Tag: engineering Posts

Almost ten years ago, I started playing around with some microprocessor hobby kits at home. At the time they main ones were called STAMPS and you programmed them with BASIC. You could make them run motors, measure temperature, pretty much whatever you wanted them to do. A few weeks ago I ran into my friend John, and he was telling me about a similar thing called the Arduino. It’s basically a small little microprocessor kit that has basic inputs and outputs that you can use to do arbitrary things. Given that I’m an electrical engineer by education and that I haven’t really done anything electrical in years, I thought it would be fun to try and build something small over the winter. So, I came up with a random idea involving an automated beer cooler. The idea would be to have a device that could cool a beer in a […]

It’s one of those questions that everyone always asks you at parties — what do you do? I guess the normal answer is to tell people what you do for a living, which in my case would currently be web development. That being said, some people tend to tell people what they are trained to do. For example, if you have a CA, you’d say you’re an accountant, or if you have a mechanical engineering degree, you’d say you’re a mechanical engineer. If you took software engineering, you’d say you were a software engineer. I did my undergrad in engineering physics, which is one of the few engineering disciplines where you don’t really have a bone fide title when you come out. I guess I could say I’m an engineering physicist, but I’m not really sure what that means. In terms of a graduate degree, I did my master’s in […]

It seems that after eight years of university I’ve acquired a fairy large array of engineering books. Since I haven’t read any of them in years, I figure I might as well sell a few of them off. Here’s a list of some of them. If you’re interested, drop me a comment. Also, please feel free to forward this list on to any physics or electrical engineering students. Materials Science and Engineering, William D. Callister Digital Signal Processing, Emmanuel C. Ifeachor Introduction to Electrodymanics, Griffiths Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, Griffiths Microprocessor Systems Design, Clements Computer Networks, Andrew Tanenbaum Modern Control Systems, Dorf & Bishop Digital Image Processing, Gonzalez & woods Fluid Mechanics, White – SOLD Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems, Boyce and DiPrima Optics, Hecht Microelectronic Circuits, Sedra and Smith Contemporary Logic Design, Katz Micro-Optics, Elements, Systems and Applications, Herzig ADSL/VDSL Priciples, Rauschmayer Calculus of Several Variables, Robert […]

So, I give this guy a few brownie points for making some cool robotic arm thing. I think he has a little too much time on his hands though. Although the dog sure seems to be having fun.

Tonight, while sitting at home on the couch, I was reminded of a conversation I had last week with someone that I hadn’t talked to in quite some time. That person was someone I used to hang out with quite a bit in university, but haven’t really seen that much of in the last few years. We both somehow ended up in software development, although I’ve stayed more along the lines of developing software while he has moved on to managing a small team of developers. The thing is, I left the conversation somehow being made to feel bad that after eight years in my career I haven’t advanced to full-time management, something this person moved into a few years ago. When I asked him if he still coded, he basically scoffed, implying it was basically beneath him now. I’ve actually been in charge of people a few times in […]