A Blog Post

We are up late writing on our laptops. I'm doing this, and don't know where it's going yet. My son is doing an essay for English 1A, the same freshman college course we all took, everywhere, and doesn't seem to know where it's going yet either. Thus the communal nature of this writing scene. The tapping of my fingers and an occasional grunt of paternal encouragement or completely random observation is sure to get him going.

Tomorrow I fly off to Oregon for the day, to hang about in labs and offices and ask questions and try to figure out how in the world I'm going to accomplish in the next few weeks a certain thing that needs accomplishing in the next few weeks. I'm doing it because we don't want the contracted EE in San Francisco to do it. We want an internal EE to do it. Since the labs and equipment are in the wild lands west of Portland, OR, it's only natural that the task fall to me, since I live six hundred miles south of Portland and ninety miles east of San Francisco, rather than to some EE up there in Oregon or the guy in the City. We have standards of corporate efficiency to maintain.

Last time I flew up there I took these pictures of the moon falling away from the dawn.

  

They're not much as pictures, but from a distance they're kind of nice.

Just to break the mood, here's a typical lab scene. I won't mention what or where it is, being as someone somewhere who has more power than sense might think I was compromising someone somewhere's intellectual property.


This is the electrical engineer's domain. Just as there are supposedly three races of men, there are three major races of engineers. ("Just as" meaning the idea is completely wrong, but it works occasionally as a model.) They are mechanical, electrical, and software. I was noticing something about these three. As they age and mature and gain the potential for roles of leadership, a natural demarcation seems to arise.

Most of the leaders, the project managers, the people managers, they are mechanical engineers. They're not the brightest, but they're solid people, excellent note-takers and minutes-senders, even-handed task-masters, goal-oriented, practical. At the other end are the twisted geniuses of the team, the jokesters, the coders and gamers, the brilliantly unfashionable software engineers who work the longest and hardest hours but whom you really wouldn't want in charge of anything. In between, sometimes filling one role or the other but mostly just getting their work done with a maximum of cynicism are the electrical engineers, the sparkies, the guys who add cool blue LEDs to the project and then sneer at you for liking them.

This continuum is reflected in their work domains. Mechanicals work in the real world. They make things you can see, touch, and hold. Electricals work with real physical processes but you can only observe them by their secondary effects: lights, oscilloscope traces, puffs of smoke. The software people work in an entirely virtual world. All they do is shove bits around in a computer, bits that are nothing more than momentary voltage states or tiny magnetic fields. Yes, yes, they have to know where to shove them. I'm not going there.

This subject suddenly made me feel like these guys. Bet it did you too, huh?


Somewhere in Utah. Warm morning sun. Slow-moving river. The absolute quiet of the desert but for a few tiny buzzing insects. *yawn*