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This is my work world, it’s the kind of view I have for eight to twelve hours a day.
Nothing like spinning logic webs πŸ™‚

Willow_Wisp 8 Oct 16
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20 comments

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1

And none of them have Minecraft or social media on them, impressive

1

Too many monitors for me.

1

Looks familiar. I write control code.

Looks like Wonderwear.
You do know few people know what the hell we do right?
LOL

@Willow_Wisp Yep. If I didn't mind travelling, I could be making six figures easily but I find it difficult these days so I sit behind the same desk 9 hours a day, 5 days a week.

@sterlingdean I haven't passed 5 digits, I automated two Coca-Cola syrup factories, wrote the controls for NASA's Ames Research centers 20g manned centrifuge, the JPL Space simulator. Numerous projects for lumber, food, and pharmaceutical industry. I've been working steady since 1987, but since I have a liberal bend and I'm a bit "odd" in appearance and behavior they're more than happy to pay me significantly less then the average integrator even when those integrators work for me due to my vast experience and competence.

@Willow_Wisp That sucks! Even here in the rather back water region of my hometown, I make a good living. With your experience you should be raking it in, so to speak.

@sterlingdean I know right..

2

My old workstation.

1

I can emphasize. I used to have five monitors going in my previous job. And when I was introduced to one of my new coworkers she said β€œwelcome to email hell β€œ!

"emphasize"? For sure your fingers have disobeyed typing instructions.πŸ€£πŸ˜…

@Petter hahaha. Empathize...πŸ˜–πŸ™„

@EyesThatSmile What's with the mask photo? I think I prefer the last pic. From what are you hiding?

@Petter Bruja! It is Halloween soon!

@EyesThatSmile Y Β‘ que bruja eres ! Nosotros pobres hombres no tienen ni una oportunidad escapar.

@Petter es una pena

@EyesThatSmile Tienez razon. Es una pena en el culo - o quizas el pene!

1

This looks delightful to me. You (presumably) have a door, multiple monitors etc etc. Sigh. I'd love a door. Easier to concentrate when you can shut out everything.

Yep, the only benefit of COVID-19 I was out in the cubicle farm before.

If you're an Asperger's, you can shut out the world without using doors. In fact, some people remark on how rude I was. In truth, I never even noticed them.

0

How many tiles are in your ceiling?

28, in the confines of my office

0

Do you have trouble sleeping? The Scientists say the blue light from computer screens destroys Melatonin the chemical that makes a person sleepy.

2

Do you ever get the feeling you are being monitored?

2

Remember the CRT days when one admired and coveted a 22", non-reflective screen?
.... and when one excitedly told a colleague you had found a way to save five bytes of memory?

Hell yea, and it still happens...
We have a lot of small controllers with limited memory but with large expectations.

2

Thank you for keeping us safer.

1

I like the exit sign

twill Level 7 Oct 16, 2020
5

Do you have square eyes by the end of it?

It gave me weaker eyes. Especially since I was in front of Cathode ray tube monitors.

@Petter Ever so often you need to do eye exercises.

@Jolanta Every so often you needed to go outside and let your eyes focus on distant objects, whilst giving them a break from the weak ultra violet light emanating from the CRT display.

2

Professional nerd?

1

Looks great but I have no idea what it is 😊 There appears to be a Spyder window though

2

You mean that isn't a warm, cozy, welcoming environment after ten hours? Looks pretty cool at first though.

2

Lucky you , while I'm overseas working my ass out in the hot weather lol

Tory Level 3 Oct 16, 2020
1

Holy shit! What do you do for a living?

I write equipment control software for airports.

@Willow_Wisp Duly impressed.

@Willow_Wisp Hasn't your job been outsourced to somewhere cheaper, like India, yet?
That seems to be the current business model in an " uncaring for quality, just increase the profit" world.

@Petter We don't out source, we're an international corporation, and besides foreign software developers couldn't keep up because half my job is electrical engineering. My focus isn't just IoT, or HTML5, it's also Siemens, Proface, Modbus, wireless, cellular, AutoCAD, C#, Networking, sequential flowcharts, old school ODBC, and hydraulics.
We actually did a study, to outsource me would cost between 12 and 15 times my salary even in India.

@Petter, @Omnedon I'm unaware of a software language I haven't had to at least debug in.
For example lets talk "basic" since most people know about it. There's Visual Basic, there's VB.Net, there's Allen-Bradly's basic (only has one sting $ that has to be dimensioned as an array.) SquareD basic (they're out of business I think but there's legacy equipment still using it). I also used old IBM Basica back in the day but that was well over 30 years ago.
We use many ladder logic languages, each being proprietary to the hardware manufacturer.
There's JavaScript, C++, C#, HTML5, CSS, and the entire family of ODBC types for databases.
I'm trying to standardize our entire company engineering on JavaScript. Which is what drives Node-Red which runs as a container in a Node.js.
Then there's communications and networking.
Almost every piece of gear has at least some proprietary scripting. Most communicate using Modbus/TCPIP. But when distance is a factor we frequently use RS-485 because it can run 6,000 feet where ethernet is only good to 285 feet. In places like Atlanta airport we install fiber optic cable which is good to 15 miles, but doesn't require specific protocols to use. We use a high electrical noise tolerant network called CAN in our power converters (airport 480vac 60 hertz converted to aircraft 115vac 400 hertz), and to communicate to the computer systems from CAN we use CANOpen which is an entirely different protocol from CAN, much like Java has nothing at all to do with JavaScript.

Most people that do what I do get their bachelors degree in either electrical or mechanical engineering then it's all OJT from there on. As always I'm the oddball I got my degree in Computer Science then went OJT. I visited my old campus in Auburn in 2002 after my father died. Their computer science department has changed so much, I can say with certainty that no education has a shorter shelf life than computer science. No one else seems to know how to write an operating system for an IBM system 3 anymore except me. They don't even have an old DEC PDP-11 anymore and I was educated before IBM AS-400 were being built and I think they're not even manufactured anymore. So it's a lot of work just to keep up. πŸ™‚

@WillowWisp You missed out Sinclair Superbasic, which was a logically structured implementation of classroom basic, with sub routines and functions. It even included the global command "when", run in the programme header.
On Java, here's a mini-book written by my son in law, Charles Humble, on garbage collection.
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Java-Garbage-Collection-Mini-Book/dp/1329312384?ref
=d6k_applink_bb_marketplace" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" class="forumlink">[amazon.com]
Until earlier this year he was also editor in chief of infoq.
[infoq.com]

@Petter I left out Palo Alto Tiny Tiny Basic too...and dozens of others.. πŸ™‚

@Omnedon My first experience with AS/400 was for Sega Genesis I had to write a TCP/IP socket so it would communicate on Ethernet to an Allen-Bradley PLC-5 that I wrote the controls for their conveyor belts and package routers on. I had to figure it out over the weekend with no AS/400 experience because my boss had neglected to tell me about linking to their mainframe.

3

At lease you had overhead lighting!!!

I used to spent 12 hours shifts there to four days a week, monitoring various networks in the NOC as a WAN engineer!!!

Beside the three 21” monitors in our pods, the two of us were surrounded on three sides by an additional 42 monitors we had to checked and constantly test!

We were the first line of defense for over fifty corporations on three continents!!!

So I can feel and comprehend your pain and adulation working in such a enclosed environment!!!

2

"Come a little closer" said the spider to the fly.

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