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Open house at Wallops

One of the reasons why we went back to Chincoteague this past weekend, entirely apart from Oz's obsession, was to attend the Open House at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. This was so much fun—almost as much fun as working there, maybe. We got to ogle aircraft, see exhibits and poster sessions about different projects, collect swag, and tour some of the facilities and a mobile command center. It seemed that many of the people in attendance were connected with the facility in some way, either they worked there and this was an opportunity for them to bring their families on campus or they were retired from there and this was an opportunity for them to lord it over their former minions.

Our swag collection consisted of stickers, a poster about ice (I didn't manage to snag a "MARS: Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport" poster, which is too bad because they were really cool), more stickers, bookmarks, a lanyard, a pin, a magnet, two collapsible Frisbees (when I was using one as a fan on one of the shuttle busses, the lady behind me tried to give me a fan from the balloon project), and flyers from NASA branches and contractors who are probably not hiring.

The Control Center was open for a presentation about what the WFF is all about. The big screens on the walls displayed control-center-y images, old launch videos, and a really old black and white video about the facility that must have dated back to the 1950s (and featured a clip of well-muscled, shirtless, perspiring engineers assembling a rocket under the noonday sun).

We also got to tour the machine shop where they make rockets. The rockets are made out of big aluminum tubes, so we saw lathes and other metal shaping equipment. I am so not a mech-e, big machines are not my thing, although one machine was pretty neat. The new computer-controlled water jet cutter was demonstrated for us by a guy who hadn't been trained on the machine yet, so he'd been teaching himself to use it by cutting metal into pretty bits shaped like flowers, F-15s, fish, and a bowl full of rocket-shaped keychain fobs. For the little kids in our group, he offered to cut out some F-15s. One asked, "Can you do a Stealth?" "No, I don't have a Stealth programmed in there. But I can do an F-15," he said, but only got a noncommittal "Oh" in return.

And, by the way, our tour group included a lot of little old ladies who asked sharp questions about rockets. I found this surprising, because most of the little old ladies I know are mainly interested in sewing and doll collecting. I hope someday I'll be the little old lady who elbows her way, gently but firmly, to the front of the crowd to press her nose against the plexiglass and watch plates of metal being sliced apart with jets of water and sand, or whatever they're using to cut metal in forty years.

After the pieces parts of the rockets are made, the rockets are assembled and tested to make sure they won't fall apart when they're launched. One of the things they do is spin the rocket to make sure it's balanced. The rocket spins for stability when it flies and, just like a washing machine load, it needs to be balanced if it's going to fly straight. Not that a washing machine flies straight or otherwise, but if the load is unbalanced it will dance across the floor. Anyway, there is a big machine that spins rockets. It's so old it has vacuum tubes in it.

In the testing area, industrial fans pointed at the ceiling and parachutes floated up and down above them. A really big scale subtracted twenty-five pounds off my weight (it must have been zeroed to a twenty-five pound tray). The building had a tall, narrow doorway especially for rockets.

We had fun. Can you tell?

Lost in space

My Japanese station didn't cover the space shuttle launch live today, but they had a big thing about the shuttle on the morning news, featuring Noguchi in particular, of course. One of the clips showed Noguchi getting all geared up this morning and holding up a sign saying "Out to Launch" in English. For the benefit of the TV audience, the NHK folks had that translated—literally—as "Youyaku, uchiage." It's too bad that in Japanese "launch" (uchiage) and "lunch" (hiru-gohan, or ranchi if you're being fashionable about it) don't sound anything alike. Puns rarely translate well.

But anyway, they had Mohri-san on to talk about the shuttle and all the safety issues. He did a demonstration with the space caulk (the special paste that hardens into something heat resistant enough to survive re-entry) and the special caulking gun to show how tiles could be repaired. Although well meant, the demonstration just did not look all that convincing. It looked like caulking.

I did listen to the live launch broadcast on NPR this morning and wore my NASA earrings in solidarity. I hope the mission gets more coverage over and above the "Hey, it didn't blow up!" variety.

Herding cats

On Monday I dragged the whole Hamster team (I have minions now) down to Hampton to see Dr. Science et al. We had to demo the Hamsters, show the techs how to work them, and answer questions about the system from Dr. Sounds, the researcher who is going to be examining the data collected by our trusty Hamsters. Now is probably a good time to reiterate that the Hamsters are microcontrollers and circuit boards that sample and send data to a PC. No animal testing here. I won't say "cruelty free" because of the sheer number of issues that keep cropping up. A Hamster is a cruel master indeed.

In the lab, they pounce on my USB drive which has all the files relating to the project and run around making copies of the files (Second Amendment Guy makes, like, five CDs so everyone has a copy and he has two) and trying to collect all the people who are supposed to see the demo. They find Dr. Science, but we have to wait for Dr. Sounds. Dr. Sounds turns up, but Dr. Science has wandered off. By the time they find him again, Dr. Sounds has gone somewhere and then suddenly it's lunchtime.

In the meantime, we've powered up the Hamsters and started running them. They work! We mess around with the extremely expensive microphones, do some testing with the super-long cables that will be used in the field. We're not used to the nearly flat line of the graphed data (this is real data, not the sine wave input we've been using for development), but it gets a little more exciting when the jet planes take off from the air force base and the microphones have something they can pick up.

The system keeps on working throughout the demo. I am able to answer all the questions they ask. It's great. Every time they say, "Can it do —?" I am able to say, "Yes." This segues into a meeting in which they tell us all the other stuff they want us to add now. I take notes. Half the time I don't know what the heck they're talking about, so I just write it all down and figure I'll find out later.

We also go over to the gantry to see the old system that the Hamsters will be replacing. Problems with the old system include the following.
It's really old.
It's really big.
It's flakey.
It consumes a lot of power.
No one is sure how it works.
If parts break, they can't be replaced because those parts aren't being made anymore.
No one likes this machine.

Being none of all that, the Hamsters were quite the hit. Dr. Sounds has been waiting over twenty years for this system. The techs are overjoyed. Dr. Science is trying to figure out how to use it underwater.

Perspective

It's very difficult to photograph very large structures from when you're practically standing beneath them. If you can't get anything else in the picture, it's also hard to tell how large the structure is, because there's nothing for your eye to compare it to. Consider the gantry.

If you look up at one end, it looks almost lithe.

The end where the elevator, stairs, and other gear all come together is much more substantial.

You still can't tell how tall it is. I don't actually know, two hundred and fifty feet, I think. I guess the trees help.

Yes, I was holding the camera crooked. The ground is very flat here—no slopes.

Notice how part of the structure looks rusty, but some bits are freshly painted? Rumor has it that they started to repaint and then decided that it would be cheaper to tear it down. It's a national historic landmark because of the moon landing practice they did here, but apparently it's okay to tear down landmarks as long as you leave the plaque intact.

Plug & play

Today I went back down to the research facility for the first time since the accident.

The drive, all 75 miles of it, was as dull as I remembered, but today I had a little added thrill from the black ice left over from our surprise Thunder Snow Sunday night.

I had to check in at the gate since I didn't have a valid pass and wear the V (visitor) badge all day.

I got to see everyone (almost: Office Extrovert had already left for the holidays), and answer questions about the accident, that being the last any of them ever heard of me. So much has happened since then.

Hooking up the Hamsters was not, as expected, as simple as hooking up the Hamsters. When you disappear for five months, very little of your stuff is where you left it, although, oddly enough, the really nice multimeter I'd been using was exactly where I'd left it. The desktop computer I'd been using had been borrowed and had developed a crashing problem, so a new computer had to be set up. The power supply arrangement had been disrupted, so new arrangements had to be made. Wires popped off the Hamster boards on the trip down and had to be re-soldered. The microphones we were going to hook to the Hamsters had special power needs, then the amplifier was getting saturated and required particular attention. My contribution to the chaos was bringing the wrong version of some Hamster software.

On the upside, I get to go back again soon.

Get a job

I got a job notice from the place I interned over the summer. It was the most general job notice I've ever seen, more like a fishing expedition than a notice for a specific job opening: "What the work entails: You may be hired for an array of positions in Information Technology. You will begin by collaborating with senior IT professionals…" Well, I'll bite. Heck, if I can get my foot in the door without having to get a PhD first, I'll do the hook, line, and sinker thing.

Right now, the idea of more school is horrifying. I began studying engineering part time in January 1998 and I should be done with this degree in May 2005. That's seven and a half years for a second bachelor's degree (with one semester off as a treat when I finished my AS). Whenever someone tells me, "You can get a second bachelor's in two years!" I laugh, "Har! Har!" Because I know about the vicissitudes of transferring credit. And let's not even talk about how little a BS in Japanese overlaps with a BS in engineering.

Seven and a half years of my life. That means I've spent over 30% of my life in college! Ugh. Any sane person would agree that's quite enough.

So I applied to the vague job opening. Maybe I'll get a vague job.

Where's my packet?

I'm still working on the Hamster project (in which our intrepid heroine attempts to transmit data from multiple, synchronized sensors over TCP/IP to a desktop computer). I had pretty much succeeded in getting the data streams synchronized this summer, but when we brought everything back to my university and hooked it up in the lab here—no synchronization. Same software, same hardware, but the slower computer revealed some flaws in the code running on the sensors. I have about managed to clean up the code, but still, when you lose one packet, even if it is packet number 38,306 from five and a half hours into a six hour session, it throws the data streams out of synch. The loss of the data is less important than the loss of the synchronization.

