Business
Electrical Engineering
Physics

Working Schedules and Blurry Trees

By Greg Ingersoll | Posted March 24th, 2010 at 11:42

Since January I have been trying out a new working schedule. The basic idea has been to be more effective in managing time to work on the research for my Ph.D. dissertation. So far, I think it has been working quite well.

Previously, I was working four days per week in the office at my day job and spending the fifth day and, in theory, the weekends and evenings to work on research. It often turned out, though, that I was not particularly motivated to work from home on that fifth day, and it was easier to run errands and do all of the other life-sustaining things that most people do on the weekends. Read the rest of this entry »

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Business
Electrical Engineering
Style

The Well-Dressed Engineer

By Greg Ingersoll | Posted March 6th, 2010 at 12:55

This is something that’s been on my radar for a while: just because you’re an engineer or a programmer, you don’t have to buy into the stereotype by dressing the part. And you all know what I mean.

A recent post on one of the blogs I monitor suggested, “You have to admit, one of the best parts of working at home is never having to put on a suit ever again.” I agree with the wording; you don’t have to wear a suit. But the hidden implication is that never wearing a suit is something to strive for, and I disagree with that. For me, I like wearing nice clothes. I like looking good. It’s a motivator for me. A nice suit for me now feels like shining plate armor must have felt to a knight back in the day. I feel confident. I think about myself differently. People look at me differently. People treat me differently. And by “differently,” of course I mean “better.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Cooking

Chicken Soup for the Stomach

By Greg Ingersoll | Posted January 10th, 2010 at 13:38

Browning Chicken Thighs

Browning Chicken Thighs

A day after I roasted a chicken, I read this post from Michael Ruhlman about roasting chicken and the general perceived inability of people to cook. Needless to say, I felt pretty good about myself. Yesterday, I turned the remains of that chicken into soup despite Ruhlman’s toungue-in-cheek warning not to bother to try to make stock.

The stock was fairly straightforward. Bones, carrots, onions, herbs, celery, water, heat. Lots of waiting. Some skimming. Finally straining, chilling, more skimming.

The soup was a similar process. It starts with chicken thighs. These are cheap, and a lot of the time they actually taste like something unlike chicken breasts. I just browned these for a few minutes to get some color and flavor (both thanks to the Maillard reaction).

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Business
Lasers
Optics

Curse of Knowledge

By Greg Ingersoll | Posted December 17th, 2009 at 09:54

It’s been a while since I posted anything, and there’s a good reason for it: Quantum mechanics. My last post was in a series of three (or more) covering the dissection of a He-Ne laser that is still sitting on my desk at work. That post covered the power supply which is relatively straightforward to discuss even if the reader isn’t an electrical engineer. Ok, well, at least I could show pictures of the dusty old guts of a laser built thirty-plus years ago.

The next post in the series needs to deal with optical gain. And optical gain is based on photon absorption and emission which is in turn based on quantum energy levels in atoms. This isn’t a topic that lends itself to annotated photographs, and it tends to be almost exclusively mathematical in nature. Thinking about how to briefly cover the fundamentals of gain in a laser got me thinking about something else: the so-called Curse of Knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

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Electrical Engineering
Lasers

More. More Power.

By Greg Ingersoll | Posted November 22nd, 2009 at 15:34

This is the second post in my dismantling-a-borderline-antique-Helium-Neon-laser series. In the first post, the project was introduced, and it was mentioned that every laser has three primary components: a power source, gain, and feedback. This post discusses the power source for this laser.

You can put energy into a laser system in many different ways, and the preferred method typically depends on the gain medium in use (which will be discussed in a later post). These methods include flash lamps, electric current through a diode, other lasers, chemical reactions, and electric current through a discharge tube. The last in the list is what is used in a HeNe laser and other similar lasers that use a gas-mixture as the gain medium.

Side view under the hood. The glowing laser tube is obvious. In front of that is the main circuit board. To the right of that is the transformer. And at the far right is the power switch. In the back of the frame is the mains power cord connected to the wall.

Side view under the hood. The glowing laser tube is obvious. In front of that is the main circuit board. To the right of that is the transformer. And at the far right is the power switch. In the back of the frame is the mains power cord connected to the wall.

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