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Recent News... Just for Pope Gregory... |
2006-06-09 - 12:26 p.m. Cheese and other things engineers do at lunch Roland has spent the week listening to me come home from work and yell Who moved my cheese? Not that I ever read that stupid management book, but the phrase rings true when we�re chasing open items between buildings and through cube-land mazes. You see, I have 16 things that must be approved by next week or my team doesn�t get stuff. No stuff = no build. No build = fall behind schedule = much more yelling. The people who approve are of the same group who care whether I get them their stuff on time � except they are divided into church (perfect technical process) and state (stay on schedule, dammit!) Perfect technical process has had 13 month to get it done. Well, that didn�t work. [Theo deletes three tries explaining the machinations � some boring, some inappropriate � all of them *profane*.] So, now my team and I are chasing each item. Yesterday the �one last thing� we needed to do changed three times in six hours. Each time my team intersected in a cube corridor, we would compare notes and find out that, once again, the cheese was somewhere else. One of the team asked for a hamster wheel today, so they could chase while standing still. Rage against the machine aside, I�m still amusing myself fooling with digital music editing. BdeB and I got a lot done Saturday, but I�m owning my hyphen and messing with filtering noise and balancing volume. I installed new features that let me design my own filters and because CDs are 8x oversampled when they play, they�re whats called an non-casual process. Which means you don�t have to decide what to do in the next second based on the last second � because the whole music file is right there the CD player can look at 8 seconds back and 8 seconds ahead and decide what sound to make for that instant. This is like seeing the future to a controls engineer. My real work is casual process. I can only decide how to react this instant based on the last few seconds. I can�t anticipate. I mean, I can try � there�s many techniques � but if my projections are wrong then I�ve done a bad thing. (Kind of like being an economist I suppose.) But if you are wrong about the future and you�re doing on a system that�s in motion, we call that destabilizing. That�s bad. At best, things spin out of control. At worst, they break catastrophically, hello Tacoma Narrows bridge. This means I get to design filters for the music that push the signal to do what I want with no regard for the consequences � bwhahahahahaha. So there I am sitting in the conference room just before an afternoon meeting eating a salad and merrily messing with the music as my colleagues assemble. In fact, three of them sit behind me just to make me paranoid. Theo: You�re all doing that on purpose now. Theo: I�m eating a salad and mixing music TK: No, she�s eating a salad and designing FFT filters. Thanks, TK, for diming me out. See if I tell you anything again. Everyone: What?!?! Why? Thus, I am forced explain the digital editing thingy. First, they mock me. That was the good part, which only lasted thirty seconds because then, they tried to help me. They draw closer to the screen, to the signals and spectrum graph and want to muck about with the FFT command. I put on swing music to deflect the intrusion, which works. Till they all start to dance. Have you ever seen engineers dance? � � � 
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