Week Deux
My days of daydreaming in the RnD office are finally over. My PC finally came yesterday. They gave me a Dell P4 2.8GHz with 512MB RAM and a 40gig HDD. All packaged in the little Optiplex casing which is normally used for small office jobs. Sadly, it didn’t come with a LCD monitor. I got a 17 inch CRT instead. And it’s not even flat!
So yesterday I managed to start and finish up the assignment I was given last week, which was due today. I managed to write a program in Labview (a program which I never used before) in half a day. So proud of myself. My stand-in supervisor was pretty impressed too.
My real supervisor and I got acquainted today. He’s rarely in the office so yes, after one week being of in the office I finally got to meet him. Nice Indian chap who’s a PhD holder. *Respect!
He tells me that I’ll be using this Labview (*groan) program to control the outputs of a LCD display of a walkie-talkie (OOooooooh!). And the tells me that I’ll get to mess around with some optics stuff along the way, which is perfect because that’s sort of my specialization. About an hour later, he performs his vanishing act again and I’m left in the office on my own to work on some Labview tutorials.
Later, I was assigned to help this materials engineer test some plastic LCD covers. Man, it was tedious. First, I had to find the correct side of the plastic piece by checking on which side some markings are on. As the pieces are transparent, it’s hard to determine which side is marked. So I have to use alcohol (not consumable unfortunately), to try to remove the marking.
After going through the 60 pieces, I had to glue this tiny stress gauge chip onto the plastic piece with superglue and a pair of tweezers. These stress gauges are like 5mmx5mm, which is really teeny. One of them costs USD$5 so I was careful not to mess up.
THEN, I had to solder two wires to the two terminals located on the stress gauges. Remember how tiny these things are? They had terminals on them too! I was almost driven to insanity. Good thing that materials engineer was working next to me so we had a little chitchat. Oh and I was saved by the bell too. After soldering my 10th one, it was time to hui jia!
Looks like I’ll be talking a lot about my work. Really, I don’t have much of a life outside it during the weekdays. Sorry if this bores you. I’ve got a list of friends who are bumming away their summer on the right of your window. That’s what linkz are for!
Peace…
So yesterday I managed to start and finish up the assignment I was given last week, which was due today. I managed to write a program in Labview (a program which I never used before) in half a day. So proud of myself. My stand-in supervisor was pretty impressed too.
My real supervisor and I got acquainted today. He’s rarely in the office so yes, after one week being of in the office I finally got to meet him. Nice Indian chap who’s a PhD holder. *Respect!
He tells me that I’ll be using this Labview (*groan) program to control the outputs of a LCD display of a walkie-talkie (OOooooooh!). And the tells me that I’ll get to mess around with some optics stuff along the way, which is perfect because that’s sort of my specialization. About an hour later, he performs his vanishing act again and I’m left in the office on my own to work on some Labview tutorials.
Later, I was assigned to help this materials engineer test some plastic LCD covers. Man, it was tedious. First, I had to find the correct side of the plastic piece by checking on which side some markings are on. As the pieces are transparent, it’s hard to determine which side is marked. So I have to use alcohol (not consumable unfortunately), to try to remove the marking.
After going through the 60 pieces, I had to glue this tiny stress gauge chip onto the plastic piece with superglue and a pair of tweezers. These stress gauges are like 5mmx5mm, which is really teeny. One of them costs USD$5 so I was careful not to mess up.
THEN, I had to solder two wires to the two terminals located on the stress gauges. Remember how tiny these things are? They had terminals on them too! I was almost driven to insanity. Good thing that materials engineer was working next to me so we had a little chitchat. Oh and I was saved by the bell too. After soldering my 10th one, it was time to hui jia!
Looks like I’ll be talking a lot about my work. Really, I don’t have much of a life outside it during the weekdays. Sorry if this bores you. I’ve got a list of friends who are bumming away their summer on the right of your window. That’s what linkz are for!
Peace…
posted by Mike Ng at 9:58 AM
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