cmos

I'm sorry about your career - this must have been difficult to write about. Sometimes it's about the journey, take solace that you just might be in a temporary dip in your life adventure. How can some of these setbacks be opportunities?

It is indeed a fact we have to face, and the best way to do it is to stop eating fish, if you have the luxury to be able to do that and other foods are available.

I have found there are people who enjoy getting into the weeds of problem solving (possibly a minority) and other people who work really well with the weed divers in applying their results. I am a person who has benefited from this symbiotic relationship in school and in my profession, from the helpful study partner to the helpful stackoverflow answer. All of them have enabled me to build things bigger than I would be capable of doing alone, and they have seen their efforts as a crucial building block. Figure out what you enjoy and find people/tools/forums who compliment you.

Throw into this confusion a badly implemented public transportation system that you find in most US cities.

Public transportation and city bike rental systems should be free to ride. We all pay taxes to keep roads maintained, we should all pay taxes to keep public transportation maintained.

Not charging would help busses keep their schedules with less queuing and waiting, tourists would be less likely to rent a car, and it could help that chicken and egg problem. The problem with charging people with riding public transportation is you are taxing the very people we should be rewarding. The people who are committing to taking up less space on the road and living with a smaller carbon footprint are being penalized for their hugely beneficial decision to society not to drive. Making public transportation better and free are the two things that can transform a city and make it more equitable. Poor people would have more money and more places available to spend it. Every city benefits from its people having more money to spend and more places to spend it.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute | Electrical Engineer | Wood Hole, MA | Full-time | Onsite

Looking for a job that has an impact on how we understand the ocean and climate change? At WHOI we get to build really interesting technologies to better understand the ocean. You might be debugging an AUV on the arctic ice, or on the back of a ship operating a winch pulling up an ROV, or designing a circuit to record audio. There is so much going on at WHOI and engineers often work on multiple projects. I recently received funding to design an open source underwater AUV.

This job opening is for a project I worked on - creating a 3D soundscape by mounting 28 hydrophones onto five 30' arms and building an underwater recording studio to record it while compressing the stream to telemeter home after hopping to our larger buoys.

Oceanography is still a young industry, there is a lot of 'firsts' you can still be a part of. This been the most fulfilling job I have ever had.. and I did my own startup for 12 years and made video games. I also enjoy living on Cape cod!

Let me know if you have any questions.. jreine whoi edu

Full job description: https://careers-whoi.icims.com/jobs/1508/electrical-engineer...

Yes, we use these in ocean bottom and subsurface buoys. However only for audio and seismic activity do we need this kind of accuracy. The cost is high, they don't always work perfect, and they consume a fair amount of power for long deployments. Overall we try to avoid them if possible.

It was 1992 and I was a high school senior. My teacher got me a job at the local DPW in the electical department. I was to work in the warehouse under a guy named Al who was an old timer and lost his hand in a forklift accident 30 years prior. My job was to clean the warehouse, and when I was done Al told me to 'go hide somewhere' which I did, at the top of the shelves 20' in the air, which I had also cleaned. This got boring and so I wandered into the main office where people were huddled over a computer. They were doing a mail-merge with quick basic to inform customers that their power would be out, and it wasn't working. I looked over their shoulders and it was exactly what I had been doing to send out mailings to companies for free stuff as I had read in Radio-Electonics magazine. I fix the problem, and the Chief Engineer said 'come with me' and takes me to the (air conditioned!) sub-station and into an even colder computer room where they had just setup the SCADA system to control the towns breakers and monitor the power. Nobody knew how to program it, so he pointed to a 3' pile of manuals and said this was my new job. By the end of the summer we saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand. I still hung out with Al, and helped him in the mornings. The linesmen still made fun of me, even more so when I accidentally turned off half the towns power for 15 minutes.

For 1.5 year I biked around the US camping with the occasional hotel.. I had an 11" macbook air with a data plan. Sometimes I would throw a rope over a branch and pull my phone up high to get cell signal, connecting to the phone via bluetooth. I did hardware development, fortunately for mobile hardware, so that packed away nicely. I would charge/work at a nice cafe if there was one, then at night a bit, and every 7-10 days get a hotel and work nonstop. I had a solar panel for my phone, but if I were to do it again I would get a bigger one to charge my laptop as well.

I loved it. Check out adventurecycling.org if you are interested - there are maps for biking routes all over the US.

Never asked.. people just offered. I attribute this to being on a bicycle, disheveled, loaded with my gear, biking through towns that don't normally see a biker. I would sometimes ask if people knew a nice quiet place to camp, which resulted in either them inviting me over OR the local epic camping spot.

Sometimes my meal was paid for by someone in the cafe. Park Rangers brought me extra food, at campsites fellow campers would invite me over for dinner. One day on the Natchez Trace I got the trifecta: breakfast, lunch + dinner all provided for by people.

When people see someone on an adventure they often want to hear stories. They also want to tell you their stories, and often need someone just to listen to them, be there for a nonjudgemental cry or help navigate a big life decision or just as a sounding board. As a traveller passing through they feel a certain freedom to open up, knowing I'll be gone the next day. One old guy texted me months later saying "2 months not smoking!", another fellow I biked with for a day texted me "my wife is pregnant!" after he talked about whether he wanted kids or not for a day.

