You know, I love the new year. I definitely fall into the group that makes new resolutions only to watch them crash and burn more often than not. Despite this fact, I still love to make them (albeit a bit more silently than I used to) and honestly get off on the excitement of working to keep them. I suppose if I thought about it, I could easily realize the fact that I’ll likely fail and to try again really wouldn’t be worth the effort but the other side of the coin is that fact that I will have fulfilled them for a short time and can look back and tell myself that I stuck to it for a time at least. And you know what, next year I’ll be making them up all over again (and maybe you’ll see my second live journal entry then :-))
Today was also the first day back to work after two weeks. Thankfully, everything is still the way I remember it. No major issues and I might even suggest that they didn’t even notice that I was gone…other than the personality that I bring to work of course. To my way of thinking, this is the way it should be. If I’m doing my job right, one of my guys should be able to fill in for me and keep the bus moving. Does it move better when I’m there, I’m certain that it does but there is no reason that any part of it should stop. Anyways, as it turns out I took today off and just forgot. Already there, so no point going home. This year, I really want to focus on writing, training, and documentation. I’ve got a lot of things I would like to pass along to make other people’s job easier so that will be the focus that I’m concentrating on.
So, I started with an exercise. What makes me a good troubleshooter and problem solver (I skipped to the fact that I was good at both) and how can I teach or share those points with others. Honestly, this is a lot harder than it sounds. It’s one thing to say that I have 84 ranks in T/S (troubleshooting for those of you googling it :-)), but quite another to define that specifically. some of the thoughts I came up with were…
- information management
- creativity
- logical thinking
- patience
- non-competitive (this one was interesting to me)
- willingness to be wrong
- certain amount of fearlessness
- experience
- high level of equipment knowledge
- individualism
I actually came up with a few more, but those were the big points from my list. So, after this now onto how do I give others these traits…or at least help them get better with them. Some were easy (equipment knowledge, information management, experience) but others are damn hard (patience, creativity, willingness to be wrong, non-competitive). Honestly, this project is going to be a very long crazy one but I’m really looking forward to the journey. I think that there will be a lot to learn and I might even be a better person in the end.
I also learned about LEDs. Now, I’m a professional in the electronics field. Simply put, I have a lot of experience and am considered pretty knowledgeable. One of the things that I honestly love about my job, field, and the group that I work with is that I don’t have to pretend to know everything. It started out simple enough, how does an LED emit light and how is it different from a lightbulb (it get’s complicated pretty fast but basically a lightbulb emits photons while an LED excites the semiconduction to expel photons…much more complicated but that’s the basics). The fun thing here however, was the fact that this simple question really spurned several of us on to figure this out and once we found out that red LED were made of arsnic immedately begin to see if google could tell us how many LED we could eat before dying (google doesn’t have this answer and really should look into this). I tell people that I’m always learning new things, but today I really was learning new things. All in all, it was pretty cool to say the least.
Well, onto other things.
Out