More Upon Lots
Overall Tuesday turned out to be a Tuesday that was alright. Things are great! Work is starting to become an interesting affair. Harris seems to provide much different process than other jobs that I've had the opportunity to work at. My priority task is to look over and supply support to our integration and test staff. They do a variety of tasks that I have done previously. Now to digress from the previous fact, at one of my previous places of employment, I would have ended up heading this effort for at least a few weeks with the permanent leader shadowing me. Here at Harris, I'm told to just provide support when needed. The thing is, the current group doesn't ask for help! They end up doing things in a long hard convoluted manner, and then end up making the same mistakes that I did. Four hours later I visit them to just see what's up, correct them and find out they've spent the morning working on some stupid task. JUST ASK!!!! When I do end up providing some input, my word is never good enough. They usually have to go to find someone else to validate my opinion. I'm not saying that having me drive this effort would increase productivity by ten-fold, BUT I do feel that I would drive the output and actually get things in front of the important folks earlier, which makes EVERYONE happy.
FIRST is still primarily treating me well. As opposed to my experience in highschool, I've had no breakdowns. I really love working with a lot of the kids. Some need to learn to listen a bit more, and others well, they need to have something to do that will keep their interest. Explaining things impromptu for me is a challenge. I end up needing to go through several iterations of explanation before I can get something that makes sense to me and the person(s) I am trying to explain concepts to. I've taught lab based courses, led a handful of lectures at RIT, but those have at least had a bit of prep time to them. FIRST gives me a chance to work on these kind of situations, and it's a great tool to learn where common misconceptions are when tackling problems of many different kinds. I know that there are many different ideas of how FIRST should be run. I want to see during the build season the effort driven by the students. I KNOW most definitely that these students all work HARD on this project. I want to see just how the work is divided between the mentors and students. I've seen FIRST teams (and absolutely despised them) that have the mentor's and the mentors' companies perform a lot of the manufacturing and assembly, producing polished amazing machines. I really doubt that this team is like this, but only time will tell. One has to remember, that when I did FIRST, our team was only 15 students, 2.5 teachers, and 2 technical sponsors. I was introduced to learning how to use a Bridgeport (and CANS Bridgeport)... And I machined near everything... Basically everyone on the team was assigned to a particular machine. I guess times have changed and such. Although these students aren't near as prone to lose a finger as I or get their fingers cut and tangled in aluminum shavings from a lathe, I can tell that they preserve the integrity and real meaning behind FIRST.
Tomorrow is another rehearsal with the Insane-O Band. I am starting to love this group one member at a time. I do have to admit that the first few times playing with them, I felt awkward as I'm one of about 4 others who doesn't have Music anywhere in my full time position. I mean I guess I could ask to get a new title at Harris, but I think they'd just tell me to go... and find a new job. We have just finished up our first recording session of the year, recording session number two will most likely allow us to absolutely fill the entire CD with enough holiday music to make your ears bleed and your face fall off! The director, Mr. Van Buren is actually getting pretty laid back and throwing jokes my way, starting to make me feel like I'm really part of this group. Of course I haven't practiced any of the music that we've been working on. Most of it is easy enough for me to walk in there, play it and rock. Of course the stylistic problems end up popping out so much more and I find that I end up having to work hard there. It's one of those things that you have to work out with the rest of the group. Speaking of this music junk, I think that over the holiday I'll end up trying to get at least my sax and "nice" clarinet repadded. They both need it lots. Instead of practicing that music I find myself running through stupid exercises that familiarize myself with how certain intervals feel and sound. I've been listening a lot to big band greats (Menza, Frank Foster, Lester Young, Etc). I've actually been trying to put together a collection of big bands that have featured two or more artists cutting one another (cutting contest). This seems to have been an art that has been long gone, I haven't even seen many bands live that participate in this type of obnoxious polyphonic cacophony, which is actually some of the root of this tradition.
