Posts Tagged ‘rant’

« Newer Entries
Older Entries »
h1

Letting go of old angst

October 21, 2013

Yesterday, I went to this conference, nervous due to my normal social anxiety and uncomfortable with my identity as I sporting a “Press” badge.

The first person I interacted with is the one guy at the whole conference that I’d hoped not to see. Of course.

I’ve never been to this conference but this guy is involved with everything IEEE, at least locally so I was concerned he’d be there. Let me explain why I had hoped to avoid him. Because maybe I’m wrong and I’m finally willing to have someone say “cut the guy some slack” or “let it go”.

My book came out two years ago. Just about that time, I decided to upgrade my membership from IEEE member to IEEE senior member. There was a member upgrade night, to meet senior members who could provide the recommendations necessary for upgrade. Soon after I walked in, I found a guy who said my background and resume were so good, he’d be willing to sponsor me as well as write a recommendation. That meant I got to skip a step. Sweet.

I met another senior member who was willing to write a recommendation.

I wanted a third person because I’m an overachiever (and a big believer in backup plans). Though the organizer (we’ll call him Fred as there will be more about him) said two was enough. Since the process had all gone very quickly and they weren’t busy, Fred offered to look over my application and resume. I handed over my papers.

He made some comments on my resume. They were ok, they didn’t really fit with how I present myself. My resume is targeted toward hiring managers, busy people looking for high level information and probably only willing to drill deeper in a few spots. I was proud it was two pages. While the other recommenders liked my resume as it was, Fred felt strongly that I should submit a longer CV with my application. He had specific suggestions for what I should do.

Happy for the help, I re-added the projects and papers I’d clipped. I made sure my CV showed growth in my careers: college, junior engineer, senior engineer, technical lead, manager, director, business owner. I added descriptions to my juried papers and to my magazine articles. I made sure my book and patents were prominent. It was a lot of bragging. And a lot of pages.

A month passed. While my sponsor came through, the other recommendation writer bailed so I needed to find someone. Since I’d already interacted with Fred, I emailed him. I thanked him for his help, describing the changes I’d made, asked if he’d write the second recommendation for me.

Fred emailed back and suggested more changes. Ooooookaaaay… I’d already put in more work than I’d expected but it seemed silly to stop when another hour of fussing would lead to the (tiny) senior member payoff.

I made the changes he requested. As I did it, though, I wondered if my application was so iffy that I needed to do more highlighting of instances success. But the committee gets a lot of applications and I want to make the choice easy for them (Fred’s reasoning but I bought it), so I made the changes.

I re-sent my packet to Fred. He wanted more changes before he’d write a recommendation.

At this point, my opinion was “to hell with them”. I didn’t know why Fred kept putting up more hurdles, what he found lacking in me.

The bar for senior member status isn’t that high: at least ten years in a related career with definite growth shown over five of those years. These are checkboxes. I suppose there is some subjectivity regarding what growth means but I’d say title changes count. I was actually pretty depressed that my new super-CV couldn’t show that I’d met those requirements. I couldn’t really imagine what more he’d want and I didn’t have time to fuss more.

I emailed back to him and said that he’d sufficiently discouraged me, that if my application was so borderline that three passes were needed, I’d wait until I was less borderline. I did not thank him for his help. I was polite (and brief).

About a month later, I got email from a guy I knew from other things, that I’d done a favor for. When I realized he was senior member, I got a recommendation from him. Easy peasy. He said my application rocked. My membership was upgraded with no questions from the committee.

Fred is the guy here at the conference. I don’t know if he recalls this interaction or not. Whenever I see his name on an IEEE ballot, I wince and fail to vote. Part of me knows that he really was trying to help, in his own way. Part of me is angered that he’d put me through so many hoops that I was willing to give up. I don’t know why I was so special or if he does this for everybody.

It isn’t like IEEE senior membership gets me anything: it isn’t even something anyone cares about on my resume. I was only willing to give up a little of my valuable time getting an upgrade that has no value. I ended up spending far more angst and time than I wanted. Apparently, there is still some angst.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Letting go of old angst

h1

An email to a coworker regarding instant messaging

September 27, 2013

I asked why he was never online. He replied:

The [group IM program's] notifications have trained me to ignore it since the notification are from someone who has sent an ALL message. For me, [it] is as effective closed as it is open. Is there a better way to use it? The thing I cannot have is interruptions every few minutes.