There's something in the code that's taking too long. I have to find a way to save a few dozen milliseconds here and there. Even then, some other random factor may turn up and eat one packet out of fifty thousand. But a faster PC might make the problem go away. I think Dr. Science might spring for that.

Rabbit

The Welder and I are driving over to another part of the facility where we'll talk with a graphic designer about these posters for the poster session. The Welder is driving since he knows where we're going. He has many odd things in his car.

I reach up and poke an oblong furry object that hangs alongside a cardboard air-freshener from his rearview mirror. "What's this? A tribble?"

"What's a tribble?"

"Don't you know? From Star Trek? 'The Trouble with Tribbles'." I'm finding that in any area where this young man isn't tremendously knowledgeable, he's stone ignorant.

"Oh, you'd watch Star Trek. That figures," he groans.

"Hey, I'm not nearly as geeky as this guy I went to college with. His mom made him a tribble that he used to carry around on his shoulder," I say.

The Welder emits suppressed gurgling noises. To distract him from the retching induced by having to share space with someone of my (and my friend's) geekitude, I prod the gray furry thing again and ask, "So what is it then?"

"It's a rabbit."

"A rabbit? Where are its ears?"

"It used to have those, but they're gone," he says.

"Okay, so it's a stripped rabbit corpse." I twist it around on its leather cord and see the bare spots where ears may have once been attached.

"Yeah. It has herbs in it."

I pounce. "Herbs? You mean it's a hippie rabbit?"

He goes on the defensive. "No! Not a hippie rabbit. My girlfriend made it. It's got herbs and runes. Nordic runes in it. She sliced tree branches and wrote Nordic runes on the slices and put those in there too."

"Ooh-hoo! It's a hippie Pagan rabbit!"

"Uh, yeah. A Pagan rabbit." He seems to like that better. "Runes and herbs, she put different herbs in there and I think there was a painted rock too."

"Ha! A hippie Pagan rabbit air-freshener totem!" I crow.

"A Pagan rabbit," he corrects me. "But I'm thinking I might take it down. See? When I turn right it really blocks my line of sight."

"Maybe it's telling you you're going in the wrong direction," I say.

"Or maybe it's telling me I should take turns faster so it'll swing out of the way," he says, demonstrating.

Brute force

"When did you want this power board?" The Welder is standing behind me holding a printed circuit board with a few wires hanging off it.

"Uh. I didn't?"

"Dr. Science had me depopulate this for your project. I finished it this morning and it's been sitting on my workbench all day," he tells me.

I stare blankly at the board. All the components have been removed except for a proper power input. I wouldn't mind having a board with a proper power input. That would be a first for me. "I was not in the loop on that one."

"Okay. I'll go see what he wanted done with it." He takes his board and leaves.

A couple days later, Dr. Smith hands me one of the new Hamster boards, fully populated with the Very Expensive Filter and other Very Expensive Components as well as all the cheaper chips. "Look! A new Hamster! We can start testing this one with the others. Have you got one of the A/D converters for it?"

I do and immediately plug it in. A few other issues arise: I don't have all the cables I need and the board is lacking a power input. I'll have to solder a couple wires into the eyelets before I can power it up. And then Dr. Science drags the Welder and I and all the boards over to the photography studio to get the boards photographed for the posters he's having made up.

While the Welder and I are cooling our heels outside the studio (Dr. Science and the photographer are not in evidence just yet), he peers into my box of boards and then chews his lip a little. "Remember that board I depopulated? They wanted the components for your new Hamster board."

"Yes. Because the filters are Very Expensive and they don't keep them lying around—"

"Right. Dr. Science didn't tell me that he wanted the components. I thought he wanted the board. So I sort of ripped the filter and those regulators off with…brute force."

"Oh." I look at the new, untested but highly photogenic board. Dr. Science and the photographer arrive and the Welder changes the subject.

I still haven't tested that new board. I'm saving it up.

Hidden agendas

Dr. Science is trouble. He says I'm in trouble because of this poster thing, but guess what? I am not going to worry about it. I think he's in trouble. For example, today I was supposed to turn in an abstract about the project I've been working on. I even wrote one that described the project and the work I've done on it, that being what was required and all. But—

"Oh, no! This will need to be rewritten. I will do it," says Dr. Science.

"If you'd let me know what you'd like it to say, I'd be happy to—"

"I already talked to the program director and told her I would turn it in. She knows I take a long time. I will see to this later," he continues.

"Okay." I send email to the director myself, just in case. And I'm not going to worry about the poster presentation either. Someone else is making up the poster and Dr. Science is going to decide what goes on it. By Monday. Hee! Monday. Like I believe that.

Evidently Dr. Science regards the poster/abstract/paper part of the internship as a means to promote his larger project and he has some specific aspects he wants to promote. I hope he tells me what they are before he props me up in front of the poster for project promotion purposes.

The chosen ones

"You two are in trouble." Dr. Science walks into the lab and addresses the Welder and me. "You have been selected for the poster sessions and I want your posters to look good."

"What's that all about?" asks the Welder.

"It's like eighth grade science fair," I say. Wah! A poster? I didn't sign up for the poster sessions. I stayed far, far away from the poster session signup sheet! Just thinking about making a poster makes my joints hurt.

"Do we have to give a presentation?" asks the Welder.

"No," says Dr. Science, "but you have to stand by your poster and discuss the project with people who come by. This means, Welder, that you must talk with everyone, not just talk to the people you like and ignore everyone else." The Welder's been here for a while. I see Dr. Science knows him well.

"Oh, and I have to tuck in my shirt?"

Dr. Science frowns. "Yes. So tomorrow morning we will meet and we will put together the text and pictures for the posters. We will send that out to be made up into posters."

I don't have to personally make the poster? That's not so bad then. But I'll have to wear a dress…

Mind the gap

Lovely big packets, full of data. Now I add different kinds of data. Easy enough on the Hamster end: just generate the data and command the Hamsters to write it out to the socket. The real difficulty comes when I try to parse it out of the data stream on the PC side. I add some code that detects the new Type B data and sends it to a set of files separate from those that collect the old Type A data that we've been messing with all along. This works, except that it leaves a hole in the Type A data stream, which is graphed on the display.

I'm almost ashamed to say how long it took to figure out that the blip in the graph was a gap in the data stream, and not a result of junk data or a bug in the Type B data extraction routine.

For cosmetic reasons, the gap in the display must be filled (no gap appears in the files, which are actually more important). The logic involved is getting really ugly. It's what I have to look forward to tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll work it all out in my sleep tonight.

My head spins

"Dr. Science says that he'll probably have Office Extrovert take over the PC end of the Hamster project so you can switch back to the Unprintable Project," Dr. Smith tells me.

"Oh. But—" I'm just getting good with this. I can get new stuff implemented and debugged in less than a day now. There's four more things in particular that I really want to do with the Hamsters before I have to—

"We should have one of the new Hamster boards populated by the end of the week for you to start testing," he goes on.

So what am I supposed to be doing? "Oh, really? Did Dr. Science say when they were going to test the Hamsters out on the roof with the real data?" The roof bit is interesting. I'm not relinquishing the Hamsters till the roof.

"Probably whenever we give them the go-ahead. Are they ready? Do they work consistently?" he asks.

"Except when they don't. They are working pretty well. I think the problems I had on Friday were due to loose cables. So I can start testing them with the 300 foot cables?"

He shrugs. "I guess you can get Office Extrovert to help you make those up tomorrow. And start testing them."

"—" Sounds like a reprieve from the Unprintable Project. Now if I can just—

As usual, Dr. Smith continues. "Can you print out another copy of the parts list for the Hamsters? Did you have the part number for the 17x2 sockets? How many of those did we need? What about—"

Filters

In the next lab, they've been working on an immense project: an acoustic filter array. Two of the guys have been soldering tiny surface mount components onto tiny printed circuit boards for days. This week they've been assembling it and testing it as parts were made. Today they had to finish everything and then pack it up to take to a university on the other side of the state.

I got to help: they had me testing the filter boards to make sure they worked and recording data on the performance each filter. I also helped identify the problems with the ones that flat-lined on the scope. Sometimes that was easy.

"Hey, this one is missing an op-amp." I take the board over to Second Amendment Guy (no explanation needed for this nickname, I think).

The Welder (so called because he says he knows how to weld. He learned in high school, in north Georgia where welding is considered to be part of the college prep curriculum) surreptitiously comes over to the workbench and checks the non-functional boards to see if any were his work. Not one is and he smiles.

He picks up some filters and arranges them in order of their serial numbers. Going back to the array to plug them in, he brags, "We've got a zero percent failure rate."

"Stop saying that," chorus the others.

"How many spare filter boards do we have?" asks Dr. Smith.

"Uh. One if we can fix that board there," says Closet Extrovert.

The Welder needs to pipe down or karma will be incurred. Solder joints will pop. Chips will work loose from their sockets. It's best not to draw too much attention to that spectacular failure rate.

New and improved

Mmm, packets. Now with twice the data.

I shall glory in the moment, for it will be all over tomorrow. Despite the distractions of the Unprintable Project, I got extra large packets implemented for the Hamsters. In the process, I rewrote the interrupt service routine and various other bits and pieces of the code and then troubleshot some resultant connectivity problems. It appears that sockets full of big packets take longer to flush and close, so the reconnection process on the PC side times out. The real reason might be something completely different, but that's what it looked like and the problem was solved by increasing the timeout time.

