On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:45:20 GMT, "David L. Jones"
wrote:


"Jim Thompson" wrote in
message ...

Years ago I did design work for Arizona Microtek and helped a very
bright young student/junior engineer along with his education in
ASIC's and solid state design.

So where does he end up...

http://www.schreyeraudio.com/ ;-)

I had a colleague once to told me about showing off a product to his wife
that he spent 18 months of long hours helping to design.
Wife: "That's beautiful dear, but it took you 18 months to design that
little box?".
Husband: "Oh no, I didn't design the box, see that tiny black chip inside,
THAT'S what I spent 18 months of my life on!"

Dave.


Paraphrase from Woody Allen: 'My father worked in a factory all his
life, and was replaced by a little chip that could do everything he
could at twice the speed and half the cost. The depressing part was
that my mother went out and got one'.

People often ask me what I do. Most people think they understand what
a software engineer does, but after explaining my job in the simplest
terms, they usually end up asking whether I can remove the spyware
from their pc. My answer is usually 'can I borrow a hammer?'.

Hardware engineers can at least point at physical things and say "I
made that". People are always far more impressed by my silly little
hardware hacks than my software, even when I lie and say I invented
the internet.

I watched a Nova last night about the son of Hugh Everett, who was the
inventor of the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics. His
son is a rock musician, and the show was both a commercial for his
music, and his exploration of the work of his father, talking to his
father's friends and coworkers. He didn't have a clue, but the music
wasn't bad.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/manyworlds/

I guess nobody really gets what people in technology do except the
people who are also doing it.

Regards,
Bob Monsen