I don’t get too personal on my blog.

1. My blog is about my professional life (mostly)
2. It’s just the way I am

But on the way home last night I was thinking about how I might define a perfect day and thought it could be a good insight into who I am. You might not care but Chris-ten-years-from-now might, so I’ll write it for him. I think the exercise is healthy as long as it’s not taken too far (ie. I don’t plan on arranging my whole life around constructing this day exactly); but in general believe that this image should be used as a guide towards what I would like to be doing with my life and what I would like to accomplish.

First off, a smart grid does not yet exist. It’s not exactly dumb, but it’s unwieldy and needs some help getting itself under control.

So let’s think of the electricity grid as an elephant.

It’s big, it’s powerful and it takes a ton of work to get it moving in one direction or another. It’s also really expensive to get it from one place to another. If you want to move an elephant over a distance of hundreds of miles, it’s going to want some peanuts, after all.

Now that we’ve made it through a bit of the summer, I think we really need to focus on something important.

Winter is on the way!

If I recall correctly, my home is still not quite up to snuff in terms of how much money I’d like it to cost me to heat and energize my house. I realize my home will never be 100% efficient. I also realize I’m not going to plop down money to get to 100% because that’s silly and sort of impossible. Instead, I have to pick my battles with my own castle and decide what will produce the biggest returns.

I like it when I understand things. The universe feels like a little safer place, even if I realize feeling secure is only a state of mind. And when I watched Steven Chu talk on the Daily Show the other night, I felt safer. Not like a warm security blanket kind of safe. More like a “Hey, if stuff hits the fan, we’ll probably be able to figure it out” kind of safe.

I had an interesting conversation today with a few friends about the exodus of young people from the workplace back to school during this recession. It seems as though people in Generation Y are bailing left and right on current jobs and diving back under the safe covers of academia. And who can blame them? You get to work on interesting research (hopefully), you get a stipend (maybe) and you have better prospects when you’re all done (eh, doubtful). But that leads me to ask, “Who’s going to do all the work when the economy is in full swing again?” Let’s survey the current demographics, starting from the top:

Irony is having a blog post in your queue with a title such as this one and just sitting on it for weeks on end. Luckily I’ve been trying some things instead of studying them, it just so happens that those things have nothing to do with this site. I hope to discuss those on this site soon.

I am a glutton for knowledge.  Part of it is my fear of looking silly in front of co-workers when I don’t know the answer to something. Part of it is feeling like my knowledge base is lacking and the thought that I can always learn or teach myself something new. But when presented with a new challenging situation that requires you to learn the question is always the same: where do you start? Do you jump in and try it out? Or sit back and study what others have tried so as to not duplicate their mistakes?

I find myself sitting around these days trying to catch up on knowledge I feel like I missed in school. Worse, I feel like I learned it at one time but it all fell out the other side once I took the exam. Pretty standard really, when you don’t think you’re going to need to the knowledge some day. Haven’t you ever sat in class wondering if you’d really ever use the material you were expected to learn? How much did you pay attention?

The Digital Switchover.

Not me. I almost did that a while back, but no. Not me.

Television.

Normally I wouldn’t write about it. A digital television standard is long overdue and in the end this will be a good thing. When you compare Analog vs Digital, there are many more benefits on the digital side of things: lower power for transmission, better bandwidth of signal, more bandwidth usage over the spectrum. All of these are good things. I can even talk about how those digital signals still have lots of analog components as they’re transmitted over the airwaves: multipath, signal loss, power calculation, reception problems, etc.

One of the best parts of working with others interested in electronics is having similar hobbies: namely, electronics and music.  And even though I have similar hobbies, I never really brought them up in conversation with co-workers (believe me, some of the stuff I have done pales in comparison to some of the people I work with). However, in the past few weeks it has really paid off talking about my non-work work, both for my personal hobbies and for things to write about that interest me.

If you are an engineer who regularly works with your hands, you likely troubleshoot on a daily basis. It’s just part of the job. Sure, you can say, “I never mess up!”, but hardly anyone will believe you. Because even when your best laid plans go perfectly, Murphy’s Law will soon kick in to balance things out. We learn to deal with these things and have developed tools and measurement equipment to help us diagnose and deal with these problems: Multimeters, Electrometers, SourceMeters, Oscilloscopes, Network Analyzers, Logic Analyzers, Spectrum Analyzers, Semiconductor Test equipment (ha, guess I know a little about that stuff)…the list goes on and on. But what has struck me lately has been that as parts on printed circuit boards get smaller and smaller, troubleshooting is getting…well….more troubling.