There's No Pleasing Electrons

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Does anything feel as good as doing something new? That whole beautiful feeling of pushing new stuff into your brain, of figuring out how to do something that you just weren't able to do before; that you weren't even able to conceive yourself of ever being capable of. You can all but feel your brain expanding in your head, like those cartoons where Bugs feeds the furry thing when he shouldn't and with a wavering sound effect the furry thing pops up another inch taller, eventually running through walls in the castle leaving holes in his shape.

I love that (the mind thing, as well as the cartoon). I went through a phase where I was doing those brain puzzlers; those horrible trick questions everyone asks you, like the light bulb question (way at the bottom of the page). I was terrible at them, just couldn't do 'em. It made me mad; I couldn't be that stupid. So I grabbed a book and just pounded into them, and then I found the patterns of the work, and once you have the patterns, you can be smart again. Maybe I wasn't happy.

My latest little obsessive foray has been into circuitry. Four or five years ago, I picked up a Radio Shack electronics kit, on the rationale that I worked in computers and yet had no idea of even the basics of circuitry and electronics. It would be like being a mechanic but not knowing how to drive. So, I thought I'd find out a little. And I did, and it was fun, but doing the prescribed experiments didn't really teach me much and I bored and put it aside.

But then last week I decided to make my own buzzer box for my electric foil. So many times I had been -this- close to just buying a buzzer box (which buzzes when you touch someone with your electric foil) from a store, but couldn't justify the forty bucks. Suddenly, I realized that I probably had almost all the parts I needed right at home in the electronics kit.

So I pulled it out and dusted it off and discovered I didn't remember hardly anything about capacitors, resistors, diodes, etc etc etc. Back to square one. But this time it was cool because I was building something outside of the book. Synthesizing something new from their book experiments. My brain grew two sizes.

It was, by the by, insanely frustrating. I burned out LEDs, I burned out switches, I burned out transistors. I bought the wrong equipment. And I kept getting close to a minimally acceptable circuit, only to lose it entirely trying to get that last 15%.

Because let me tell you, electricity is a wily enemy! It'll go scampering down paths you least expect just when you think you have it all planned out. You've carved out this gorgeous little road for it to travel down, and then it decides, 'hey! I think I'll go left here and see what's over this hill!' and then your buzzer buzzes way too long and your LEDs go off almost right away.

Or you try to set up a cliff for all the electricity to fall off of, and then for some unknown reason only most of it falls off, but a little manages to make the leap to the other side (without you even lowering the bridge!) and your LEDs are always gently lit and the buzzer always gently buzzes. Insanely frustrating.

Or, you have one electricity bucket for the buzzer, and another capacitor for the LEDs, and then somehow, even though they're separated by three physical inches and (you thought) were discrete in the circuit, both buzzer and LEDs are draining both buckets as if they were one, which is too much for the buzzer and too little for the LEDs.

Or, you hook up the power and everything seems to be working until you notice that horrible burning smell that means you're going to spend the next five minutes looking for the piece you fried.

I made myself sick with the problem. It's only just about the simplest circuit you could construct. Buzzer and LEDs activate and persist for a second when a closed circuit is opened and then closed again. The equivalent of the "hello world!" program when you're learning a new programming language. And it was such a bugger. Anyone who knew the tiniest bit of anything could whip it out on a napkin in like ten seconds. I'll bet you just did it while you read that last sentence. Feel free to email it to me.

I would lie there on my living room floor, hours on end, focusing on little teensie things and their shuttling of little invisible electrons that I started to believe I could actually see (they're perpetually unhappy little buggers. If you read the book when you were a kid with the Warm Fuzzies and Cold Pricklies, electrons are, without a doubt, Cold Pricklies. Hour after hour, getting sick to my stomach, developing a sharp little headache, and yet I just could not quit. I took my oh-so-mockable Radio Shack circuit board to the Crisis Clinic to work on it during my shift. I left it sitting in my car to invite the laughter of everyone who rode with me. I brought the book on the bus to try and figure out what my problem with the transistors was.

I went, to make a long story short, mad.

And then I finally got it, and it was the happiest thing ever. And now I have to build it on a separate little breadboard as an independent circuit in an Altoids box, and it's a whole new nightmare. I've never soldered anything before! It's a lot harder than it looks! And I only have access to one side of the board once it's in the box, so there is this whole other logistical pain in the neck. And only now, after getting a third of everything in place, does it occur to me that I should probably have mapped out how I was going to do this before I just started soldering stuff together.

Anyway. It's insane. But it's insane in that great way that makes you feel so good, like you're stretching a muscle that you didn't know you had. Fencing was this way, the CC is this way, hockey is this way (I mean, my god!, I finally learned how to skate backwards! It felt like the heavens opening up and welcoming me in when I could finally do that), and each new computer thing is the same feeling. Yeah. Doing new stuff is just about the best feeling ever.

This little happy rant comes because M~ asked me yesterday if I thought my life was settling into a comfortable routine at the ripe old age of 29.

Certainly, a lot of my time is fairly routine. The whole weekday cycle of work is pretty stable. No major innovations in sleep or dream control yet, so those eight hours are pretty dull. And work is very routine. Even though every day has new stuff, new projects, new obstacles, really it all ends up being variations on a theme.

The exciting days of learning new technology, buying great toys with other people's money, long nights and hardly being able to tear myself away from work and the fun creation I was in the middle of are pretty well gone. Now I am playing variations on a central theme, with no major innovations for the last year and a half. So yeah, my 7am to 5pm or so is pretty locked.

And that is an acknowledged problem. I would rather be in a work environment where I'm pushing myself. I just don't think the field of computers is that place anymore. But, until I figure out where the next place I should be is, computers are paying the bills quite nicely, so that's an accepted problem for the time being.

But outside of work, no, I don't feel routine at all. My weeks are (too) busy with stuff that's new and learning for me almost every night.

And if there is a pattern to my life, I have yet to find it.