Tech refugee

submitted by [deleted] from (self.Introductions)

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[–][deleted] 7 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

DOS was king. X-wing, Crystal Caves, Wolfenstein and DooM, I used to play DooM so much I would have nightmares about being in the game. My dad had DOS with Norton Commander as a file manager, and I remember being absolutely amazed when he installed windows 3.1 and it ran for the first time. That was when you did stuff in DOS and ran Windows when you needed to, I think it was better that way. It was like being headless but having a GUI on demand. He had a set of disks called the 'Windows Bible' that wasn't about the Bible but had a ton of free and demo software, and it included a lot of games from Apogee and Id (which I think are the same company?) like Commander Keen and BioHazard. Good times.

Didn't realize I was talking to the bossman, I like your show already, I've already been here for a couple hours and every time I click save there's a new response. Phew, gonna have to call off soon.

But yeah, it is an incremental nightmare, and it's all getting outsourced for cheaper and cheaper. I don't even do 'tech', I make ads and throw money at keywords, and solicit people on LinkedIn. No one needs me to write anything, they just want me to talk up customers and make sure the web site still functions. Occasionally I put out a dumpster fire by restoring a backup, or sometimes I stare blankly at log files wondering why someone would put so much work into trying to GET <script> into a company that, in the grand scheme of things, makes so little money. That fRMI burn sounds maddening, I would lose it. Good tech, I worked on RADAR, TACAN and ILS before moving indoors, so I get the RF stuff, but stories like that make me boil. It's not the first 'do this while your new to prove yourself, oh it works whoops you're fired' I've heard.

Well this has been fun, but I've just spent the past couple hours responing just to replies to my intro post (holy cow), thanks for running the place, what a welcome. I'm hoping it's been long enough from the rFMI fisaco that maybe you'll talk about what you working on at the time, maybe? I still really like RF stuff.

[–]magnora7 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Thanks for the chat.

The fMRI stuff was detecting brain activity as part of a realtime feedback experiment. Basically we had a participant in the fMRI machine, then they would look at pictures on a screen telling them to think about certain things, or try to imagine doing or saying certain things. Then we would watch the brain's activity appear on the fMRI machine readouto, with about a 6 second delay. We could then correlate physical activity in specific brain regions to certain types of mental activity. I basically programmed the entire real-time feedback experiment myself for $12/hr, and then was promptly fired when it was finished. And not only did they fire me, but they created false allegations against me and I was escorted out by security on my last day, not allowed to return to my desk to fetch my belongings. I had worked in that facility for 12 years. I was put on retainer and full salary but I had to be accessable phone for a month, to ensure I hadn't backdoored the software somehow. It was terrible.

[–]bobbobbybob 8 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

I used to program those fMRI machines and the software used in them. EDITED to remove self dox doh

weird that we have that in common. Where was it?

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

That's cool we have that in common. I was writing mostly overlays to interact with the machine rather than the machine functionality itself. I have a lot of respect for that though because it's certainly complex. I'd rather not say where so I don't doxx myself.

[–]bobbobbybob 9 insightful - 3 fun9 insightful - 2 fun10 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

fair enough. I've doxxed myself to three people at least if they ever read that post!

maybe i'll delete it. not been that careless before. But yeah, was working on the machine protocols themselves, mostly, plus lots of backend coding to try and manage massive datasets for the data analysis in the days before big data. Huge parallel drive arrays acting as swap disk for big endian unix systems. Did a bit of work on the aux systems running it all. Was heaps of fun LSD helped :D