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bdi wrote: > At 05:38 PM 23/08/1998 -0400, Wrolf Courtney wrote: > bdi wrote: > >> >> >> > >> >> >> Wrolf, exactly what kind of engineer are you? > > Wrolf wrote: > >> >> >OK. This one's for free. > >> >> >A practical one. > >> >> >Wrolf > >> >> > > bdi wrote: > >> >> Does this mean you don't have an engineering > >> >> degree or some professional qualification? > > Wrolf wrote: > >> >Great. This is a new question, not a restatement of someone > >> >else's. And you did not cross post it to cavers etc. > >> > > >> >I will answer your question. I usually answer with a wealth of detail, > >> >is this OK, or do you want a simple yes/no answer. > > bdi wrote: > >> A yes or a no will do, thank you. > > Wrolf wrote: > >Why certainly. Would you like this to be an advance on your study of > >DiR vs. Hogarthian vs general cave diving vs. general tech gear rigging > >techniques? > > Wrolf, you supported some observations > by referring to yourself as an engineer. > I simply asked what kind of engineer. > > In response you have written quite a lot > of nonsense and bullshit. > > Why not just answer the question? Why slide > around? > > You are the one who wants to be regarded as > an engineer. I'm asking what engineering > qualifications do you have? > > regards billyw OK, OK. I have several times referred to myself as an engineer in discussions, during the many years that techdiver has been in existence. And I have used that description with an intent to appeal to my authority, rather than to reason. And I do not see it in the archives. I am a computer scientist. Graduated 1986 from SUNY at Stonybrook, B.S. (cum laude), major in Computer Science. Computer Science was regarded there, as at Imperial College, where I had previously studied Computing Science (sic), as an engineering discipline. At Imperial, the Department of Computing is in the City and Guilds College (rather than the Royal School of Mines, or the Royal College of Science), and at least when I was there, part of the orientation was that we were (budding) engineers. Does not sound controversial today, but back in 1980, everyone wanted a piece of the pie. The mathematicians liked that Turing stuff, wanted it all as a branch of applied mathematics. (Some of) the electrical engineers knew that computers were just programmable logic arrays plus memory. That was their stuff, and they wanted it all too. Heck, some universities divided Computer Science between the two, to enrichment of neither, but killing the discipline. I was pretty into this, having been a teenage hacker who learned Algol 60 at thirteen; helped a friend with his SCMP-II kit (he was good with the soldering gun and the circuit diag, but he didn't even know what a register was!); and picked up babes at a high school math conference at the University of Kent with my ability to do some BASIC programming with the free accounts we were given. The faculty were much relieved that I had not picked up bad programming habits, unlike about half the new class, who were getting BASIC programming in high school en masse for the first time. But I had been turned on to structured programming by a mentor, a former M.Sc.(Computer Science) alum of Imperial. His thirteenth birthday gift to me was the classic, Structured Programming (Dijkstra, Hoare, Dahl), still in my collection. My fellow students were amazed and perplexed when they would ask me how I had mastered Pascal so quickly, and I would wave at them the Wirth's minuscule Pascal Language Reference Manual. But I had Algol-60 and (most of, no one knows all of) Algol-68 under my belt, the immediate precursors. I pseudo coded and top down refined away (far better than every before I went to Imperial), and after a while, I had "eaten" the LRM, and it stayed in my locker. Meanwhile, my personal and family life went south. A long way south. I did not complete the second year. After bumming around for a while unable to find work (this was the early 1980s, in Britain), I left for a new life in Israel. Leave it all behind, rediscover my Jewish heritage. Which I did. I also discovered that I genuinely was really into computers. That once I had looked outside myself, my family situation, my dead brother ... that then I could look back in. And I did not want to do Computer Science for my family. I did not want to do it just because it was such a safe choice, and my uncle had even shown the way. Not for my teachers, nor even for my mentor who turned me on to it. Not for Jeremy, my closest, bestest friend, my dead brother, whom I had sworn to protect when I was 2 1/2 and he was 1 1/2, and had no one else to protect him. It was for me. I just liked this stuff. It was cool. I mean, like horn clause logic does not have negation, but you really need negation by failure to make Prolog useful at all. And as I learned at Stonybrook, there are very good reasons for that. During Stonybrook to help pay for it all: part time small business programming, and net installation and configuration. Then a small (but now very successful) Wall Street software firm, to get into the big time, programmer plus network guy (since I knew how, from the last job). Then two bulge bracket investment banking firms, originally as a programmer with a net.sideline, but after a couple of years, full-time net.geek. Immediately before my son was born, moved out of the financial industry. I had pretty much realized what the pattern was here, and since I was not female, I could not do the hanging on to the glass ceiling that they could. And I wanted to be able to not cry at my leaving party. I am serious. You never saw a harder worker than Dan. If you turned up at 2:00 a.m. and Dan was not there, you were in the wrong place. And I certainly did not see them significantly slack off after his girl was born. He was a lifer, born to it. Swore that he would do what it took, he wanted to stay. Had our boss behind him 200% - who else would do what he did to manage the Fixed Income systems (I did the Equities). When the order came down to fire him, Bill had no choice. I could see in his eyes. And then Dan cried as we walked away from the party. When my wife's due date was set, I knew I had only about two or three months after the delivery. C'est la vie. The Street is no place to raise a kid. Bounced around a bit, trying management. But I am an engineer, not a manager of engineers and associated staffs. I work now in a firm that handles back office processing of advertising orders. I am one of three in the router group. Router configuration/troubleshooting; performance monitoring and programming; internet access and security. Relevant? Not much. Was mentioning that I am an engineer relevant, or a chest pulling reference to (one's own) authority, rather than to facts and the theories that can be built on them? Yes. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Peccavi. Now for your turn. If you do not have the data, just call for help on, say, techdiver. Or even cavediver. Check carefully the photographs in Tom Mount's "Mixed Gas", in the gear configuration chapter. I have already received two fairly complete replies myself! -- Wrolf Wrolf's Wreck: http://www.concentric.net/~Wrolf Wrolf's Net.Wreck: http://www.concentric.net/~Wrolf/netmgmt.shtml -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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