Sunday, July 14, 2024
By:
Things started all fine and dandy at the start of the internship. Carrying it out of my mentor's car, placing it into my new office, plugging in USB cables, setting up a square wave, it was the start of something special. As the weeks passed, I got to know the Oscilloscope better, really appreciating it as an instrument. Writting up a little user interface for the Oscilloscope was the best moment of working together. Unfortunately, it's all downhill from a maximum. The signs were there from the start. The first time booting up, no longer how long I waited, it would throw an error when asked to do anything. Odd, but just restart the program, and things would work out. Always me restarting, and never the Oscilloscope.
However, our breaking point would swiftly come. I was jimmy-rigging a microscope with a laser, a positioner, and the Oscilloscope. I wanted to set the range of the Oscilloscope from my computer, so I found the command and ran it. Didn't work. Doing what everyone does in that situation, I ran the command again hoping for a different result. For the first time since the dawn of the universe, that worked. Odd. I experimented. The first time adjusting the range, I get total nonsense. Try it again immediately after, it magically fixes itself. An annoyance, but a predictable annoyance. I could work around that. Just run the command twice when it should only be run once. Always me rewriting, and never the Oscilloscope.
When it came to running the microscope, I was distracted by the positioner's issues. The little snook had the attention span of a hamster that went through a spin cycle, forgetting where it was and screaming until I put it out of its misery. I put in a timeout by putting it on a timeout, but then I was faced with the reality that had been floating over my head since the start of the internship. I fix up my code and run it. The little positioner that could worked its way through its tasks, but then disaster struck. Everything froze. The Oscilloscope stood there, unblinking, unphased, unresponsive. I restart the Osciloscope, I restart my code, and nothing. In the second such occurrence since the dawn of the universe, repeating these steps yielded the desired results. But the issue remained. The chance was small, about one in several hundred, but when I asked for a measurement, the Oscilloscope would refuse, grinding everything to a halt in its fit. There was little I could do, I looked up the error code, nothing. I tried giving the Oscilloscope time to do its thing, nothing. In the end, I just had to accept it. The good times with the Osciloscope were on borrowed time. The truth was it couldn't be trusted to run anything consistently. Always the Oscilscope crashing. But not me.
So, anyway, I learned why powdered sugar is always in recipes for icing. You need too much liquid to dissolve regular sugar, so you would end up with either cereal milk or a grainy icing. But, an icing is an icing. Scones are good. Planning on finishing up my infinity gauntlet of bread items with bagels.
Evan Erickson