job (2)

[da]

OK, it's sunk in, a bit. My first-ever (non-contract, non-time-limited) real job. Yay!

I'm looking forward to this. This will be a real stretch. I've never (ever) been responsible for writing production-quality C code, even though I've edited a fair bit in my time, and wrote some in school. I know very little about the content-area; I couldn't correctly spell kinesiology two weeks ago. I've certainly never touched this breadth of hardware before. Eek. Still, it seems to be stuff I will be able to do, and enjoy.

When my new boss called this afternoon, I asked if she knew of a good book on LabView, so I could read up a bit before I started. She laughed. Then later, she left voicemail saying she'd located some manuals for me, if I want them. I think I do. :)

At the moment, I'm very grateful.

I'm glad that yesterday I had the bright idea to write up a piece of sample code in C++ to give them today (it was a stretch for me, since I... um... never wrote any C++, ever.) This little script defines a bunch of random n-dimensional vectors and tells you which two are closest to each other. Around 100 lines with comments. It doesn't have anything really clever in it, or any templates or inheritance, but... it may have made a difference; they seemed relieved when I handed it to them, since it showed I can do more than perl. I suppose it showed them I knew what they were looking for, and that we were on the same page.

I owe a guy in my IRC channel a beer for pointing out a semi-obvious bug that I could have spent hours not seeing. I owe my wonderful melted_snowball... more than I can say, for being the stabilizing influence he's been for me while I was looking for work, and a sympathetic ear, and much more.

I owe alla-you a lot for being there.

Thank you.

This afternoon there was a neat talk, sort of at the intersection of Computer Science and kinesiology.

The title was "Endpoint Prediction Using Motion Kinematics," by a new prof in CS. His specialty is Human Computer Interaction, predicting motion of computer-users, with a mouse or a pen on a computer tablet.

Apparently there is a formula with the unappealing name of "minimum jerk law" which accurately predicts how a person will choose to move while pointing (that is, we move to minimize jerking around). The formula depends on velocity, acceleration (derivative of velocity), jerk (derivative of acceleration), and the three following derivatives.

I didn't realize those three derivatives had names. I wondered about them, in calculus. Not for long, mind you.

I can conceive of and observe acceleration. I can even conceive of jerk, and semi-accurately observe and describe it. Darned if I have a concept of the following three derivatives. Physicists, said this speaker, call those derivatives "snap", "crackle", and "pop" so I have a fair guess that they don't really grok them either; so they give 'em cutesy names like they do with quarks. We can describe and define them even if you can't see 'em.

Neat.

[hm, according to LJ's spell-checker, kinesiology should actually be: gynecology, genealogy, or kinfolk. Um, no. And LJ isn't LBJ, either. Sigh.]

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...and combinatorics doesn't exist in Microsoft Word...