29 June 2007

Hi, I've accepted a position with a small engineeringfirm in Costa Mesa that does medical devices, etc. They have 6 EEs andI'm the second CS; clearly they are unbalanced. Anyway,if this doesn't work out look me up, if y'all get fundingbefore I get attached.(I hope you don't because then I'll have to make a hardpersonal decision ---but I hope you do because I likedworking there and y'all.)
Just after telling another headhunter to desist, one from the same agency calls with a slew of jobsrelating to DAS etc. I tell her that if Z crashesI'll forward the ref (or if y'all ask me preemptively :-) but won'tcannibalize for her. Other than this indirect ref as a favorto y'all.
Have you ever fed goldfish in a pond? Hungry goldfish?Or sharks? Tossed scraps to seagulls?
I hope its fun at the new place, I was told when interviewing about beingSW lead on an electric knife, but I heard from the headhuntertheir 'urgent fire' is some 'board bringup' which doesn't excite me.Although its for airplane-seatback entertainment computers; if I add a backdoor I'llbe sure to tell you :-)
This new place is very unslick, very crowded, like my garage, but its not the acresof undecorated cubes at Panasonic or Masimo and I like smaller groups and less paperweight-inertia. (Although I've raved to interviewers about how Tom & Mike were the Saviors. Process Uber Alles)
One of the guys who interviewed me at Panasonic recognized my name when he saw I was from UCI. Turned out I taught an assembly language class he took.
That's the second person I taught that I've met in OC. Hilarious.
The month of unanticipated vacation :-) has been used productively, I'veincreased my knowledge of Home Maintainence, debug, and repair considerably.Learned how to use Java Audio to build a sound toy for Isaac (available onrequest --its bad netiquette to forward (executable) JARs without prior notice),wrote a Heartbeat (high availability monitoring) Class after spending a lot of time thinking about medical sensor nets over commercial WiFi.. and an 8.5 hour interview.. and not getting it because I wasn't "systems" enough.. burnt the rest of the tree I chainsawed to pieces because it fell in a spring Santa Ana windstorem..
(re coding) gotta stay in shape.. I wonder how lawyers stay in shape "between projects", do they come up with random lawsuits? [Sometimes, yes, I think is the answer]
I got to use the phrase "a pig with lipstick is still a pig" in an interview, which I heard went very well (albeit its moot now). Some of you will know what lipstickedpig I am talking about. Isaac et al. will wonder what this has to do with Software Engineering which he knows I am. My SW Eng friends will know exactly what pig I am talking about.
The electric knife will be interesting ---in a way more irreversible than a defib,but there may be no monitoring of the physio signals required. If the analogs doit right, the critical path ---surgeon finger to 'blade' latency--- won't evenbe in software. That would make it much easier than the defib project, which was about as complex as it could be --multiple computers, hard real time constraints based on physio (ECG) signals, logging, printing, wow. Just to save a life two (actually three) different computers have to talk to each other. A electrosurgery knife is just a fancy high power CB radio.
Lap surgery may make it more interesting. I can speculate until I start work, I suppose. Also I probably have hit only 20% of the interesting/scary paths.