I know this sounds silly, but who here gets to work with cool shit on the job?. I own a shop that does custom framing and a big part of our orders involve cutting mats. We have a computer driven, robotic mat cutter that greatly automates the process. You just plug the dimensions of the mat in the software, and the robotic arm does the rest. It’s driven by a hospital grade, ultra quiet air compressor. It can cut intricate patterns in seconds.
I just cut some mats on it this morning and had a huge grin on my face watching it. It’s the small pleasures in life, right?
We do MilCom, MilSatCom, Elint, Direction Finding, Jamming, etc. all with SDRs: Software defined radios. Where is this stuff used? Check out: http://jtrs.army.mil.
no cool toys, but watching hockey tournaments is required and the TDF is encouraged. bossman is good at calling me in for the exciting parts of the TDF. or when he’s really confused (often) and wants to know what is going on.
M1A1 Tanks, M155 Howitzers, M4 Carbines, M2 .50 Cal machineguns, Redman rubber suits, pepper-spray, be-cool sticks, SPIE-rig or fast-rope out of helicopters, long range IR scopes, long range "flashlights capable of shedding light on targets nearly two miles away…and now satellite transmissions gear, Unit Operations Centers with multiple plasma/e-whiteboard displays, etc. etc…every once in awhile I get to ride a warship or two…
Yeah, I get to/have played with some pretty cool stuff over the years…
It is quite an amazing job. My cubicle desk is so small that the 19" monitor is about 12 inches from my face if I don’t sit way back from the desk. The only good thing about two monitors is that I can be on slowtwitch and pretend to do work at the same time and no one knows…
btw, I’m quitting this engineering gig to work in a tri shop.
A magnet, 1,500 times more powerful than any that you may have stuck to your refrigerator. When your body is placed inside me, I alter the position of every hydrogen proton you own. Those spinning hydrogen protons are then bombarded with pulses of high-frequency radio waves, again altering their position. When the radio pulse ends, the hydrogen protons return to their original “magnetized” state, emitting energy in the form of a signal that can be analyzed by my computer and demonstrated as a slice of anatomic tissue.
At my old job we had some big magnetic and electric fields too. We made high power microwaves, xrays and gamma rays. we used them to simulate the radiation pulse from a nuclear weapon to test radiation hardness of various military components. we got to blow up a tank once at our test facility. seeing something the size of a coffee can take the turret off a tank is pretty amazing.
Now I do rocket, hypersonic and turbine engine manufacturing and R&D for various govt agencies. We have some cool robots to play with.
My Office is pretty good,
No complaints here, except my job cuts into training time every now and then.
I want Herberts Job, I need a new Vortex!
Maybe we can swap for a week or a month, because I’d surely love to fly one of those. But I doubt that they’d let a German citizen fly one, even though I used to be a Lieutenant in the German MP and even have a US Green Card.
Herbert