I left it alone for nearly a week, it wasn't important. But it mattered so I decided to write up the following.

If we worked in the same office, I would occasionally come up to your desk and ask if you had a minute. Then, if you said yes, we'd have a conversation that was back and forth (and often more friendly) than via email.

We don't work in the same office but IM gives us the opportunity to have conversations. I don't mind sending you emails but sometimes it is easier to have a faster flow of back and forth for little issues.

For example, if you were on IM today, I'd have asked the questions about schematic revisions I sent over email (and probably spent less time wondering if it was something broken on my end). Actually, if you were on IM, I probably would have asked that two days ago since I put it off until I was sure I couldn't figure it out on my own.

Another example: last week, I sent you two lists of schematic issues. If you'd been on IM, I would have asked if each one made sense, about an hour after sending them… since you didn't see the second one until I asked why the modifications were absent, in a group meeting, that would have been useful. Actually, [another EE at this company] and I have done the whole review via IM so he could clarify each point as I was making them (and fix them while I went to look for others). That was probably the best not-in-person review I've ever been part of.

Sure, it provides interruptions but you can always ignore or turn it off for a few hours when you are working on something hard. Having it on and available is like having an open office door. I won't interrupt you for stupid crap (unless I'm in a “let's not work, let's play nerf wars” sort of mood but that is pretty seldom since I'm a contractor, and even then you can close your virtual door).

This IM program is a part of this company's culture. I understand not liking the interruptions but urge you to give it a try for a few days, see if the benefits outweigh the annoyances.

I'm done with my soapbox. 🙂

My coworker appeared on IM today. I hope it works for him.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on An email to a coworker regarding instant messaging

h1

I hate connectors

October 26, 2012

I’ve hinted about my personal project… I’m still not going to be specific about it but I will say that there are six pieces connected together via cables, fairly complicated cables.

I’ve been working with my single prototype, built by ordering parts from Sparkfun and laboriously put together, particularly given my soldering skills. It isn’t that I can’t solder, just that I don’t do it often so I tend to over-engineer my connections making each built circuit look like a tiny tank. Of solder.

Anyway, I need to move from one prototype for me to develop the idea to several prototypes to test the unit with actual users. I’d like to go to ten prototypes because that is what I’d ask for the firmware team if I was at a real company. You know, one with funding. Let’s just say the ten prototypes will be expensive and talk about funding another time.

What I want to discuss today is about connectors. By the title, you may already have clued in my feelings on said topic. But there is so much more to it than that. The only way to express the horror is to describe the whole process.

I started out with the number of wires I need to go to each piece of my system (five). For my prototype, I went to an electronics store and looked around for things about the right size. The resident helper-gnome sold me a wire crimper… Like some sort of medieval torture device a crimper puts a metal sleeve (terminal) on a wire so I can put it into the connector housing I’d chosen. Then I could attach my housing to the pins jutting out of the connector header on the board.

Got that? The housing is on the cable, the wires go in to it via crimped terminals. The board has a header that connects to the cables housing.

Crimping the wires requires a special tool. The usual cost for such a tool is between $400 and $2000 dollars. My head reels at what a scam that is.

The gnome helped me choose a $40 crimper tool that will work on most connectors of a certain size (0.1″ if you must know) and a certain wire gauge. Of course, I have to do three times more work than the expensive version but I’ve this is a labor of love. Right?

So I learned made cables with all this and it was difficult. By the end, I was near blind and my hands hurt.  Right now, I need to make a couple cables longer (which means remaking them entirely). I’ve been putting it off for two weeks.

The pain of that is nothing compared the pain of trying to choose the correct connector for going forward.

I know I want a smaller connector for the small build than the prototype. And I need a lot of interconnects so cheap headers would be nice. I plan to have someone else make these cables but I need to be able to build extras or repair broken ones, so the tools can’t be horrendously expensive. Someday, when we build in the thousands, I might be able to get rid of connectors altogether actually soldering wires on to boards with some (unknown and magical) strain relief.

