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Meet the new boss

The researcher I'll be working for this summer is up at my school for a workshop. Till the internship starts, I'm working on Dr. Smith's end of this man's project. (No cute nickname yet. Dr. Science, maybe? Okay, for now he's Dr. Science.) Dr. Smith brings Dr. Science to the lab to meet me and to see the part of the project that I'm taking over now that the seniors who had it before are all graduated and out of here. Luckily, one of the seniors was kind enough to drop by the lab this morning and get it working. I hadn't been able to, because of what turned out to be a very simple problem that would have taken me hours to locate.

Dr. Science asks a few questions about the project. Easy ones, so I am able to answer them. Then he has a suggestion. "Has this ever been run for a long time? Why don't you let the [microprocessors] run overnight to see how they handle the heat dissipation? Or maybe we can do that down at [the research facility^*]. We have this heating oven we can put them in and run them at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, for example."

"Oh. Well. Really?" I am non-committal. I doubt that such an experiment conducted here would result in any data, because I have no facilities for tracking the temperature of the room, or the devices (other than patting them to see if they're hot), or their performance. I am also a big fan of non-destructive analysis, because it seems that destructive analysis will result in broken things that I will then be required to fix. I ask Dr. Smith about it later.

He says, "Well, that sort of means 'leave it on all night and see if it's still working in the morning.' It can wait till we move everything down to [the facility where they have proper equipment for this]."

"Okay. I figured."

(^*Author's note: I have to watch out for the indexing on this site. You'd be amazed what brings people here. And, no, I can't get you Matlab for free. And the "Atmel relative branch out of reach" error message means that you have a relative jump to a label farther away than 2048 machine instructions. You will have to use subroutines and if all else fails, put in some intermediate relative jumps.)

401 words | May 20, 2004 07:36 PM | Rocket science