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06/22/2004: "what I do"

This month has sucked for adding entries here. I've simply been way too busy at work to do much writing, and I've now fallen out of my one-a-week habit as well. There's still lots to write about, but most of it is the stuff I'm doing at work.

Up until now I've been fairly private about personal details. I don't say where I live, or what I do, or name names. Well, as my job is sucking up so much time but is interesting enough that I could write about it, I'm going to formally change my policy and tell you what I do, in order to allow me to tell you what's going on.

I went through school to become a Mechanical Engineer, and lo and behold that's what I am. More specifically, however, I'm a Product Design Engineer - most of my experience has been in designing consumer products of various kinds. There's a fair whack of heavy industry experience in there too, but I've decided that heavy industry isn't where I want to be. It's not nearly as interesting as product design, and working with huge diesel-powered hydraulic machines just really doesn't mesh with my environmentally-friendly side. So product design it is.

My last job was heavy industry, and I moved down the road to product design. And right now, one product is sucking up all my time.

The company I work for produces fairly mundane consumer products for the most part, although there is a heavy push into other areas that are going to make this job much more interesting. What has kept me from writing regularly since April has been a 3-wheeled electric trike that I'm redesigning. It's not actually my company's product, we've just been "hired" to actually produce the thing, which essentially meant redesigning the whole damned thing to make it manufacturable. (The guys who developed it did a great job of marketing the thing, but couldn't design their way out of a paper bag.)

Anyhoo, that's the brief overview. I'll go into more details later, but suffice to say it's keeping me quite busy, but I think there's light at the end of the tunnel. Stay tuned!