In any case, the Hamsters now pack their data in big packets. Packets that are not only large, but easily resizable. Packets that are filled through a compact and efficient interrupt service routine. Oh, the joy of it!

Tomorrow I shall attempt to add another feature and things will come to a screeching halt for reasons that will seem obvious once uncovered, but insurmountable until then. For the present, however, I can bask in the idea that I've got something working.

People are just like cats

My friend Lisa has a story about some cats. A family had two cats of which I don't remember the names, but one was so much like Jabba the Hut that the girl in the family cast the cat as Jabba in a homemade Star Wars video. The other cat hung out on top of the refrigerator a lot and didn't interact with the family much. They always thought the cats got along fine, but after Jabba croaked, the other cat became much more friendly. She got down off the fridge and began to hang out with the family. She was like a completely different cat.

The guys at the lab are just like that cat. Everybody is introverted, except for Office Extrovert. On the days when OE is out, it's very quiet except that whenever one of the guys walks into my lab, he grins and says, "Sure is quiet around here today." Well, OE has been out all week and the one who shares his office is getting positively gleeful. It took a couple days, but now he's chatting with people (even me to a slight extent). All morning I could hear his voice in the background.

I suppose I should call him Closet Extrovert.

Don't ask

As per Dr. Smith's instructions, I'm taking a break from the Hamsters and trying to get a prototyping board for the Unprintable Project (what I was working on in May, with the FIFO and all) up and running for the Gambler.

Let me just say that the Hamsters are looking better all the time. A former student who had worked on an earlier version of UP was on site the other day and shared some horror stories to the tune of "and we couldn't get the boards working so we had to run it off the development kit and then it still wouldn't work, so I put pull-up resistors on it and then it did work long enough for us to get graded on it. But then when I worked on it some more the next summer, I took off the pull-up resistors and it still worked. Augh!"

Actually, it was comforting to hear that other people are as confounded with UP as I am. This makes it much easier to blame the hardware.

In any event, all I really need to do is make sure that the prototyping board communicates with a desktop computer through a serial cable. Theoretically this is easy, as all the necessary software and hardware have been developed and set up—plug & pray. What we really said, however, was "This chip is hot. What voltage are we supposed to be running this at? Ow! Damn, that chip is really hot."

After some minor hardware destruction, we then had to eliminate and resolve other hardware issues scientifically. My repeated declarations of "the FPGA on that module is fried" were not rigorous enough. We had to swap around cables, boards, solid state PCs, and software for five hours until Dr. Science said, "So, this is a bad FPGA, yes?"

Three days later, we've got a (theoretically) functional FPGA module, a (theoretically) functional solid state PC, and a (theoretically) functional prototyping board that do not communicate with the desktop PC.

Dr. Smith says, "Let's just write a program for the solid state PC that puts out a letter U over and over again. Then we can put a scope on some of the pins and see where the signal's going. I don't know why it's the letter U, there's something special about it in hex. Do you have an ASCII chart handy?"

I grab a C++ manual and flip to the ASCII chart in the back, but it only has the decimal values for the characters (each keyboard character, as well as every other character in the ASCII character set, is represented by a seven bit number which can be stated in decimal, hexadecimal, and octal—or any other number base). Dr. Smith reaches over and grabs a C manual and searches the appendices for an ASCII chart.

I reach for a different manual, but then stop and mutter, "Oh, heck, I can find it faster online." I open my browser, which I have set to start at Google, type ascii table hex and hit "I'm feeling lucky." I end up here. (Yes, someone actually registered the domain "asciitable.com.") "U is 55 in hex. So that's 1010101."

Isn't that special? Now we've got to make the solid state PCs consistently give us U's we can use. Please note: The Unprintable Project has issues with consistency.

Tubular

When I left the lab last Friday, the Chemist was hovering around the nanotube machine. All afternoon, he'd been saying how he had high hopes for this run. By the time I left, he was itching to open up the oven and run his sample over to another research facility where the scanning tunneling microscope is located. He had to wait, however, until the machine cooled down enough that he could open it up without the sudden temperature change destroying his sample. Oh, and so that he could open it without getting third-degree burns, but the possibility of damage to his own flesh was about as far from his mind as, say, grain prices in Nebraska. The machine cools down at a rate of 100 °C per hour and although the gauge still read 350 °C, he was fussing around with his special tweezers so that he'd be ready in two and a half hours when he could finally grab his sample.

Today he had a load of digital images from the STM. He had indeed managed to produce single-walled nanotubes, but they lay down parallel to the substrate surface instead of standing up like he wanted. "See? And they are curly too. And this gray area"—the whole image is basically a gray area, but anyway—"is amorphous carbon. Not what I want, but I am getting closer. Here," he says clicking around and showing me more images. "This is from the run on the second. You can see how these tubes have multiple walls." He points to thin, parallel lines around a lozenge-shaped nanotube. "But the multiple-walled kind are better for making devices because they are straight."

Cool. I've been wondering why we even have a nanotube machine in my section, which is all electronics and has nothing whatsoever to do with chemistry. I found out when Dr. Science drifted through one day to show off the Hamsters. He said that someday the Hamster data-collection process would use nanotube-based sensors.

Is this long range planning or what?

Dreaming in code

I woke up this morning with that interrupt service routine dancing through my head. I figured out how to reduce the number of instructions by another third and make the logic easier to follow. Good for me. Or is it?

Back when I went through college the first time, I majored in Japanese. I can count on one hand the number of times that I dreamed in Japanese while in school. I was rather less intense about my studies back then, but even though I've managed to become well and truly obsessive-compulsive about engineering, I would never have expected to find myself dreaming in C, Z80, Fourier transforms, and Matlab on a regular basis. It really doesn't make for restful sleep. I wake up feeling like I've been working for hours.

Oz does the same thing. He says I can expect to get over this in about thirty years or so. Or maybe never. Does this mean that I've made a terrible career choice, or that this is what I was born for?

When I mentioned to Dr. Smith that I designed the logic for some data analysis software in my sleep, he said, "Oh. Um, I do that too."

When I mentioned to Office Extrovert that I'd figured out a way to add features to some data collection software in a dream, he laughed at me and said, "That's bad."

Engineering might be driving me crazy, albeit an employable kind of crazy. After all, whom do you want designing the processor that runs your pacemaker or controls your antilock brakes? The obsessive-compulsive perfectionist who eats, sleeps and dreams logic, that's who.

What's the difference between 255 and 256?

If you answer "1" then you're not a computer engineer (or programmer).

The Hamsters are transmitting their little packets of data in perfect synchronization, mostly. Since size does matter when it comes to bulk data transfer, I've been trying to increase the packet size, albeit with little success. To be honest, that would be no success. Although I've optimized the hell out of all the timing, socket, and transmission unit parameters, my Hamsters choke as soon as I give them bigger packets to send.

Why? Why, Hamsters, when I've been so good to you?

Having run out of TCP documentation to mine for further clues, I decide to stare at the Hamster code for a while. Although staring blankly at code gives one (if one is sufficiently self-delusional) the sense of doing something, one can only take so much of this before one has to make trips to the water fountain, to the far end of the building to read Far Side comics taped to the doors of unoccupied offices, and to ferry one's crap out to the car.

Why would adding one word, two measly bytes, to a 256-word packet crash the Hamster?

To put off the inevitable return to the code, I sit on a picnic table in the shade and watch bees pollinate clover. I count no fewer than four bird's nests knocked out of the trees by the daily thunderstorms. The crepe myrtles bow beneath loads of pink flowers. The corn in the field over by the hangar is tall.

Why is there a cornfield on the grounds of an aerospace research facility? Why would increasing the maximum buffer index from 255 to 256 choke the Hamster? What's the difference between 255 and 256?

In hex, 255 is FF and 256 is 100. 255 is an eight bit number and 256 is a nine bit number. The dried flowers woven into the bird's nests are pretty. One of the nests doesn't have any flowers and I wonder if it was built by a bird of a different species. If the kids who wrote the original version of the interrupt service routine (the code that the Hamsters use to load data into the buffer that constitutes the packet) didn't consider that someone might want to increase the packet size, then they might have only used an eight bit register to hold that value when indexing data into the buffer. If that is the case, then that Most Significant ninth bit gets lost and the buffer never gets filled, because the first 256 locations (we start counting at zero so 0 to 255 is 256 locations) are written over and over.

Do you think that's sweet corn? If I pulled off an ear, would I get in trouble? It's probably not ripe yet. I'll try in August.

I return to my lab and read the interrupt service routine very carefully. Not only did the kids use an eight bit register, they included several extra lines of code to make goddamn certain that only an eight bit value could be used to represent the maximum buffer size. I rewrite the ISR and it is faster, simpler, and able to accommodate humongous packets. Ha! It—compile-time errors. Damn!—isn't quite working yet and it's time for me to hit the road. I grab the rest of my stuff and head out to my car. On the way, I figure out how to eliminate the compile-time errors and halve the number of instructions in the process. I keep going because traffic is murderous around here, but on Monday, when I get that bit of code up and running, the Hamsters shall rejoice. So shall I.

Carpool?

I have a seventy-five mile commute down to the research center, and seventy-five miles back. For five more weeks (unless they want me to keep working on the project till school starts). Today I was talking with one of my fellow interns who is doing the same insane thing from almost the same part of town. We may start carpooling, except that his truck doesn't have air conditioning and he'd have to convince his wife to trade cars on the days when he drives. Another possible impediment, I warn him: "I carry a lot of crap down with me. Every day. Extra shoes, a little cooler, my backpack. And I drive really fast. I scare my boyfriend." I neglect to warn him of how grouchy I am at six in the morning when I leave for work. Heh. Maybe he's grouchy too. If not, he'll have to get grouchy in sheer self-defense.

