Adrift on an ocean of beans and rice

I wish I could figure out why I get so cranky behind the wheel. I'm instantly prompted to cursing and name calling at the slightest infraction. I just feel like so many folks aren't paying attention to driving. The rest exude an apathy towards courtesy and sound judgment. And of course there are the blessed few who use turn signals, give you space to move over, and let you out of the parking lot. Ironically, the truly stupid people who nearly get me in wrecks merely make me afraid to be driving anymore. There's no anger in those instances, only relief that I and my car aren't all smashed up and a vague incredulity at what the other person almost just perpetrated.

I get thursday and friday off this week. That works to my benefit because it means I only have to work 24 hours this week. When you're used to 10 hour days, this makes the week very short. So I'm driving a friend to the airport tomorrow at noon then helping another study for her SATs. I really needed this short week. 50-some hour weeks of work, class, homework, chores, and errands have nearly burnt me out.

Oddly enough, I think I've accomplished more in the last few business days than 3 times that thitherto. I'm doing a couple of interesting analyses for this one program.

One is a shielding audit. This particular spacecraft has a requirement for the physical structure ("walls", "floor", etc.) to provide 40dB of shielding (a factor of 100) to electric fields up to 1GHz. This is a pretty tough requirement to levy on a structure that wasn't designed to provide any shielding at all. Naturally, the thing is full of holes which have been patched using various kludges of tape and wire screen, and one particularly silly application of ferrites (those are the heavy things on the end of your monitor cable) where they're not meant to be used. Unsurprisingly, they won't work very well, but I'm having a lot of fun using this software called Microstripes, which costs about the same as a Mercedes-Benz, to prove it. Ooo, pretty colors!

The other one is a lightning study. It's not as glorious as it sounds--I don't get to zap million-dollar hardware with bolts of lightning and watch it pop and sizzle. I get to do in in PSPICE (electric circuit simulation software) instead. The only problem is, it doesn't have any way for me to generate the input signal (a bunch of short pulses with random spacings). Matlab can do it pretty easily, but that leaves the problem of how to get data between the two. Well, there is software to do it, but it costs $3000 and needs approval by the engineering tools group. So I attempted to write a compelling email explaining why I need it, only it came off sounding disingenuous and arrogant when I read it. Unfortunately my language center stubbornly refused to engage the task again so I sent it off anyway.

But I digress. While I could expound at length about the technical subtleties of modelling 3-dimensional electromagnetic fields or the debugging process of writing a script to generate randomly spaced pulses or the logistical problem of running a long simulation which produces hundreds of megabytes of text files, you all probably want to do other, less eye-glazing things, so I won't trouble you. The bottom line is I think one of the best parts of this job is getting to play with all this extremely expensive software on someone else's dime.