The joy of nightouts

Over 6 years of college + grad school life as a Computer Engineer/Scientist....you get used to being nocturnal. The sights and sounds of computers, oscilloscopes, bread boards, chip testers, wires, resistors, caps, LEDs, soldering irons etc....bring you comfort on a seemingly endless road punctuated by deadlines, projects, presentations and demos.

The most memorable of these experiences are the late night lab sessions. Bunches of geeks/dorks/nerds/me-types hunched over PCs and other random equipment....trying to get our logics to work. Hitting keyboards, jabbing at the screens, shaking our heads in frustration, nervous laughter and desperate deliberation. It's all there. How is this fun again? It just is. It's part of the geekhood experience. These are the times you get to bond with your teammates and learn truckloads. Welcome respites come in the form of trips to the vending machines and water coolers., animated sleep-deprived conversations with other fellow tortured souls, and the (passive-smoking) smoke breaks.

Then in the end it's all worth it when we get our programs to work or our boards to behave properly. That's when you look back at the infinite sleepless nights and say..."hey...that was fun".

Byte that chip,
$amrita$