Working with your hands

Engineering is so many things. It is binding to a solution while having too little information. It is knowing what data are important and what data may be ignored. I believe the latter is one of the greatest engineering skills, since we are usually inundated with data and complexity. The act of "getting your hands dirty" lets you know if you have paid attention to the right stuff and correctly ignored that which doesn't matter. BTW, great blog Paul. I read everything you write.

I agree, I can feel like I accomplished just as much in a day if I spend it troubleshooting a board (and finding one bad resistor) as when I spend it figuring out transfer functions on paper. Sure, the transfer function might be more crucial to the end product or give better insight into that product I'm working on but I wouldn't get too far if I couldn't implement the transfer function in the real world on a real product.

Well yippee, we have a new comment Captcha. It sometimes requires two tries in my Opera web browser but the old system did that as well. The old system let you cut and paste the Captcha letters, which was a little broken, but it exploded a week or two ago and refused about 90% of the comments. The other weirdness was that if you had an apostrophe', it would add another apostrophe to it, for every time you tried to enter the comment. I also love that the letters are not case sensitive. I think our IT folks whipped up their own system rather than buy a pre-packaged one and the hard works shows, the equivalent of the hands-on work I talked about in the blog post. BTW, if you use Opera like me be sure to add the plug-in Aspell, and you can right-click and check spelling in any comment box. Explorer has iespell that will do the same thing.