So, if you go to Digikey and search for connectors, you get a giant list of inexplicable things. There is no quick parametric search yet where I can enter the number of wires and the spacing. Like looking up the spelling of a word in the dictionary, you really have to know what you want before you get there.

I went for Board to Board – Arrays, Edge Type, Mezzanine. It had lots of options. And I got completely lost in the options. An EE friend came over to let me watch over his shoulder as he found some connectors for me. We ended up with a housing that is half the size of my current one, has keying (can’t plug it in backwards) . At the bottom of that page, you can see it links to mating products. Sorting out which of those would meet my needs meant reading about each one, trying to figure out what it meant. The datasheet didn’t exactly have a choose-your-own-adventure guide to connectors, more a terse listing of numbers and part drawings that looked like they were drawn by Escher.

We chose a header and selected terminals to crimp on to the wires. A complete set. And the EE thought that it would all work with my $40 crimper, though it might a little fussy.

In a different adventure, another EE came over and looked at all this. He said it was all wrong. Well, not all wrong. Just not right. Sure, it did all match which was good (better than my first on-my-own attempt). But my crimper wasn’t going to work… not really. I’d go blind first.

He suggested a different style of connectors (IDC) which don’t require terminals. (I didn’t think that was an option because I need discrete wires and not a ribbon but that is a detail, and they do make discrete wire IDC, it is just harder to find. As though I needed that.)

However, that connector variety still requires expensive crimpers. Though they don’t properly crimp so much as push things into the right place. The one we found online was only $80 on ebay but since its retail was $11,000 (boggle!), I wonder. Also, after 30 minutes of us both digging into the specs of the tool and the specs of the connectors he’d identified and assorted random standards, we determined it wouldn’t work for the connectors he’d chosen. Or any in the right size range.

The goal now is to haunt ebay and craigslist to find a second-hand crimper of the right size and then select connectors that work with that crimper. If anybody has a matrix of which crimpers work with which connectors, do let me know?  Until then, I’ll be going cross-eyed trying to figure it out.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on I hate connectors

h1

Hosting for the socially inept

September 23, 2012

I went to two parties yesterday. This is twice my monthly allotment so I’m feeling a little oversocialized. Due to the differences in how the events went, I’d like to take this time to rant about hosting parties where people don’t know each other (especially for the socially inept).

As the host, cooking is not that important. Talking to your BFF is not that important. Fussing with this or that is… let’s see…. not that important. The highest priority of the host should be to pawn the guests off on each other. Given your guest list, you can even think of some of the connections ahead of time.

“Oh, have you met Kershohsdaf? She’s in the same field as you are.”

“Let me introduce you to Uoweirj. He’s interested in the XYZ as you’ve mentioned before.”

If you can make them amuse each other, then you can do all that other stuff without wallflowers growing. Especially for the stand-around-and-chat parties, the host can’t be the center of attention; they’ve got too much to do. Introducing people helps a ton. Another method of clearing the walls is to give shy people jobs so they have a good reason to talk to others.

“What I need you to do is take this to everyone and tell me what they think of it. If they like that, we’ve got more but if they don’t we’ll switch to another bottle.”

“I’m afraid Ldsofai and Jsdfa don’t know anyone here. I know you don’t either but I’m hoping you can introduce them around. They are so shy on their own.”

The best a host can hope for is to make people talk to each other. If the partygoers can find new people to talk to on their own, even better. And as an attendee, you have to be willing to use social ploys to keep thing going so your host doesn’t have to baby you through everything. But for that, do as I say, not as I do.

At the BBQ event yesterday, sponsored by my college alumni association, the host said hello, asked if we enjoyed the aquarium, pointed us to the snacks, and resumed her previous conversation.

I grabbed a water and stood on the periphery of the group near the snacks. Then I got bored (and uncomfortable, like I was eavedropping) and went to look a the pictures C and I had taken before we got there. Then, feeling chilly and sunburned and useless, we left. We didn’t talk to anyone else. I thought it was because everybody else was talking to each other. After we’d left, C pointed out that they were all in groups of two or three so they probably weren’t talking to each other either.

It shouldn’t have been hard to start conversations. Most of the people had been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium that day. Most of the people had all gone to the same college (though not in the same years). Most of the people had science or technology jobs. Some had been whale watching that morning.