Wild blue yonder

Today is "flight suit picture" day for us interns. I am disappointed to find out that instead of playing astronaut dress-up, we are playing pilot dress-up, but I bear up well. Dress-up was my favorite game as a kid and things haven't changed much. Some people, however, are too cool to participate.

"Uh, I didn't sign up for it." Amp&Effects tries to do a quick fade back into his office.

"You didn't have to sign up. This is for everyone. C'mon, Amp&Effects, you'll really want this picture in twenty years, I promise you." I speak from experience.

"Uh. I'll probably be back next summer. I'll do it then."

"You could get your picture taken today and then you'd have two pictures."

He finally manages to disengage himself and I go over to the hangar alone. Out on the tarmac, a sparse group of students in flight suits waits in line near a small jet. I see that Amp&Effects is not the only cool intern. Based on the small number of students present, I'm guessing that seventy-five percent of the interns are very cool indeed. I join the uncool and enter the hangar where I'm given a flight suit to pull on over my clothes.

"Here, adjust these," says one of guys handling flight suit distribution. He pulls on the Velcro tabs at my waist.

"Oh, these are so slimming," I say as I adjust the wrist straps.

"Yes, the government spends lots of money to make sure these are stylish," he says.

"I'm sure."

I go back out to the plane and get in line. I watch my fellow interns pose for the camera. A helmet has thoughtfully been provided for us to tuck under one arm for added verisimilitude. The short people stand on a little box beside the plane, the tall people stand beside the box. We all have different shoes on. Some of the girls are wearing high heels and sundresses beneath their flight suits.

It's gorgeous out, by the way. Sunny, a little haze to soften the light, we're out in the country so it's quiet, except for the fighter planes taking off from the air force base next door. I look back towards the hangar. A "meatball" (the agency logo) twenty feet in diameter is blazoned above the doors and above that is a white, spherical tank. It seems that every building at the facility is required to have a huge white sphere associated with it in some way. It's like interning at Epcot Center.

Back at the head of the line, an intern wants to make things interesting. He asks, "Can I make it like an action shot? Like I'm about to hop in the plane and fly off?" He's a non-traditionally aged intern (I think), like me, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Tim Allen (in more ways than one, I suspect).

"Whatever you want," the photographer says.

"Cool! How's this?" He poses. The helmet under his left arm and the other hand resting on the plane, he hunches down as if in mid-hop and looks back over his shoulder. The huge goofy grin rather subtracts from the dramatic value of the pose.

"Great." She snaps a picture.

Further contortions. "And this?"

"Okay."

I didn't have the nerve to go that far with my picture. I just stood there and smiled. I suppose I might have a little too much coolness after all. Maybe I'll be back next summer and I'll ham it up then.

Making a list, checking it twice

The Hamsters are getting new printed circuit boards. So far, we've been going over improvements and additions for the PCBs and making sure that we haven't introduced any errors, like inadvertently forgetting to have a power input. Oh, wait—that's one of the problems we're correcting with the new boards. Now that the new board layouts have been exhaustively checked and the boards ordered, it's time to get the components that will go onto the boards: resistors, capacitors, LEDs, various microchips, etc. I'd sort of been hoping that since the boards were going to be populated (have all the components soldered on) elsewhere, that perhaps the component acquisition process would also be taking place elsewhere.

This morning, Dr. Smith drops a copy of the new schematic on my workbench and says, "Why don't you make up a parts list for all the parts we need for the new boards."

"Okay," says I. Easy enough. Let's go shopping!

Six hours later, eyeballs aching, I'm wondering why there are seventy different kinds of 10K Ohm surface mount resistors. How different from each other can they be? (Don't answer me that, I'll find out tomorrow from Dr. Smith.) And why are the part numbers written in such tiny letters?

Office Extrovert wanders into the lab and I ask him, "How do you know what kind of resistors to get? There's all these different tolerances and stuff."

OE shrugs. "Dr. Science just hands me a list and I order them."

"Oh."

The hermitage

One of my tasks on Friday was to run some components over to the guy who is laying out the new Hamster boards. This I don't mind at all. Stealing time, I took some detours on the way back to admire the gantry and find the other gate to the research facility. Moreover, the facility was very quiet on Friday; it being the day before a three-day weekend, many people were opting to make it a four-day weekend.

The electronics building is no exception. The guy to whom I'm delivering stuff is not at his desk and the other desk in that room is also not occupied, so I can't ask the girl who sits there if he's around at all. Not wanting to leave my components adrift on the morass of pens, papers, printouts, and other components on Bobby's desk, I dither around for a minute, but then I hear a rustling from behind The Barrier. This room is quite large, but is made cramped by its division down the center with a towering accretion of scrounged cubicle dividers (thus far I've noted the agency to be remarkably cubicle-free), filing cabinets, and storage cabinets plastered with mission stickers and small calendars bearing the logos of microchip manufacturers.

A-ha! I peek around The Barrier and spy a thin, pale man with a long, gray beard and a khaki driving cap. He's rustling papers at a desk partially hidden behind still more filing cabinets.

"Excuse me, is Bobby here today?" I ask.

He jumps a little and throws me an annoyed look. "Who?"

Uh— "Bobby? He sits at that desk right there?" I point at the desk in question. The desk right by the door that this man can't avoid seeing when he comes into the room, unless he does some creative face-shielding with his driving cap.

"I haven't seen him today." He returns his attention to his papers.

I am clearly dismissed. Okaaaay. I lift an unused post-it note from a pad on Bobby's desk and leave a note with the components, which I place on the copy of the Hamster layouts resting on the top of a heap of other printouts. I'll have to come back another day to check out the fascinating group dynamic here.

The gantry

The gantry is a huge orange, white, and rusty metal structure that towers over the trees like a giant spider. It's visible from outside the research center grounds and looks as though it belongs in a shipyard, except that it's miles from the sea. Beneath it is a rust-stained concrete slab with weeds sprouting up in the cracks. They used it to test and practice landing the Apollo moon lander. Here's a picture of the gantry being used for its intended purpose. Nowadays it's used for dropping things off to see how they break.

And now that the Hamsters are doing their thing, it's time to start testing them with real data. We'll start out on the roof of the building that houses the lab, but then we're supposed to install them on the gantry. The guys all laugh when they talk about putting me up on the gantry to run the Hamsters. I laugh too, but I'm having to restrain myself from saying, "When? You're serious, right? So when do I get to go up on the gantry?"

Look who's talking

Walking down the hall, I pass Chuck's office. Through the open door I see him climb up onto a table and take down his wall clock. When I started here a few weeks ago in June, I'd noticed that he hadn't set the clock to Daylight Savings Time back in April. I recognized a kindred spirit (the clock in my car only has the correct time six months out of the year), but now he's setting the clock.

"Are you springing forward?" I ask.

"Well, I had to get up on the table anyway to hang this picture." He replaces the clock and then holds the picture against the wall to decide where to put the nail. "Is this level with the top of the calendar?"

"Not quite. You should set it a few inches off, you'll never get it exact, only close and it'll drive you mad. It would drive me mad."

"Down a little?"

"Yes. I always hang pictures low anyhow because I'm short." I'm just a regular Chatty Cathy today, aren't I?

"You're weird." He sets down the picture and marks the wall with a pencil.

"No, I'm eccentric."

"Like that's any different? Hand me that hammer and that screw over on my desk. It was a job getting up here."

"It is different. I used to be weird, then I got old and now I'm eccentric. But I hang pictures low because I'm short." I pick up the dainty ball peen hammer and a three-quarter inch wood screw from his desk. "You're going to put in a screw with a hammer?"

"I'm going to start it anyway." He taps the screw into the wall. It goes right in, raising some question in my mind as to the stability of the walls. He hangs up the picture and it's not quite even with the calendar. It would drive me mad.

Mesmerizing

Now that the Hamsters are in sync, most of the time anyway, people like to come into the lab and watch them. For the present, a sine wave is being fed into the Hamsters. They send the data to a PC which then displays the sine waves from each Rodent together in a scrolling window. It's not very exciting, but the draw of movement and light is irresistible, like some sort of millennial data hearth. I have a lot of conversations that begin with "How 'bout them Hamsters?" and segue into lab gossip. I suppose I'll have to break them again if I want to get anything done.

The future's so bright I gotta wear shades

Yes, nothing makes one reach for the danger-sensitive sunglasses faster than a lecture from an overly enthusiastic science wonk, or futurologist, or terrorizer of the ignorant, or however he categorizes himself. To illustrate where he's coming from: he starts out by saying how in prehistoric times humans lived in "Hunter/Killer" groups. Evidently, in prehistoric times humans survived on pure protein and we've devolved a bit since then.

Our future holds exciting things: computer education for everyone, viruses that circumvent our immune systems and kill everything or leave people completely incapacitated, robots that are smarter than we are, dreaming computers, nanotube repairs to spinal cord injuries, nanotech leaving us covered in gray goo, frankenfoods, plowing the Sahara to grow plastic-generating plants, salt-water irrigation, computer viruses, machines replacing migrant agricultural workers, human genome manipulation, and various other treats. Supposedly nanotubes will make our cars incredibly strong and light so they'll be more fuel efficient and we can go anywhere, except that we'll all be telecommuting to the jobs that don't exist anymore.

