New Jersey Day....... Well The Rest Of Them

Sean — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 15:38:00 +0200

So writing 2 days behind turned into 3 turned into 4 turned into….... well, a week.

Things were pretty busy between diagnosing hardware problems (old power supplies dying really screws things up, you know?), software problems (no matter how many bugs you fix, running software in the field will always bring about more), and a combination of the two (what happens when you write code for a winch when you don’t have a 100% working example in the lab to test important things, like almost everything except movement).

End result: lots of code changes, lots of issues corrected, a lot of end user usability concerns written down. All in all this was pretty much what everyone expected going into this, and since nothing catastrophic happened, everyone appears quite happy. I had an awesome (though really tiring) time down here and am very glad I made the decision to. In the end, I learned a few new things, and came up with several ideas on both how to improve the user interface of the project as well as how to set things up in order to allow a trip like this to run more smoothly from the development side (I will be writing about some of those later).

One really important things:

They want me to go back down in a month. This is due to a number of things, including the fact that no tests were able to be performed in the water (due to dead power supplies) and the result in me doing an apparently awesome job, and my increasing familiarity with the code, along with my ability to discover, diagnose and fix problems even in areas that I am unfamiliar with. Technically, my supervisor wants me to work for them full time, degree or no degree, because he feels I am up to the task based on my work over the previous 4 months and, hey, I’m already trained.

There are some problems, however, mainly with a) me wanting my degree, b) the fact that I had registered for 5 classes, and c) prior commitments (being CS Social Rep is important for me as well). On the other hand, after hearing some of the future plans for Satlantic, I want to get more involved NOW so I can be included in all the cool stuff.

Some of you may recall asking me when I graduate. You will probably also distinctly remember me saying “May….... in theory”. Well, it looks like that theory proved wrong. I have just finished altering my class schedule yet again. Instead of taking a 5/3 workload, I am now doing a 4/3/1 workload. Since I ended up dropping Science Fiction, this means that I won’t have to spend time on writing lots of essays, and this will free up my Monday/Wednesday evenings, so I have more options for when I go into work at Satlantic and when to do everything else. Sure, this once again adds another 4 months to my degree again. On the other hand, based on the amount of stuff I have already done in the past 4 months, I know for a fact that I will do some cool stuff, learn a lot, have fun, and make some money while doing it.

Let’s see how this thing goes.

Crazy Or Genius?: Tag work

New Jersey Day....... Well The Rest Of Them