Also, everyone has a broken computer at their home or small business, and need help getting something working. So in some cases that was an entry point. I often offered to help them and get things in order, sometimes making lifetime friendships. If I was a musician I would have been busking.

check out adventurecycling.org !!

I got rid of everything I owned and spent 1.5 years biking around the US. I lived at a whitewater rafting company for 3 weeks, was hosted at music festivals, taken in by hundreds of people and lived in yellowstone for a month in their hiker/biker campsites for $2/day. I was working part time the whole time for a small mobile hardware startup.

It was amazing!! The toughest part was being alone the whole time, though in solitude I relived my life from the earliest moments, going through each grade in school, unwrapping memories and figuring out the rough bits as I pedaled.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

"We go to impossible places to do impossible things." - Dr. Mark R. Abbott, WHOI President and Director

Some of the jobs available at WHOI:

- Robotic Software Engineer to work within the VAST (Various Autonomous Subsea Technologies) group within the Deep Submergence lab. Develop soft real time control code, communications code, GUIs and other code for AUV operations.

https://careers-whoi.icims.com/jobs/1274/robotics-software-e...

- Robotics Engineer, Oceanographic Systems Lab (OSL). OSL is one of the world’s leaders in AUV technology and their operations in many complex oceanographic environments. Perform a wide range of mechanical design and system testing tasks related to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and their subsystems. The position will include both mechanical (70%) and systems (30%) engineering, with a focus on detailed design of mechanical systems and integration of multiple electrical subsystems, sensors and power sources.

https://careers-whoi.icims.com/jobs/1285/robotics-engineer/j...

- Principal Systems Administrator, Information Services Department. Work closely with scientists and researchers who are leaders in their fields. Architect, implement, and support WHOI’s servers, data storage, and HPC clusters and applications, with an emphasis on High Performance Computing (HPC).

https://careers-whoi.icims.com/jobs/1092/principal-systems-a...

If you have questions about Engineering in Oceanography please email me - I am an Electrical Engineer who switched careers into oceanography 5 years ago and love it. I am designing an open source underwater robot, working on a 3D acoustic telescope and run a lab that maintains and designs the electronics on over 25 buoys. john at johnreine dot com

https://careers.whoi.edu/

We have a 2 year old daughter and working from home is a bit noiser but so much nicer. It's not perfect, but neither was going to the office. We are doing shift work in my lab so I go in every now and then at night.

Consider the field of Oceanography!

Try hacking an underwater robot to navigate under ice from a ship during a storm. Or adding software on a remote buoy over dicy network connections to help it survive a hardware failure. Work every day knowing you are helping us to understand the worlds most precious resource better.

(shameless plug) https://careers.whoi.edu/

Most importantly work in a field with people who are passionate about their jobs!! It removes all the backstabbing when there is a higher common goal.

Annoyed by the money and harshness of interactions in a game like monopoly with 5-8 year olds we created "Friendopoly". When you land on someones property you are invited to camp on their lawn or sleep in their house or hotel. The railroads are all connected, there are no chance or community chest cards, and it's just a fun time going around the board that is more communal.

I have done the same. Labview is confusing and destroys computers, old and new.

What I recall from the 90's was using DOS labview to make a control UI and it was pretty remarkable for it's time, clean and lightweight and easy to implement.

When I saw what it had turned into a couple years ago my jaw dropped.

I am working on an underwater recording studio. We are building a "3D Telescope" underwater to listen to the ocean. 28 hydrophones mounted on five 5 meter beams connected like a starfish. It will then compress the data and telemeter it home real time.

https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-release/whoi-awarded-1-...

Additionally I just won a grant at work to begin designing and building an open source underwater glider. Underwater gliders are one of the best ways of carrying instruments to sample the ocean. They can last 6+ months and be directed to interesting area's. The billion dollar companies that make and sell underwater gliders are focused on oil+gas+military business and are not giving the service, support or product depth the science community needs. They are in dire need of a tech refresh - they fail a lot for an old technology and run DOS. The only way we have a chance of understanding the ocean is to make sampling the ocean more affordable, reliable and accessible.

I agree, you don't have to go vegan, but you could go mostly vegan, so that instead of meat and dairy being the default they become the exception.

Once you start it's a slippery slope to full on vegan. You will look at meat and dairy not as food but as liabilities to you and your earth.

Then it's just kinda depressing. Here you are in an alternate universe with hope and love and beauty while your friends and family stuff buttered bred muscle into their mouth and complain about all their health issues brought about by eating meat and dairy. These same friends look at you with concern for your life decision to not eat meat or dairy while you look at them with concern for their decision to eat meat and dairy.

You research it and realize the meat and dairy industries lobby and get our money for their ad campaigns. got milk beef. its whats for dinner pork. the other white meat

For the last 70 years they have been programming us that this is how food should be three times a day, every day. We will look back on the cruelty it takes to buy meat on foam wrapped with cellophane and our grandkids will ask us how we disassociated ourselves enough to take part in it all. Why didn't we shout from the rooftops that we are destroying ourselves, our world, our dear sentient animals?