The Q&A session afterwards is interesting, to say the least. Most of the questions are along the lines of "So, is {insert horrifying future scenario here} really likely?" or "How far along is that {machine takeover of the world} in reality?"

One man stands up and says, "I don't have a question, only a comment, like. I'd like to ask everyone to say a prayer that some of this doesn't happen, because I'd like to be able to raise up my kids."

The next question after that is my personal favorite. "So how long until I can have everything I want and not have to do anything?"

The answer is, of course, never, but the speaker dithers around with a vague estimate of decades.

"But this is all like Revelations. Like the end of days. Is it?" one kid asks, shell-shocked.

This kid hasn't read the Revelation of St. John, he's just been preached at about it. I heave an exasperated sigh and draw a dirty look from a girl in the next row. I'm sitting in the back because we got here late, as usual, and glad to be as far from the speaker as I can be. Equally absorbed in the proceedings, the kid sitting beside me is folding his lecture leaflet into pointy, multi-coned shapes.

The speaker dodges this one. "I do science and economics. I don't do metaphysics. That's a question to discuss over a glass of beer"—this kid is clearly not of age—"or whatever with your friends."

The lecture has left Amp&Effects mildly irate. (We're all highly introverted here. We do everything mildly.) He sputters all the way back to the lab. "That just got people all upset. That was mean. He's just trying to frighten people to sell his speeches. All of that is so far off and he makes it sound like it's tomorrow."

I agree, "Yes, that was a lot of information to dump on people all at once. If you've been following science news for years, you have more perspective on it. For the past ten years, they've been saying 'in the next ten years we'll have such-and-such' and they're still saying it today. And things don't always develop the way these wonks predict."

"And, like how robots are going to make everything, but then how will people earn money to buy all that stuff. And nanotechnology that can solve all our problems or kill everyone—" he goes on.

"Yeah, I was thinking 'Man, we've all read The Diamond Age,'" I say.

"The what?"

"It's…a book. Anyway, most of what he talked about, the ideas about the dystopian future resulting these technologies, has been fodder for cyberpunk authors for years," I explain. Or try to.

"Cyberpunk?" Amp&Effects laughs. He's never heard the word before.

"You need to read more."

Breakfast of champions

The guys across the hall live on Diet Coke and peanuts. Sometimes I wonder how Office Extrovert can get through the day with only a cup of yogurt for lunch, but then I recall the half pound of peanuts he consumes in addition thereto. Every week, they buy a couple five pound bags of roasted-in-the-shell peanuts which they make free for all. The bag o' peanuts leaning against their office wastebasket serves in place of a water cooler for this end of the building. All day long, the sounds of peanut shells snapping between fingers, the cracking of soda cans, and rumbling conversation float into my lab. The first day I was here, I cleaned up my workbench and found little red flakes of peanut paper drifting through equipment racks, into keyboards, and behind monitors.

This week they're out taking a telemetry class and their office is locked and quiet. When I hear a key clicking in their lock, I look out in the hall to see Chuck, acting administrative boss guy, disappearing into their office. He emerges a moment later with two fistfuls of peanuts.

"Gotta get some breakfast," he says. "Breakfast of champions."

The chemist

The nanotube professor offers me some of his coffee, but I decline. It's too late in the afternoon. Besides, he tells me he's doctored it up with condensed milk and Splenda which, ick, I only like coffee in my coffee anyway. We discuss how we find our caffeine intake has increased since we started our respective programs.

"I started bringing a Diet Coke, just in case I need extra caffeine," I tell him.

"Oh, I don't drink Cokes," he says. "Our teeth are made of calcium phosphate and these drinks have so much phosphoric acid. It's very bad for your front teeth over time to drink out of a bottle. If you use a straw it's less bad though."

I look at the ingredients label on my Diet Coke. Hmm. I knew it could dissolve nails, one of my classmates in high school chemistry did that for her term project, but of course she didn't try it on teeth. I put the can back in my little cooler and wander over to the window, near the nanotube machine, to look out at the rainstorm.

"But you don't need to worry about that machine," the chemist continues. "It uses argon which is neutral and methane which is the gas stove at the house."

"Yes, it's CH₄." I nod. Which would make it safe? I'm sure that's what Sylvia Plath had in mind.

"Right! So it's what is in a propane grill, for example." He grins.

"Mmm." Next time he makes nanotubes, I'm making sure that methane sensor is on.

Well, when did you want that?

The extra copy of Matlab is located (found in a drawer) and I now have it on my machine. I go ahead and verify whether the synchronized data actually are. It takes more than ten minutes. More like thirty because of endian issues. The data were in big endian format but were being read in as little endian.

In big endian, the most significant byte—the big end—of the two byte number comes first; in little endian it's the opposite. "Most significant" means the highest order. For example, in the number 10, the '1' is the most significant digit; it comes first as we read it.

As a result of the data being read incorrectly, my first graphs look like noise, not a nice sine wave, and I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out (1) what endian are my data, (2) what endian is Matlab reading (the opposite of what I had, obviously), and (3) how to tell Matlab to read in the data appropriately. The solution? Use the fopen() function to indicate the endian being used by Matlab and then force Matlab to read big endian:

my_file_id=fopen("my_file_name", 'r', 'b'); %r: read only, b: big endian

Now my graphs have nice swoopy sine waves and, sure enough, the data are synchronized. Even better, the Hamsters are sampling identical input values within hundredths of a volt of each other. Wanting to show off, I take the graphs to Dr. Smith's office. He's not there, so I leave a page on his desk. With no titles on the graphs, but he can figure it out.

Eventually he turns up in my lab and we discuss the data. Unsurprisingly, now that I have data analysis capabilities in place, he has more suggestions for types of data to gather and ways to analyze them. He seems to think that I managed to teach myself the graphical programming language well enough to do all these graphs at the same time that I was resolving (most of) the intractable synchronization problems, making up parts lists, identifying features to add to the next generation of Hamsters, verifying that said features won't interfere with Hamster data collection, and learning enough TCP/IP and Hamster C to accomplish the above.

I set him straight. "No, if I were doing this with the graphical language, it would be three weeks before I could get to this point."

"That's a student for you, just get that answer," he says.

Well, yeah. "I'll work on the graphical language when I get a chance." Like I'll get a chance.

Safety Day

We have to watch a video presentation about safety and organization culture. The culture bits pretty much confirm for me that, yes, I have found my people. With the lights low, we sit in one of the labs where there's a TV connected to the base channel. Office Extrovert dozes off. I try not to giggle at the PowerPoint parts of the video, with un-readably absurd quantities of text pasted onto each slide. The lecturer makes sure to warn us how PowerPoint is used to manipulate the viewer through the selective inclusion of information.

We have a mandatory safety presentation that I mostly manage to miss. The conference room is full by the time I get there, so I stand and sit with a few other stragglers out in the hall. The theme of the day is ergonomics and we grumble about how this floor we're sitting on isn't ergonomic at all. OE dozes off again.

Later, on the stairs, I pass some other people who have another mandatory safety meeting that I don't know about so it must not be mandatory for me. I'm carrying my lunch, cornbread and a container of blackeye peas with okra and greens.

As if he's got extra gravity pulling him back, one hauls himself hand over hand up the railing. "It's like—you can't make yourself go."

"You should be using the handrail," the other says to me. Grinning, he points at one of the multiple "Use handrail" signs that decorate every staircase.

I free one hand by placing the edge of the plastic bag that holds my cornbread between my teeth. "'ike dis?"

"Yeah."

We're also supposed to clean our labs. Since I cleaned mine when I moved in a few weeks ago, I don't bother. I have to say, however, that I'm about to get buried under all the manuals I don't have time to read. I suppose there is some point to the cleaning activity. But guess who else had to clean? Yes, I have seen the surface of Dr. Science's desk! And the heap of trash boxes outside his door (If we have trash that doesn't go into the wastebaskets, we have to put it in boxes, tape the boxes shut, and label them "TRASH").

Do the peasants rejoice?

They would if they weren't so damn busy.

This morning I modified the code that runs Hamsters such that they are now synchronized most of the time. Not bad for two weeks of work, especially if you consider that they were synchronized exactly none of the time until a few days ago. So the peasants (i.e. me) should be rejoicing, and we would except that we must answer the pressing question of why only most of the time? Which shall likely remain unanswerable until I get the Hamsters synchronized all of the time.

If that weren't enough, there is the ever-growing List of Things To Do: ordering parts, learning a new programming language, analyzing the data to see if it's really synchronized, determining which of the Hamster pins can be run out to LEDs on the new boards (currently being laid out), determining why the Hamster stops working when anything is written to those pins, etc.

Who would have thought that getting something working would be so anticlimactic?

Research—Not for the faint of heart

"Hey, Office Extrovert, doesn't that voltage source for the nanotube machine make ozone?" I ask. I'm pretty sure I know ozone when I smell it. Even if that machine is putting out something else, this lab still needs some ventilation.

"Yeah, I guess it could." He goes over to the machine and looks at it. He picks up the portable methane sensor on the same table and presses the ON button. The buzzer sounds and he quickly presses the button again. "I think the battery is dead. I wonder where the manual for this is."

On the black surface of the sensor is printed "Do not operate without reading all instructions." The sensor only has five buttons and more than enough blank space to allow instructions to be printed on the sensor itself. I guess the manufacturer wasn't paying attention. The manual is not in evidence anywhere.

"Isn't ozone toxic to humans?" asks Amp&Effects.