So it might be said that "Another One Bites the Dust". Jonathan Lareau whom I've had the pleasure of working with in the Lab for Computational Vision and Acoustics has successfully defended his thesis, "Application of Shifted Delta Cepstral Features for GMM Language Identification". The content was very informative and Jon made it very accessible to everyone. He was the last link that lab had to the original Building 0 night that I had proposed and implemented in my last year there. We'll what happens.
If you've read this far, I think you might be as nuts as I am. That's okay though! I'll be sure to write to this a bit more often to vent so that I don't end up having long long posts like this again!
FIRST is still primarily treating me well. As opposed to my experience in highschool, I've had no breakdowns. I really love working with a lot of the kids. Some need to learn to listen a bit more, and others well, they need to have something to do that will keep their interest. Explaining things impromptu for me is a challenge. I end up needing to go through several iterations of explanation before I can get something that makes sense to me and the person(s) I am trying to explain concepts to. I've taught lab based courses, led a handful of lectures at RIT, but those have at least had a bit of prep time to them. FIRST gives me a chance to work on these kind of situations, and it's a great tool to learn where common misconceptions are when tackling problems of many different kinds. I know that there are many different ideas of how FIRST should be run. I want to see during the build season the effort driven by the students. I KNOW most definitely that these students all work HARD on this project. I want to see just how the work is divided between the mentors and students. I've seen FIRST teams (and absolutely despised them) that have the mentor's and the mentors' companies perform a lot of the manufacturing and assembly, producing polished amazing machines. I really doubt that this team is like this, but only time will tell. One has to remember, that when I did FIRST, our team was only 15 students, 2.5 teachers, and 2 technical sponsors. I was introduced to learning how to use a Bridgeport (and CANS Bridgeport)... And I machined near everything... Basically everyone on the team was assigned to a particular machine. I guess times have changed and such. Although these students aren't near as prone to lose a finger as I or get their fingers cut and tangled in aluminum shavings from a lathe, I can tell that they preserve the integrity and real meaning behind FIRST.
Tomorrow is another rehearsal with the Insane-O Band. I am starting to love this group one member at a time. I do have to admit that the first few times playing with them, I felt awkward as I'm one of about 4 others who doesn't have Music anywhere in my full time position. I mean I guess I could ask to get a new title at Harris, but I think they'd just tell me to go... and find a new job. We have just finished up our first recording session of the year, recording session number two will most likely allow us to absolutely fill the entire CD with enough holiday music to make your ears bleed and your face fall off! The director, Mr. Van Buren is actually getting pretty laid back and throwing jokes my way, starting to make me feel like I'm really part of this group. Of course I haven't practiced any of the music that we've been working on. Most of it is easy enough for me to walk in there, play it and rock. Of course the stylistic problems end up popping out so much more and I find that I end up having to work hard there. It's one of those things that you have to work out with the rest of the group. Speaking of this music junk, I think that over the holiday I'll end up trying to get at least my sax and "nice" clarinet repadded. They both need it lots. Instead of practicing that music I find myself running through stupid exercises that familiarize myself with how certain intervals feel and sound. I've been listening a lot to big band greats (Menza, Frank Foster, Lester Young, Etc). I've actually been trying to put together a collection of big bands that have featured two or more artists cutting one another (cutting contest). This seems to have been an art that has been long gone, I haven't even seen many bands live that participate in this type of obnoxious polyphonic cacophony, which is actually some of the root of this tradition.
So it might be said that "Another One Bites the Dust". Jonathan Lareau whom I've had the pleasure of working with in the Lab for Computational Vision and Acoustics has successfully defended his thesis, "Application of Shifted Delta Cepstral Features for GMM Language Identification". The content was very informative and Jon made it very accessible to everyone. He was the last link that lab had to the original Building 0 night that I had proposed and implemented in my last year there. We'll what happens.
If you've read this far, I think you might be as nuts as I am. That's okay though! I'll be sure to write to this a bit more often to vent so that I don't end up having long long posts like this again!
posted by Dave at 7:35 PM
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