:
I had driven straight there from my second (!!!) job interview at the surprisingly interesting Sea Bird Electronics in Bellevue WA, and was thus regaled in my rarely-seen “interview costume” of beige J-Crew “fancy pants”, button-down green shirt and black shoes.
I walked past a rather-scruffy group of adults, plus an innocent blonde boy of about five, worse for wear and barbecuing themselves nearby. One of the men called out:
“There’s your daddy, Zach, hahahaha!”
…and the boy looked up at me, and around at the chuckling adults, bewildered… and I slowly figured out what they were teasing him for (not knowing who his Dad is, and by extension never getting to know)… and wanted to cry. Or better yet, punch somebody and adopt him.
Tell your heart that the
fear of suffering is worse
than the suffereing itself.
And no heart has ever
suffered when it goes
in search of its dream
– Paulo Cohelo
Here’s the idea: It’s an electric skateboard with no hand-held controller. Instead, it senses the portion of the rider’s weight on the fore and aft trucks with strain gauges and commands motor current (~= torque) according to the differential between them.
So the trucks (where the wheels go on) are actually electronic scales. It knows which way I’m leaning (toward one end of the board or the other), and accelerates in that direction. That’s pretty much it.
I and the great Frank Schmitt tried to make one of these back in the 20th century when we lived in California. He’s carrying the torch presently, while I fired all of my guns at once on this proof-of-concept.
I came up with some way to belt-drive the wheels, glued the strain gauges (the little brown rectangular thingies) down to some custom trucks, and hacked together an all-analog (!!!) motor controller that used the strain gauge signals to compute a current command and drive an H-bridge power stage accordingly.
Upside down to show the complexity. The big metal box housed the batteries, and the 9-volts were to deliver +/- 18V to the analog motor controller! (I forget what the black box is.)
Closer-up of the back end. I think those are Speed-400 motors, one per wheel, belted to pulleys that I somehow screwed onto the polyurethane wheels. The strain gauges are visible as little brown rectangles on the trucks.
Left of the purple truck piece is the analog-output current sensor, and to the right are the battery/controller current fuses (lot of good they did me).
(I like how the photography came out. Thanks to Mom and Dad's 1967 Nikon!)
My Crap-o-Matic H-bridge power stage for the motors. Notice the SOOT emanating from the second MOSFET! (Power electronics is hard.)
Of course it's an all-analog strain-gauge-informed current-mode DC motor controller. What else could it be?
One Saturday night I finally got it all together at work, turned it on, and I swear to God, good people, that it worked for ten seconds.
Ten seconds.
For ten seconds, it responded to my fore/aft shifts in my CG and motored to get under me.
And then the power stage caught fire.
Sadly, that ends my chapter of the story, because I’m just not that into skateboards anymore. The great Frank Schmitt is making progress a version with just two rolling-pin-style wheels that’ll allow direct-drive motors, which will be very cool. When he updates me I’ll link to it! Go go Frankus!
So get a load of this. I wanted to do some simple playing along to my favorite Oasis and Tears for Fears songs. Play what? Well, I tried guitar classes, but man is guitar hard. So how about a musical keyboard?
I had actually taken a basic piano class across the street from Harvey Mudd at Scripps College (where the girls were), and was indignant to learn how the conventional piano’s “seven-five” (seven white keys, five black keys) layout meant that a C-major chord, while embodying the exact same sequence of half-steps between notes as a B-major chord, for instance, ended up looking very different. Bullcrap!
The sequence of four, and then three, half-steps between the notes in a major chord is an easy concept to learn and understand, but that doesn't mean that all major chords look remotely the same!
The same goes for scales. Playing a C-major scale is easy, but an A-major scale is more complicated, even though the sequence of half-steps is exactly the dingdang same:
Same thing with scales. Even though all major scales are the same series of half-steps, they look very different. Learn one learn them all? Nope!
So how about this. How about a “six-six” keyboard, with six white keys and six black keys per octave? That way, the geometric patterns (and the shape necessarily made by one’s hand) between keys that correspond to half-step interval patterns will be consistent, regardless of where you’re starting from:
Aha, now that's more like it. The same half-step pattern corresponds to the same geometrical pattern between keys, wherever you start from!
Now we’re talking.
What’s weird now is that the “white” keys are no longer always the “natural” (as opposed to “flat” and “sharp”) keys. The C, D and E keys look the same as before, but F, G, A and B are black keys now.
It’s all the same notes, though. All the same notes.
Bingo! I took the brain of a cheap Midiman MIDI controller and figured out how to re-wire it to a new set of key switches. (Now in a storage room at Cornish College of the Arts).
So I got a cheap Midiman keyboard and figured out to wire its brains to a new set of Cherry keyboard keys. I water-jet cut the “white keys” from a sheet of fiberglass panel and glued the black keys down.
In triumph, I sat on the floor in my underwear for an entire Saturday and played along to my favorite songs with the help of some guitar tabs from the internet. The regular geometric pattern of the keys meant that most of the time, when I intuitively reached out and played a chord, I actually got it right, like I’m Elton John! Victory lap!
(As transcribed by yours truly to a note card from the back of his book in the book section of the Brown Elephant thrift store in Wrigleyville, Chicago IL)
Hm.
(Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for some time and is credited with helming one of the biggest corportate turnarounds in human history.)
(RFO == Request For Opinions)
I’ve been doing some traveling lately, to the east coast and to Chicago, and found that I still like it. I’m not 20 anymore, but I can still deal with some hassle and bullshit from time to time and appreciate the surprises and adventure of going to new places and learning stuff.
(And things like WiFi, iPhones and Couchsurfing.com make it so much easier, it ain’t funny.)
So I think about how I could do that as much as possible, or even “move to nowhere” for some years, as I’ve been fantasizing for some time.
And here’s the catch: Books! What about my books!
I can pare my life down to five each of a certain shirt, underwear, pants and shorts. A certain blue blazer and pair of shoes. A MacBook and certain fiddly accessories. That’ll pack my world down to a (waterproof, airline-checkable, shotgun-resistant, rollable, lockable and enviably macho-looking) Pelican 1620 hard case. Great!
But the books! The books! Dangit! I want access to my books!
So how about this. It lets me “dispose” of my books physically without saying goodbye entirely:
It’s a super-simple streamlined business that receives books (and magazines), slices off the bindings, sheet-feeds them into a pack of PDF’s, and emails them back. (’And implements the ~100 non-obvious details that make it real and genuinely useful.) They’re legible on one’s laptop or, even better, on one of those easier-on-the-eyes electronic-ink Kindle thingies.
The books are always destroyed! Bye-bye! That makes the service cheap and fast. Five cents a page? Four? Three? Two?
Services sorta like this exist, but their websites are complicated and crappy (== government work). No one’s really ironed this out to something that’s as slam-wham-bam as it should be, given the assumption (that no one’s ever made) that we’re only doing one-way scanning, and never two way.
My question: Am I the only freak who can see himself using something like this?
Woo! Mister Handsome, that’s me!
Photo credit to the delightful and endearing K____, aka “dotdotdash” on Flickr.
