Ooh, Toys!

When I first started my new job back in early July, the first thing they had me doing was designing analog circuits. Thing was, the circuits they had me designing would have been dead easy in digital, and I mentioned that to anyone who would listen. The response from mangement was pretty much uniformly, "You're probably right, but we need the analog circuits anyway because..."

"Because" could be complicated, but the upshot was usually that The Russian wanted it that way, and was pathologically opposed to digital anything. Probably because he doesn't understand it.

For months, whenever the subject came up, I'd say "You know, we should really be doing this in digital." ("Carthago delenda est.")

Well, the anaolog circuits got finished, and it finally became apparent to everyone that digital was the only way to go. (So we went to war with Carthage.) It also happens that I'm the only one around with any DSP experience, so I was asked to recommend hardware to make this new stuff happen.

So, I did my research and decided on one of these, a convenient single-board computer built around a TI floating-point DSP chip. I recommended it to management as the thing we want for my research (acoustic echo cancellation) as well as applications a few other people are going to be running.

So they bought it for me. It's sitting on my desk right now, running the idle process at 1800 MIPS.

This all makes me feel very adult. I saw a problem at work, agitated (no other word for it) for what I feel is the right solution, people listened to me, asked me to recommend hardware to do what we needed, I did some research and made a recommendation, the company bought the thing, and now I'm using it.

Actually, I'm totally playing with it like a kid on Christmas morning, on account of it's so cool! Which makes me feel somewhat less adult. But anyway.