Today's Random Sequential Indicator is 6.5: That's how many hours we have to go until until Christmas! As I publish this, Christmas begins less than a full-night's-sleep away. So I hope everyone has a great holiday and survives their families! Remember to take breaks :)
Now on with the blag. I may have mentioned this, but ECE 371 (Microprocessor
Design) was the highlight of the term.
The content was interesting, the assignments were fun, and the professor
was awesome. This all came as a bit of a
pleasant surprise, as I really didn’t expect to enjoy assembly language
programming in the least.
Don't worry, this shouldn't make sense. |
For everyone not familiar with assembly language, here’s a
crash course: It’s a programming language used to talk directly to hardware,
and give it extremely simple, basic instructions. It is so simple that a program to display
numbers typed by someone on a monitor would take literally thousands of lines
of code to create, since each instruction really can’t contain much more than
“add these two numbers together” or “check if this button has been pressed
yet”. Sounds boring on the surface, but
the real power becomes evident when you are NOT waiting on a user for inputs. When it is just hardware talking to each
other, things start moving VERY fast. As
in, you could check to see if that button I mentioned earlier was pressed
thousands of times in a second, and respond nearly instantly if it had
been. Or a robot could check to make
sure it is standing upright a few thousand times every second, and quickly
adjust its balance if it starts to fall.
I might not be making it sound like it from this explanation, but
basically with a microprocessor you can control just about anything that inputs
or outputs an electrical signal with incredible speed and accuracy; the
applications are endless.
For anyone who has experience with assembly language, all I
have to say is: Yes, I agree it’s a really shitty development environment, but
somebody has to do it. It makes a lot of sense to me, and for some reason I enjoy it, so it might as well be
me.
The other reason 371 was awesome was who was teaching it. (He reminds me a lot of Mr.
Renner, my favorite teacher from high school).
He is a really sharp guy, he’s very helpful, he is extremely
knowledgeable in his field (He wrote the book on microprocessor design… No,
really, he did.), he really enjoys his work, and he has a great sense of humor. Which brings me to the reason I decided to
write this post. Many of the following quotes were simply too good not so share, and they
have all been reconstructed from my notes as accurately as possible, so I hope you
enjoy.
·
“So, what happens when you supply a logic high
to the Intel PXA270 reset port? Well, it turns on. With the miracle of electronics and all that
stuff.”
·
“I’ve been up here waving my hands around for
quite a while, is there anything that anyone doesn’t understand, or should I continue?”
·
“Don’t try to keep all of this information in
your head. Unless your head works better
than mine”
·
“I always complete the projects I assign just to
make sure there are no problems, and this next project was a little
tricky. But, all I had to do was change
one setting then my LED started blinking and I threw my arms up and started
running around the house. These things
are still exciting even after all these years”
·
“What is 100 times 10?” *Silence* “Now, don’t everyone take your
shoes off all at once here…” (‘To take your shoes off’ is a bit of slang he
invented meaning ‘to get down to business’)
·
“What do you do when you get your first job, and
your boss gives you your first real design project, and it’s impossible? You freak out, jump around, throw your
clothes everywhere—but you can only do all that for five minutes. Then you check to see if anyone else already
figured it out.”
·
The previous quote was A reference to his ‘5
minute rule’: “When given an impossible task, you get 5 minutes to freak out,
but then after your 5 minutes are up, you have to get to work.”
·
“This ‘Talker Board’ is great: You can make it
say anything you want—unless it’s X-rated.
Unless you bring headphones, then you really can make it say
anything. Ok, since I am being recorded
that’s as far as we’ll go with that…”
·
“Why do you want your product to be able to be
assembled by a robot? Well, because you don’t have to buy them coffee every
day.”
·
“What do you do while you are waiting for your
device to be fabricated? That’s easy—you just sleep under your desk until it’s
done.”
·
“What do you have to add to asynchronous memory
to make it synchronous? Oh, I don’t know… Turtles or something, I think…”
Remember, all of these were actual quotes from an EXTREMELY technical and detail-oriented class, which in many cases made them even funnier. As an added bonus, he also teaches 372 and 373, meaning I will get to take his class every term this year! So expect
more awesome quotes from him in the future!