We use this website in oceanography to understand what kind of weather conditions our buoys are in. Off the coast of greenland this is helpful to shunt the wind turbines in extreme wind - not because they can't handle the wind, but because the waves crash on the spinning blades and shatter them.

I work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Research - I started there two years ago. I run a lab that refurbishes the electronics that collects data from the sensors. Technology wise we are fairly slow to adopt new things, and making changes to the infrastructure can take a few years. It is incredibly interesting and fun! There is both a mix of real time issues that pop up that need nasa style engineering to fix (i.e. logging on remotely to a buoy and adding a script to control the power module as a clock that triggers the main loop in the microcontroller interrupt broke) and plenty of mysteries to solve (why did the mooring in the Irminger Sea disappear?)

The program I work for is OOI, where the goal is to have long term consistent readings of the ocean. We are funded by the NSF and deploy and recover over 20 moorings with sensors on the surface, along the riser column and at the anchor.

Before this job I made video games.. this is far more gratifying. I am redesigning and upgrading the electronics in the buoys one section at a time and already there has been a large improvement in uptime. Oceanography is a fairly new science and there are a lot of opportunities to make collecting and analyzing data easier and more accessible.

I bike to work along the ocean for 7 miles, take a small boat for 25 minutes, then another 3 miles along the ocean.

We always need engineers.. https://careers.whoi.edu/

My best advice to live with a lighter footprint? try to be more vegan, take the bus, bike more, vote.

To take it a step further, if the house owner works outside home during the day it could be mutually beneficial if you throw in taking a few breaks to walk the dog to make it an even trade. It's always better for pets to have people around all day.

Another AA alternative is Alan Carr's book "The Easy Way to Stop Drinking".

It's a logical approach to repositioning alcohol as a poison that somehow 90% of our population embraces as normal.

I stopped drinking four years ago.

What is consistently missing in the conversation about addiction is Alan Carr's book "The Easy Way to Stop Drinking" and "The Easy Way to Stop Smoking"

reddit/r/stopdrinking is also an invaluable resource.

I subscribe to tidal. It is expensive.. $20/month for "hifi" streaming. It is the only streaming service that offers lossless streaming. Their catalog is good - if I can't find a band it's not a huge surprise. Their playlists are pretty decent - I miss a bit of the community playlist building that spotify has. I like that there is a company offering a better quality of music and am willing to support that.

I quit my job making video games and cycled across the country for fifteen months.. I worked a bit in the last 8 months from my tent (40-60 hours a month).

It was epic! I would definitely do it all over again.

I use google maps bicycling directions every day on my bike trip across the US and just saw this the other day.. that plus street view to see how good shoulders + road conditions are can be very cool tools for planning a bike trip.

Sadly in west Texas good shoulders tend to be covered in chipseal resulting in days/weeks of much vibration.

Moby has a site.. though it appears to be for film, you could ask about a video game. http://www.mobygratis.com/

Nest has built an expensive thermostat that is engaging. It certainly doesn't take $80 Million to do that. So perhaps they also spent their money developing a cheaper version after proving that people like it and more importantly proving it can save money and eventually pay for itself.

I would spend a ton of money putting everything on one chip, getting the cost down to $5 or $10 for the same user experience. Maybe put in a cheaper display if needed. Now this wireless device in the house can pay itself off in very short amount of time, making it a super easy decision for consumers. The current offerings of thermostats are clunky and have horrible user interfaces that require modes and buttons and such to program.. forget about daylight savings time!

If people can buy Nest functionality for $50 then google will have a solid foothold in people's homes. From that they can sell camera's that show up through your google TV device and get into the security market.

The dial on Nest is a universal interface, as the original ipod has shown us, perfect for scrolling through menu's and long lists and for changing volume or choosing music. Might as well put a microphone in so people can ask the internet things.

Still not quite sure it's worth $3.2Billion.. perhaps there was a bidding war?

I 'dropped out' of my life of making video games this summer, got rid of everything I own and set off on a journey across the US by bicycle. Every day I wake up in my tent and make a conscious decision to climb on the bike, with an awareness that something amazingly bad might happen, however something amazingly good might also happen. I so far have been fortunate for I have enjoyed lots of amazingly good moments, and have learned it is an acceptance of the prospect of very bad things that makes the trip more remarkable.

Your writings of your baddass journey have always been inspiring.. I'm so sorry about your friend.

not quite the same ballpark, but many years ago I helped write testing code for the backend of a states drivers license creation system.. there was a back door for feds/cia to make any license they wanted. I imagine all states probably have that..

This singlehandedly almost and should have killed my startup. And the problem was so evil.. not all mainboards got it at the same time.. it was a bell curve distribution, and it started with simple lockups that a reboot could fix (which required a customer service trip). Then the lockups would increase with frequency until it no longer turned on, at which point my company had to replace it with a new mainboard and sometimes chassis for free.

Worst 4 years of my life.