Turtles. Definitely turtles.

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!