Sunday, April 17, 2005

Box Full of ... Voltage References

Something reminded me of this...

Years ago, while at National Instruments, I had to setup an experiment to test the long-term voltage drift (essentially the pink noise, but it turns out it also gave a good indication of the temperature coefficient for shorter time scales) of 48 voltage references over a few months. There's a long (and very interesting, trust me!) story involving how this experiment was setup and why we needed the results, and it leads to me building a fancy box... On the outside of which I wrote,
"Box Full of Voltage References" -- Wilco 1995

I'm pretty sure I also wrote something like...
"Think you might like to read"

after it... (you see, I was continuously reading all 48 references over and over and over and over again...) In fact, I'm pretty sure I parodied almost the whole song in a sort of tru-geek speak.

I got a chuckle out of it. I think my boss (he's pretty "hip") got a kick out of it too. However, because the experiment going on inside the box was pretty loud, we had to cover the box to keep it from disturbing the people sitting near to the box. We didn't have much to cover it with, but LUCKILLY my boss had a bunch of his dirty clothes in his office (for some reason?), so we piled them on top of the box, so no one else got to share in my chuckling. So now you can, and everything in the world is right again.
 

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