"Yeah, that's why I keep bringing it up," I say. We all go over to the ozone-emitting apparatus and stand next to it while we speak. And we're supposed to be smart people. Hey, is that toxic? Let's sniff it while we figure it out. I don't mention what the safety guy told me on the previous day. He'd said, "Hey, this was the lab I closed down. There was this Ph.D. in here with all this tubing and those gas cylinders and that machine. Everyone else in the hall was getting scared."

The matter of ozone is discussed, but nothing is resolved and I still don't have my ventilation. I'll bring it up again on Monday. Or maybe on Safety Day this coming Wednesday.

The nanotube machine continues to go through its heating cycle, but this time something bad happens. The mineral oil through which the exhaust gas bubbles becomes overheated and starts smoking. Black stuff is deposited on the inside of the glass tube in which the samples are baked. I suspect something similar is getting deposited in our lungs, and find reasons to stand out in the hallway. It is decided to cut the cycle short, but even so the cool-down period will be several hours. The professor is disappointed, but not as much as one might expect. Eyes wide, he confides, "I can't wait for it to cool down so I can see what that black stuff is."

Now they're determining how to get the black deposits out without destroying the glass tube. If this means they can't run the machine for a few days, I'm all for it. I have to admit, I'm curious about the black stuff too.

Excavation

The data analysis will take weeks if I try to learn the graphical programming language well enough to use it for that analysis. "But," I tell Dr. Smith, "I could do it in a half hour with Matlab."

So Matlab it is then. Now I have to get a copy installed on my computer. They are very careful about having everything licensed and legal here, by the way. Arrangements must be made. I know Amp&Effects (He's obsessed with his hypothetical senior design project for school. He wants to make a guitar amplifier with some extra features. It occurs to me that I actually own such an amp. I suppose I should tell him.) has Matlab on his machine, so I go ask him where I can get a copy.

"I only have the books. I think I gave the CDs back to Dr. Science." He rummages in his desk drawers to find the books, but I leave them with him as they are not much use without the software.

I go to Dr. Science's office. I find him at his desk. In one hand he holds a hamburger and in the other he holds the wrapper because he can't set his lunch on his desk. The desk, which is L-shaped and must have fifty square feet of surface area, is swamped to an average height of eight inches of papers, journals, circuit boards, manuals, old lunches (I'd put money on it), software boxes, and tools. An LCD monitor rises like a shark fin above this sea; presumably a keyboard swims somewhere below the surface.

I explain, "I need to put Matlab on my machine to analyze the Hamster data. Amp&Effects says that you have the copy…"

Dr. Science is horrified. "Oh no! He gave it to me? I always try to stop people—It will be easier to buy another copy than to find it again." Placing his lunch on the desk and therefore at risk of disappearance and subsequent fossilization, he comes out into the hall with me and we go talk to Amp&Effects again.

Dr. Science scolds him mildly, "You gave me the Matlab? And I let you do that?"

Amp&Effects grins uncertainly and says, "Ye-es."

"I can't believe I let you do that. I must not have been thinking." Dr. Science goes into a couple different labs and looks in some random drawers. "Oh, it is basically gone now. Let's see if Office Extrovert has a copy."

OE isn't around right now and we can't get into his cabinets. OE is the sole practitioner of inventory control around here. Since he wants to be able to find things hours or days after he's set them down, he uses the lock and key method to keep them from walking off (resources are treated as communal). This is not a bad thing at all. So long as he's around, all you have to do is ask him for stuff and you shall receive it in minutes, as opposed to—

"Well, I don't know where to look. I suppose we should order another copy."

Creative ways to pass the time

The other intern in my branch, Amp&Effects, is in the electrical engineering program at school, but for his internship, he's parked at a computer writing graphics code. In the afternoons, he often wanders into my lab to ogle the Hamsters and other hardware that I'm working with. He envies me and grumbles how he's doing more computer science than engineering.

He finds other ways to pass the time. This afternoon I walk into his office to ask if the copy of Matlab I'd been looking for earlier had turned up. While we chat about the software, he hears his boss hang up his phone. He says, "It's time to—Shh." He picks up the receiver of his own phone and, holding it just off the hook, punches in a number. His boss's phone rings.

"What?" I ask.

He shakes his head and puts a finger to his lips. His boss's phone rings a couple more times before the boss picks it up. Amp&Effects drops his receiver back onto the hook.

"Is that lucky?"

I've been finding a lot of four-leafed clovers lately. Not unusual in itself: I'm one of those mutant people who can walk along and spot them without hardly looking.

I found one by my building at the research facility on the first day of my internship. Good omen. Outside an "Irish" bar here in town, I found three more right close to each other. I was feeling very lucky and then I found another four-leafed clover outside the building where I work. I pressed it in my log book where I'm supposed to be recording what I'm doing.

Today I found a six-leafed clover. Outside the building where I work.

I show it to one of the guys in the lab.

"No way. Really? But it looks like two regular clovers."

"I'm not tricking you. See, only one stem." I proffer the mutant clover.

He looks it over and has to agree. "But it looks like two three-leaf clovers coming out of the top of that stem."

Retrieving my clover, I go and press it in my log book too. I'm starting to wonder what's in the dirt around here. Should I bring the issue up on safety day next week?

Mandatory lectures

Every week, we have to attend a mandatory lecture by a researcher here at the facility. They make at least half the lectures truly mandatory by passing out our paychecks at them. This week's lecture they tricked us. The checks weren't ready yet, but they didn't tell us that until we went to the conference center. And on the basis of the disorganized sign-in process for this lecture, I'm dreading the mob scene that will result when real, as opposed to hypothetical, paychecks are involved. Nonetheless, we manage to file in and listen to a lecture about a nifty airbrush vehicle and assorted rationalizations for its mission based on the agency mission statement.

Ha! Mission Statement! The real mission statement: "Because it's cool and we want to. Oh yeah, and the advancement of knowledge and all that." I doubt the real mission statement would go over too well with the taxpayers.

The other intern in my section, Amp&Effects, and I slide into the back row (benefit of arriving late) next to Dr. Iron Fist/Velvet Glove, who is here on the faculty version of the program.

Throughout the lecture, he chuckles (as do I) at particularly propagandistic moments and emits little hisses at beating-of-dead-horse moments. At the end, we're subjected to announcements about different events, mostly lunches for people other than me. Dr. IF/VG greets the start of each announcement with "Eh!" and the end by making as if to rise.

"Now, for the picnic, be sure you bring proof of age…"

"Eh!"

"For faculty members, there will be a dutch luncheon in the cafeteria…"

"Eh!"

I can see Skipper two rows ahead. He is being good, sitting still for a whole hour. A new record for him? Dr. IF/VG should be ashamed. He may be getting a new nickname. Dr. Fidget, perhaps.

Finally the last announcement has been announced. Dr. IF/VG hops up and moves his arms like he's running. "Okay, let's go!"

I jump up too and put on my hat. "Yes! Back to work!"

Ghost in the machine

Maybe it's not a ghost. Maybe the hardware is as flaky as I think it is.

I am trying to get consistent behavior out of some boards. Let's call them Hamsters. The Hamsters have a microprocessor and other nifty chips, and are supposed to collect data and send it over TCP/IP to a PC. The software on the PC with which the Hamsters interact indicates how many Hamsters are connected at any one time.

I've tested each of the Hamsters individually and together, so I'm sure they are all functional. When I left work last Thursday, all four were chatting happily with the PC. This morning when I power them up, only two and sometimes three connect with any consistency. I fiddle around, testing cables and connections, and eventually narrow in on the non-performing Hamster. I narrow further and determine that it's a bad cable. Then I hook all the Hamsters back up in their original configurations, bad cable and all, and suddenly all five are talking to the PC. That's right—five.

I'm wondering what established that fifth socket, seeing as how there are only four Hamsters. Data are coming in through only three of the sockets. If I had five data streams, I'd be scared.

O₃

All week I explore the building and the contents of the lab where I'm working. This is necessary because, just like at school, one has to scrounge around for cables, connectors, function generators, hand tools, and anything else needed to put together whatever one might be working on, so it helps to have a vague idea where to find things. Unlike at school, where the resources are contained in a two-room lab, all these resources are distributed throughout a huge building. Moreover, the lab where I am working this summer has collected the usual detritus one would expect to find in a room that doubles as storage because it is relatively unused, as well as an assortment of interesting equipment. I find the 42-inch plasma display very interesting. I hooked it up to the computer that I'm using, but the video card therein doesn't do justice to the display. It's not for me anyhow (Duh), it's for a scanning-tunneling microscope which is to be used in association with the nanotube generating apparatus over by the window.

I have been wondering about the gas cylinders and the nanotube thing. A big metal box with glass tubes sticking out both ends and danger signs all over, it is not obviously related to the other research being done at this end of the hall and I assumed it was in this room for storage purposes. I was wrong! A professor who's on the faculty version of my internship program is going to be making up nanotubes this summer. He did his first run on Thursday.

One of the technicians (technician: person who knows how to do everything) across the hall helps him set it up. They have a little trouble removing the cap from the end of the glass tube through which the "sample" (material in which he is trying to grow nanotubes) is to be inserted. (I'm sure there are proper technical terms for all these pieces-parts, but I don't know them yet.)

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this," says the professor, who looks nervously amused when he realizes what he's said.