Maybe I was already socially feeble from going to the aquarium and interacting with people there. Still, I’m kind of embarrassed that we didn’t talk to anyone. I mean, I did re-load business cards into my wallet in hopes of meeting people. But they were talking to each other. I didn’t want to interrupt.

This is somewhat a couples’ problem. If Jack and Jill come to a party and are too shy to introduce themselves to others, they will talk to each other, thereby making it hard for anyone to come talk to them. It is even worse if one half of the couple is less excited about meeting people.

At the second party, I went solo. I had to interact or look like a complete loser.  My host there was more helpful, spending a little time making me comfortable and then doing the big group name-only introduction (sadly, those don’t tell me who I might be able to chat with). There were lots of other solos there.

Even so, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen refilling the water jug, feeling like an idiot, particularly after I hit shoals in the conversation (Hint: “So, what do you do?” is not always a safe conversation starter. Sigh.)

Fish not swimming together

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

h1

A hotel review…

May 14, 2012

The Hotel Murray in Livingston, Montana was charming, quaint even. It was an older building; the elevator that is operated only by the staff definitely constitutes character even though we stayed on the fourth floor and the view of the antique marble covered step wasn’t quite enough to make up for the hike.

The town is adorable. It is an artist colony: writer, painters, and sculptors whose inspiration comes from the surrounding mountains and nearby Yellowstone. The food and coffee were great too.

After dinner, we went to the Murray’s roof top patio to watch the sunset. It was ok, mostly a smoker’s haven though it was empty when we were there. Well, empty of smokers; we were clearly disturbing the pigeons. But it was nice. The sunset was ok… Not a great one, I forgot the sun needs to go through thick atmosphere to turn wild colors. As the sun crept behind the mountain, throwing our valley into shadow, it was still high in the sky. Even throwing its rays on the mountain, the light was a too clear to make it as awesomely pretty as I’d hope. Still failed to suck.

20120513-185046.jpg

The room was spectacular; I had this thought that if I ever wrote a private eye novel, the detective would stay in this room (and his mental voice would sound like Cary Grant, at least he’d think it did).

Renovated from two small rooms, the suite was big. It was nice to have a separate area to sit in. Though, that TV had something wrong with the HGTV channel. Ah well, we could watch it in the bedroom.

The earplugs on the bed were a worry. Nay, a serious concern but I was still charmed. And they were attached to a card that explained that if we didn’t find train whistles romantic, we might want them. Um, ok… I was tired enough that the occasional train whistle wouldn’t matter.

That was a lie, of course. Oh, not about my exhaustion or the train whistles.

The (insert expletive of choice) hotel had a bar attached to it. With a live band. A loud live band.

The ear plugs were effective but a little too effective, I kept waking up with a start (I like quiet but silence is bad). And the earplugs were too big, my eardrums hurt. Sad. So I took them out around 1230, getting to listen to a fair rendition of Cheap Trick’s “I want you to want me” at a volume slightly higher than if I’d put it on in the kitchen to dance around and empty the dishwasher. (That is the main time I put music on pretty loud, it is much louder than I can sleep through, tired or not.)

Sometime before then, C and I realized we were too hot. Groggily, I tried to open the window, turning locks and pushing up to no avail. I went to the bathroom and came back to find C holding the latches and pushing up (oh, there were latches?), then switching the locks and trying again. I went to help, hampered in communication by our earplugs. It was a comedy of errors, only aided by the fact that neither one of us was dressed appropriately to be framed in a window overlooking the street. Eventually I used my phone as a flashlight to figure out that we kept locking one lock and unlocking the other (hot and groggy and tired, it was not a moment of intellectual greatness) and we got some much needed air.

Of course that made the band louder, the street sounds louder, and those not-very-romantic train whistles even more piercing.

The band quit at 1am. I waited for the bar closing, band load out racket to abate. Before it did, though, a brawl started in the street below. Despite the crashes and thunks and yelling, I stayed optimistic that it would quiet until I heard police sirens.

Then I put my earplugs in again.

I suppose I slept a few hours before waking up from a nightmare about the bugs from Star Trek crawling in my ear to cause unimaginable pain and control my brain to make me stay at the Hotel Murray for another night. The horror.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments Off on A hotel review…

« Newer Entries
Older Entries »