My name is John:
I'm an uber dork and I love it. I'm happiest when I tinker with things and they don't blow up. I work at National Instruments in Austin, Texas, but I wouldn't call it working because I absolutely love my job! Every two weeks I get a check for just having fun.
Specifically, I'm in charge of making sure our switch product line and our customers get along. I spend a lot of time unscrambling other people's problems and am constantly challenged by new problems. I support well over 200 products; here's a couple chassis full of some of the various cards:
Each one of those card-looking-thingiess is a board full of relays. We do matrices, muxes, RF, high current, SPST/DT/4T/6T/4T, etc. Our products rock and it's great to stand behind a product line that works!
Right now we're working on 4 new products, one of which is a high current 7 SPST 40A FET switch. Since the day we started, our goal has been to start a car with it. The other day I decided we might as well try it and therefore spent an hour connecting our switch straight up to the starter of the waterloolabs car (if you haven't heard of Waterloo Labs, check them out). We got the motor to crank twice, but then the overcurrent protection of the relays kicked in to keep the module from melting down. Damn laws of physics! Since we designed it from the ground up, we've got a good idea on what to try next time (cyclical load balancing).
Believe it or not, I actually have a girlfriend. She's hiding behind a box:
I freakin' love Texas, as evidenced by my trusty flag that always goes biking with me:
On that note, and in case you haven't guessed already, I love biking!
And humorous, permanent "temporary" solutions, like this flusher on a urinal in West Texas:
And this BBQ pit:
(P.S. I love guns and shooting sports)
So that's a very quick introduction. I imagine once this bike gets running I'll share my journeys on it.
