People ask me what I do for a liv­ing.  There are sev­eral answers to this ques­tion that, effec­tively, mean the same thing but dif­fer based on audience:

* telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions — This is the quick answer that nobody ques­tions.  The typ­i­cal response is “oh.”  Peo­ple fig­ure it has some­thing to do with the phone company.

* I design net­work routers — “lit­tle boxy things that let mul­ti­ple com­put­ers talk to each other.”  This usu­ally prompts a lit­tle more con­ver­sa­tion than the sim­ple “telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions” answer.  Most peo­ple come to the real­iza­tion that this is some kind of hid­den infra­struc­ture at their work that some­one else maintains–it lets them save their Pow­er­Point slides to the net­work share.

* firmware — “It’s like soft­ware, but in things you don’t typ­i­cally think of as computers–things you don’t usu­ally want to crash: cell­phones, tele­vi­sions, cars, and the like.”  This usu­ally prompts a pro­longed ques­tion and answer session.

But now, I can pro­vide a more visual demon­stra­tion of the sort of things I do at work.  I visu­al­ize Matrix Code and cre­ate fireworks.

Okay, so what I do is actu­ally a lot more bor­ing than this, but I thought this was a fun demo of one of the more enter­tain­ing R&D projects I got to do recently.

P.S. that pur­ple thing in the back­ground is my yoga mat.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. Moral Dilem­mas Abound
2. Pens
3. Win­dows Horizon
4. The num­ber you have dialed has changed.  Please make a note of it.
5. I saw you!  On your bike!

Tagged as: demo, firmware, lcd, network, routers, telecommunications