Hee! That's what I've been telling myself all through engineering school, and it's never struck me as odd till I started working on this project. Because, uh…

They eventually get it set up and then turn it on. The machine has to warm up to 1000 °C and stay there for a few hours. Because the window air conditioner is in a position such that it blows cold air onto the glass tubing, they shut off the air conditioner. The machine also has a tremendous voltage source. "No smoking or open flames within twenty feet while operating!"

The lab begins to warm up and I notice a smell: the thunderstorm precursor scent of ozone. I smell a lot of ozone, way more than the spicy little whiff one enjoys from the power source of one's train set. I start to feel dizzy and I can't concentrate on the not overly spellbinding TCP/IP documentation I'm reading. I open the door to the hall a little wider and find reasons to go elsewhere.

This run doesn't work out. No nanotubes. Bummer. But we've got all summer…

Dweeb heaven

My building has many doors. I am working on finding them all. Leaving through one of the four (so far) that I've found leading to the parking lot, I walked around the building at lunch the other day, just to see what I could see. And this is what I saw as I walked around one end. No word yet on what exactly is in all those spheres, but one is clearly a water tower. Something about the haze in the air and the shapes messes with my sense of perspective. The lack of human-scale features, like windows, on the structures doesn't help either. It's hard to gauge the distance, but these are actually rather close—not more than five minutes' walk—from where I stood to take this picture.

Don't panic

During orientation, they told us about the Venus transit and that we should be sure to watch it, to which my response was Are you people fucking kidding? We should stare into the sun? After being subjected to four hours of orientation, I figured that these people are capable of just about anything and obviously they hate us all. But they passed out these nifty sun-viewing glasses so that we actually could stare at the sun without going blind.

These are cardboard glasses, reminiscent of 3-D movie glasses, except that you can't see through them. Whoa! I always wanted danger-sensitive sunglasses! So I've been staring at the sun. It's like having superpowers.

On Tuesday morning, the morning of the Venus transit, I had to get up at 5:00 for my eighty-mile commute down to the research center and I planned to stop at the rest area and exercise my superpowers. Sunrise at 5:45, they said, except for the fog and clouds. Visibility was so terrible that I had to obey the speed limit on the interstate. However, luck was with me (I found a four-leaf clover on Monday): the fog lifted slightly when I reached the rest area at 6:15 and the clouds thinned. When I stopped, I pulled my danger-sensitive sunglasses out of my purse and viewed the sun, which was blurred by the excess moisture in the sky but not quite enough to obscure the little dark smudge (Venus!) at the bottom. After doing the happy dweeb dance, I got back in the car and headed on out. The fog rolled back in and the clouds slammed back into place for the rest of the morning.

Next Venus Transit in eight years.

dis(Oriented)

Interns get orientated. Boy howdy, do we ever. Yesterday we got four hours of orientation, by the end of which we're practically screaming, "Please let us go work? Please?"

We get told almost immediately about the national day of mourning for Reagan, so that ends the suspense for me.

We get a presentation about the different fields of research at our facility. Various aerospace things, space things (Mars!), Earth-observing and monitoring technologies, and so on. The speaker is emotionally involved with the subject matter, especially when something environmental comes up. He shows us a graph. "Look, CFCs have leveled off and that's good, but this line represents the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. See how it's going up and up? A 'certain political party' thinks that this is not a problem and we should 'don't worry be happy.'" At one point we see slides of Glacier National Park with photographs of a glacier taken in 1910 and within the last decade. The glacier has shrunk to a fifth of its 1910 size. "And by 2015 all the glaciers will be gone. So what the hell are we going to call the national park then?"

We get a safety video which includes instructions on how to walk down stairs. Just in case we haven't mastered that yet. And how to call 911. And then we get a PowerPoint presentation of the same information. What about these chairs? My back is killing me. Workplace injury!

We are told about all the things we cannot tell foreign nationals or people who are not foreign nationals, but may talk to foreign nationals. Or post to the Web where a foreign national might see it. What will I write about this summer? Oh, look a million dollar fine. But none of that applies to public domain or publicly available information which is—whatever they say it is.

We are instructed about IT security by the IT security guy and his html-based presentation. Each of about a million pages includes an audio track that reads the text on the page. Each page includes a link to the next page which the IT guy right-clicks and opens in new window. Netscape can only take so much of this until the audio locks up and then starts playing the audio for multiple pages at once. "Hmm. I don't know why it's doing this…" I sense the forward twitch of the crowd as we all restrain ourselves from surging forward to straighten out the poor, beleaguered laptop. Three-fingered salute! Task Manager! Augh! Let me fix it.

When we've had all that we can take, they give us a seven minute break and the fun continues while we're informed about special stuff for the interns: luncheon, mandatory lectures, volleyball (not mandatory), and our proximity to the beach. After telling us how this is the biggest group of interns they've ever had in the program, they make us pass around a microphone and introduce ourselves, triggering more sotto voce pleading to be released from me and Skipper (one of my classmates who's also in this internship program). No! No! Not that. Let us go. Ple-ee-ease.

And then we're told to stare into the sun so we can see the Venus transit.

Can I bill for this time?

I swear, last night I woke up every hour on the hour with the code for my finite state machine dancing through my head. Where are the visions of sugarplums? Don't I get sugarplums? It wouldn't have been so bad (yes, lack of sleep==bad, but apart from that), if it hadn't been basically the same bad dream over and over again. This morning I was able to fix the odd compile time errors and get it all working, or at least functioning incorrectly in a way that I can't yet determine, but I don't think I owe that to my overactive subconscious working on the problem all night long.

Following instructions

In the hardware definition language, I create a finite state machine (FSM: a little computer entity that carries out a set of tasks, step by step). It has too many states, I am informed by Dr. Smith. It should have six states, as shown in the diagram on the white board, not ten.

"I based mine on the ones that were already written," I explain. This project has been around for a few years and there's a lot of old code floating around. Anyway, some of the six states require multiple steps to implement, hence the extra states.

"Oh, well, I didn't like those," Dr. Smith says.

Okay. I can see that my next task will be to rewrite all the old finite state machines. But how? Glad you asked… I get a long description about how to break the FSM into multiple processes so that it will execute faster, be easier to maintain and modify, and not have more than six states. By now I am looking pretty dazed, which he must interpret as my being unhappy that my initial design was a reject (I'm not. I'd rather learn how to write good code than have my bad code let slide. This is a lack of sleep combined with hypoglycemia sort of daze.) and he launches into the lecture about modular design and on and on.

At last I am released to eat a granola bar and rewrite the FSM. Crunch. I do. It's modular all right: the main module consists only of declarations for the three sub-modules. Ha! Modular! I send the file to the printer in his office and let him know that I finished it. "I haven't tried to compile it yet or anything."

Ten minutes later he carries the printout into the lab. "You know, there's such a thing as going to extremes."

This is the way we R&D, R&D, R&D

We get stuff working and then we break it again.

The morning is tough. The logic is fine, the programming file for the FPGA (field programmable gate array) compiles and configures, and the software runs on the board. However, when I stick a probe on the pins of interest (those through which the control signals are passed to the chips), the oscilloscope flatlines. The system is obviously getting hung up somewhere and I am instructed to find out where. This involves putting the code through a simulator, which involves re-learning how to use the simulator, which…You get the picture. And the simulator, after appropriate sacrifices to the ModelSim gods, reveals that the logic is fine, the programming file is fine, etc. Back to the hardware. I am told to bring the counter value, which is incremented to step the system sequentially through the different states, out to the LEDs so we can see for sure where it's getting hung up. Easy enough. I do so and suddenly the system works perfectly. No more flatlines, the scope shows all the signals pulsing exactly as they should down to the nanosecond. The FIFO fills up and is emptied out by the PC. Beautiful.

The only change I made was to direct a different signal out to the LEDs. Is this what they call the observer effect? The lazy-ass system shapes right up when I look at it closely.

The hardware synthesis tools are a fickle lot indeed.

But, hey, it's working. Time to add the next level of functionality. I wire some of the control signals to a dip switch and send one into a data pin of the FIFO.

It stops working. More specifically, it works wonderfully, except that the FIFO stays empty no matter how many times it is written.

The hardware synthesis tools are a fickle lot indeed.

The computer can't count

This is very bad. If there's one thing a computer is supposed to do, it's count. Arithmetic is applied counting and computers were designed to do it very quickly and very accurately. A computer that can't count from 0 to FFFF (aka "64K" or 65,535 in base ten) using a sixteen bit unsigned integer number type^* to hold the value does not merit the title "computer" and should be called "expensive coaster" instead. Or maybe "small, rectangular Frisbee that doesn't loft well." (These are tiny, solid state PCs. Eminently throw-able.) Yes, I'm blaming the hardware again, but I'm willing to consider the perfidy of DOS 6.22 and this aged C++ compiler we have to use. The FIFO may be innocent of many of the crimes with which it was charged. It seems that when I instructed the PC to write 64K values to the FIFO, it was only writing 32K values and then the counter flipped over to 0, then –1, then –2, and so on. No wonder the Full Flag never turned on. It's as if I only have fifteen bits to work with. Even though I declared my counter as "unsigned" (meaning that the computer won't use the sixteenth bit to indicate whether the number is positive or negative), the computer isn't giving me my sixteenth bit! I even tried declaring my counter as a "long" integer so I'd have 32 bits, but it won't give me 32 bits either. I suppose there's a way around this. I could perhaps write a routine that forces the computer to count in base 28? Oooh! Sudden flash of insight: This counting problem might explain some of the erroneous values being written out to the FIFO because I use the counter to calculate the values and…Never mind. I had the same problem with the 256 byte FIFO and the computer can certainly count up to 256.

