I'm chatting with Dr. Smith about the Hamsters. They're behaving a little bit oddly and I'm fishing for any insight into why that could be.
Because I hadn't observed this particular behavior (very slight and inconsistent phase shift among the different channels) before we started testing some of the Hamsters with extra long cables, I have to ask, "Do you think it's because some of them have the 300 foot cables? If you get a nanosecond of delay in the signal for every foot of cable, that's still only 0.3 microseconds. Is that difference in the interrupt arrival time enough to even appear in the output?"
After a few minutes of this, I'm noticing that the answers to my questions sound an awful lot like my questions and am not distressed when the subject changes to other plans for the Hamsters. Dr. Smith mentions that he'd like us to make a schematic of the Hamster Hub and I am able to tell him that we've already done it. (Heh. We're ahead of the game—for a few seconds.) Dr. Smith says he'd like us to design a printed circuit board version of the Hub, the current incarnation of which consists of wires and glue.
Also, some additional Hamsters are being assembled and soon we'll be setting up a second system down in Dr. Science's lab. We're also supposed to be adding a weather station to our Hamster setup next semester. Ratso's even asked about it (he wants to write the code). We haven't even seen a spec sheet, so we don't really know what we're in for.
I bring it up. "Has Dr. Science got that weather station yet? I'd kind of like to get them started with it while they're still really stoked about winning that award."
Dr. Smith laughs. "Oh, you're a good manager. I'll go call Dr. Science and see."
"Great. Do you think we can get the weather station to coincide with the arrival of the checks?"
And thus it becomes apparent how really manipulative I can be.
344 words | December 8, 2004 09:16 PM | Ivory tower