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Some updates and plans
9 years ago
I'm sure no one is really all that interested in what I'm up to, but I'm procrastinating, and writing a journal about it seems like as good a way as any to kill time.
Work got really stressful over the last few weeks. I went from pulling tons of overtime over the holidays to help spend year-end internal R&D money (which was actually pretty fun since I was basically hanging out with my friends working on our pet projects and generally doing what I love with zero pressure) and then straight into tons of overtime because the system we delivered to a customer wasn't working right and I'm now the only software developer supporting it (I inherited the codebase and hardware from a team of PhDs who, in hindsight, probably realized they were in over their heads and decided to get out while the getting was good).
The good news is that overtime = more money = closer to my goal of buying my own place. Real estate prices in socal are ridiculous (I could buy a mansion on 20 acres in Indiana for the cost of a down payment on a 2 bedroom house in San Diego). I'm not looking forwards to navigating all of the stress and hassle I suspect I'll be in for once I'm ready to start the buying process, but it will be awesome having my own place with no one to bother me (at least for a while, whatever I buy will definitely have to have an extra room for renting out just in case I get bored).
Then on the personal projects front I've got a few neat things going on. I've been working with a friend now for about a year building a coilgun. While there are literally hundreds of them out there to be found on YouTube, ours actually takes a pretty unique approach that I've only seen 2-3 other people do. We've seen pretty good success on our test platform so far with just 3 coils, and I've got a bunch of experiments planned to optimize it. Once that's figured out, we move up to 10 coils and double the kinetic energy.
I'm also slowly going over the material for a HAM license. There's a lot of really interesting things going on with software defined radio, plus I feel like what over learned from the coilgun project has given me enough knowledge to actually have some hope of comprehending RF. Once I'm out of this latest sprint at work I'll have to start looking into when and where the next opportunity to take the test will be.
Then there are two upcoming trips in their planning stages that should be pretty interesting. One is a sailing trip with some friends from San Diego to Catalina and back (it'll be a fun opportunity to play with HAM radio stuff too if I have my licence/equipment by then). We're going to start doing some shakedown cruises once a month until the trip in ~August while we get the boat ready and slowly buy equipment.
Then the other trip is going to be a visit to the UK to see friends, do touristy things, and also check out the UK Maker faire in April. Should be interesting. The tentative plan is to fly into Heathrow, spend a few days making our way north for maker faire, continue north from there to see other stuff, then back down to London to do more sightseeing for a few days before heading home.
So that's about it for me. Any of you guys doing anything interesting? Or even anything boring for that matter? I'd love to hear about it.
Work got really stressful over the last few weeks. I went from pulling tons of overtime over the holidays to help spend year-end internal R&D money (which was actually pretty fun since I was basically hanging out with my friends working on our pet projects and generally doing what I love with zero pressure) and then straight into tons of overtime because the system we delivered to a customer wasn't working right and I'm now the only software developer supporting it (I inherited the codebase and hardware from a team of PhDs who, in hindsight, probably realized they were in over their heads and decided to get out while the getting was good).
The good news is that overtime = more money = closer to my goal of buying my own place. Real estate prices in socal are ridiculous (I could buy a mansion on 20 acres in Indiana for the cost of a down payment on a 2 bedroom house in San Diego). I'm not looking forwards to navigating all of the stress and hassle I suspect I'll be in for once I'm ready to start the buying process, but it will be awesome having my own place with no one to bother me (at least for a while, whatever I buy will definitely have to have an extra room for renting out just in case I get bored).
Then on the personal projects front I've got a few neat things going on. I've been working with a friend now for about a year building a coilgun. While there are literally hundreds of them out there to be found on YouTube, ours actually takes a pretty unique approach that I've only seen 2-3 other people do. We've seen pretty good success on our test platform so far with just 3 coils, and I've got a bunch of experiments planned to optimize it. Once that's figured out, we move up to 10 coils and double the kinetic energy.
I'm also slowly going over the material for a HAM license. There's a lot of really interesting things going on with software defined radio, plus I feel like what over learned from the coilgun project has given me enough knowledge to actually have some hope of comprehending RF. Once I'm out of this latest sprint at work I'll have to start looking into when and where the next opportunity to take the test will be.
Then there are two upcoming trips in their planning stages that should be pretty interesting. One is a sailing trip with some friends from San Diego to Catalina and back (it'll be a fun opportunity to play with HAM radio stuff too if I have my licence/equipment by then). We're going to start doing some shakedown cruises once a month until the trip in ~August while we get the boat ready and slowly buy equipment.
Then the other trip is going to be a visit to the UK to see friends, do touristy things, and also check out the UK Maker faire in April. Should be interesting. The tentative plan is to fly into Heathrow, spend a few days making our way north for maker faire, continue north from there to see other stuff, then back down to London to do more sightseeing for a few days before heading home.
So that's about it for me. Any of you guys doing anything interesting? Or even anything boring for that matter? I'd love to hear about it.