^*"Oh no! Techo-babble!" cries the reader.

"Don't worry. It's easier than you think." I explain, "The computer stores the number as ones and zeros in a memory location which holds sixteen ones and zeros. You can only count up so far with sixteen bits. Just think of it like the odometer on an old car. The odometer can't count past 99,999 because it's only got five digits to work with. When you drive the car 100,000 miles, the odometer has to flip back to 00,000. With sixteen bits, you can count up to 64K before you have to flip back to all zeros."

Stupid questions, smartass answers

Last night I bought another ergonomic keyboard so I wouldn't have to keep carrying my good one back and forth to school. I hope to get through this internship without becoming really crippled, as opposed to more-or-less crippled as I am now, and I may manage it with the ergonomic keyboard, touchpad pointing device, and making sure I have braces on both wrists anytime I touch a computer. Because I am not officially disabled, I have to provide all my accommodation out of my own shallow pockets and just hope that no one I work for stops me from using my potpourri of assistive devices. I'm not sure why I've been having so much trouble, probably because the setup is enough less optimal than my setup at home and the activity level is enough different from what I'm used to.

This afternoon I am in the lab, trying to make LEDs light up because they won't and I must find out why. I do find my stupid oversight eventually: I didn't have them fully implemented in the code. My wrists are doing okay, but my right elbow has gotten all inflamed so I'm still not comfortable.

The Absentminded Dean wanders in with a group of the trustees who are holding a meeting of some sort today. He likes to drag visitors through the labs to talk about all the research projects. The Gambler (I'm not sure what his job here is. What he does for hours on end is play four simultaneous games of video poker while IM-ing people.) and I are the only ones in this lab today and none of the cool-looking projects are ours, so we are not much help to the dean. I rather wonder what the trustees thought when they saw all those video poker games up on the 20" LCD display that the Gambler uses. The Absentminded Dean herds the trustees over to me and asks to be reminded yet again of my name. Thinking one of these days I'm going to snap and say something really obnoxious, I tell him my name.

"And what project are you working on?"

"Right now I'm trying to make these little lights turn on, but this is part of the…" I go on for some time about the project.

One of the trustees asks about my wrist braces.

Figuring the short answer is best, I sigh, "I have carpal tunnel syndrome."

"And you're still using a computer?" The Absentminded Dean asks.

"Well, I guess I could just starve," I snap, drawing nervous chuckles from the trustees and making myself such an asset to the school. But really, how does one complete a computer engineering degree without using a computer? Or hold down any kind of job that doesn't involve manual labor (also not an option for me)?

After a few more questions about the project and my wrist braces (and my unsatisfactory—to the Dean—answer about the speed of the Sun workstations in the next room), they all troop out and leave me to my LEDs, my sore elbow, and the happy prospect of the Dean possibly avoiding me in the future.

The hardware still hates me

At this point, I have come to hate the hardware more than it hates me. The hardware had better start living in fear and performing consistently. It can perform wrongly—I can deal with wrong—but inconsistency is not acceptable behavior on the part of a microchip. "Chip that makes intermittent errors" is simply a long way of saying "trash."

Nonetheless, until I can think of a convincing way to hit the bad FIFO with a hammer by accident and render it completely non-functional, I'm stuck analyzing the ways (note the plural) that it screws up. At least I'm entirely justified in blaming the hardware (I've noticed that everyone in the lab blames the hardware for everything: bad bits, lost packets, global warming …), because I have a second board with a good FIFO, a good FPGA, and a good PC on which I have verified my code. We're very scientific about all this, except when I lose my temper and say, "Hah! You stupid FIFO, I shall write to you seven bajillion times! Take that!" Actually, I did this and then the FIFO, briefly cowed into submission, wrote data correctly for a while. I'm getting a little too emotionally involved.

Today I learned of a third board, but it runs off a special battery which is out of charge. Dr. Smith showed me the battery and said, "When you're hunting around for stuff in the lab, see if you can find anything that looks like the charger for this. Then we can start running this board too." Hunting around is the only way to find anything here, but usually you don't find what you're looking for until the day after you needed it. If not purposely hidden, tools, materials, and hardware are organized by the pile-on-the-counter or the shove-in-random-cabinet method.

I'm beginning to suspect this is all an evil plan of Dr. Smith's. He was going to be out next week, packing and moving house, but now he's saying that he'll be in after all because "we aren't as far along as he thought we'd be." I can see he's terribly broken up about having to come in to the lab instead of putting things in boxes. I wonder if Mrs. Smith is onto him.

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.)

The hardware hates me

The assorted printed circuit boards, wires, and solid state devices decided to get on with that baptism by fire that I'm due. I hope they've got that out of their systems or I'm going to degauss their sorry little butts with a hammer. I did manage to get through the day without breaking anything on purpose, however, and I hope to continue that streak tomorrow. I could tell lots of stories about my adventures for the day, but my finger joints are aching from all that plugging defective hardware into slots, trying to make it work, removing it, ad nauseam thing I did all day. And the quart of Guinness I had with dinner has about worn off, so I'm really hurting.

For illustration: A wire broke off one of the circuit boards and the bit left soldered into the via-hole had to be removed so the wire could be replaced, there being no other place to pick up 5 V. But once the wire was finally removed (long story: lack&(experience | extra hands | proper tools)=excessive hassle), the via-hole was plugged with solder. Gentle methods of melting and wicking out the solder don't work (I now have a microscopic piece of copper wicking embedded in my left thumb). Getting draconian, Dr. Smith sticks the tip of the soldering iron into the hole and, when the solder melts, quickly bangs the board on the counter to knock it out. Handing me the board, he says, "That's probably not the NASA-approved way to do that."

Exorcise the FIFO

Okay, so he said "exercise the FIFO," but that's not what leaps to mind, is it?

My assignment, now that I've chosen to accept it, is to write software to run on some specific hardware that no one has got working yet the way it's supposed to. Of course, if it were working, then I wouldn't have a job right now, so I can't complain. "FIFO" means "first in, first out" and this FIFO is basically a data buffer. Data are stuffed in one end and read out from the other end in the order in which they arrived, hence the name. I will be writing code to run on an itty bitty PC (it's about the size of a credit card) and operate the FIFO: reset it, read from it, write data to it. As a bonus challenge, the PC is running DOS (remember DOS? from back when everything ran off the command line?) and therefore requires me to write for a rather archaic C compiler (the compiler is what takes the code I write and turns it into a real program). "Forsooth! Tho' the fourth bit is one, let it now be zero that the first datum may be read."

Cross purposes

The seniors are restless. They want this project to be done and damn the synchronization problems! The professors are full of suggestions for further tweaks and kindly don't laugh out loud when the kids blame the problems on differing propagations through the cables to the various boards (because unless the cables are a mile long, that nanosecond delay per foot isn't perceptible to the equipment). That's right, blame the hardware!

The kids fall back on their next suspect: dropped packets. In fact, the real source of the error is that they're having to use TCP/IP which is not appropriate for the type of data synchronization they're doing.

My part in this? I'm taking over the project after they leave. I have to get them to tell me all they know, walk me through their code, and show me how to use all the development software during the same four-day window that they are wrapping everything up, writing their paper, and preparing for their final exams. And Dr. Smith, who is responsible for the continuation of the project, has got his own priorities.

Damn. People skills.

Can't I just hide behind a computer?

Did anything happen today?

I paid a stack of bills. That was painful. I did the computer simulation assignment for Electronic Devices in less than two hours. Not painful at all. Now I'm wondering if Dr. ED thinks we're stupid. What's the deal with giving us an assignment we understand? None of the other professors do that. Anyway, I was feeling all accomplished after making a pretty graph of collector currents for a bipolar junction transistor. Starting my DSP homework took care of that sense of accomplishment pretty quickly. It took about an hour of thinking and reading before I understood the first problem. I still don't think I understand it. I'm glad this DSP problem set has only three problems. Only three opportunities to feel stupid this week! Actually, that's not true. I'm sure I'll have many more, because we have a big computer science homework problem set too.

The NASA internship paperwork arrived in the mail today. In addition to the acceptance form, background check form, and housing information, they sent us a bumper sticker for "Space Flight Awareness" and a nice picture of the astronauts who died in the Columbia disaster. The sticker I understand. The picture I don't.

Really?

By the front door of the building formerly known as the Shockoe Bottom Arts Center
North 21st and East Grace Streets

I'm in the lab giving up on my DSP homework because I have somehow become too stupid to do it. Before I pack up to go, I check my email to see if the career center person has got back to me. If I'm going to interview for another internship, I have to have her approve my resume first and the application deadline for an internship in which I'm interested is late next week. Not that I have a chance. The Prestigious Internship Program didn't take me even with my professor calling in favors and saying "Pick her!" I'm wondering if this whole engineering thing was totally misguided, because obviously no one will hire me. (Yes, I'm still having to use those highly depressive eye drops. Most of this attitude and the cognitive problems I'm having with my homework are a direct reflection of that.)

A new message has come in and I scroll down to that it's from—NASA. The Prestigious Internship Program. And they've finally come to their senses and funded me. I guess the fourth time's the charm. I'm really pleased about this, but what with the depression I don't have any trouble suppressing squeals of delight. So he'll know, I forward the salient bit of the email to the professor who's been trying to get me in and thank him for all his help.

So I have my internship. I get a little help on my DSP homework and only have to wipe tears from my eyes a couple times. Turns out that I was doing it correctly and didn't know it.