I hate repetition!

[johngalt47]

Now that I know I am a scanner, it helps, but I have more issues that complicate the problem...

I have always hated repetition and my memory was so good when I was young that I could not watch a movie or read a book a second time. Now that I am older and forgetful, I can do both, at least until I get to the point where I remember it.

Anyway, although I wish I knew everything, I have no interest in formal study. I can watch a youtube video or read a little on whatever subject interests me at the time but I don't want to put any effort into it. I absolutely abhor actually working. The problem is that I still need to find a way to supplement my income.

I am not enough of an expert at anything such that I can lecture off the cuff for hours. Now what???

[SquarePeg]

I sympathize completely.

So even though I have to do the same things over and over at my job, I have enough autonomy over how I do them that I can vary the process and make it seem different. I'm not saying that one day I sweep the right-handed, and the next day I sweep it left-handed. But if I need to generate data, I'll write a script for it in a certain language. The next time I might choose a different language.

[johngalt47]

Instead of creating a new topic I thought I would just hijack my own to write a bunch of stuff about myself.

As with some or maybe all of you, "Scanner" does not completely define me, although "Dreamer" fits pretty well. I am sort of an inventor, but I am not willing to actually see any of my ideas to fruition. I want someone else to work out the details. For example, I called the local university yesterday with an idea for their agriculture department.

Although I actually had a long career in the petro/chemical engineering business, I was sort of like a duck out of water. This came to a head when I started working as an engineer. If you have ever worked with a real engineer, you know what I mean. In general they are the antithesis of a scanner. Now part of this may be because, unlike "real" engineers, I don't think linearly. I also rely on intuition. It also seems to me that my subconcious mind does some of my work for me.

As a result of this realization I began to wonder exactly what made me different than the engineers with whom I worked. Yesterday I wondered if there is a way to determine how my brain is different from a non-scanner with the same IQ.

When I was 20 I got drafted and chose to enlist in the AirForce. While in basic training I took a test to determine my aptitude to learn languages. I did well enough that they called me in to see if I would be interested in going to language school. The two languages available at the time were Russian and Korean. I declined ( which I regret) and they asked me what I wanted to do and I said that I wanted to work on missles. They let me work on a secret air to ground nuclear missle carried by the B-52 bomber until they made it obsolete in 1975.

[Elaine Glimme]

Working for EPA or some such agency would be fun and would put your engineering skills to work, but I'll bet that job won't be available, or will be very frustrating in the near future.

Can you afford part - time?

Does anything opposite of engineering appeal to you? It sounds as if you'd like to be an inventor, but bypass the boring part of invention.

Good luck.

[SquarePeg]

I'm an engineer. I do well in an R&D environment. A scanner is well-suited in this environment, IMO, because of the need to learn many things quickly and combine new ideas in novel ways.

[johngalt47]

I have a health problem right now that precludes just about everything. The disk between C6 and C7 is impinging on the nerves going to my left arm so I can’t sit or stand for more than a couple of minutes. In any case, R&Dsounds like fun except that I want to come and go as I please, which does not usually sit well with employers! LOL

I just remembered something. Back around 1985 we were doing a project for Shell Western E&P. It was a very interesting project whose purpose was to extract carbon dioxide out of the ground in southern Colorado and send it to west Texas to pump back into the ground to get more oil. There were eleven wells that got the CO2 out of the ground and sent it to a centrally located compressor. At each well site was a metal building containing instruments and gauges with which to measure the quantity of CO2 coming out of the ground.

Also in the building was equipment to send the data over wires to a control center. I asked my supervisor if I could come up with a way to test the equipment semi-automatically. He agreed so for the next couple of weeks I sort of worked from home inventing a way of testing. The CO2 flow transmitter sent pulses to a flow computer. The electronics to do the testing were not that hard but the mechanical part taught me a huge lesson. I built a plastic bar to hold the contacts so each input on the terminal strip could be tested sequentially. Each terminal on the strip used a little spring. I bought some springs like those used in ball point pens. Each spring was relatively easy to compress so I never gave a thought to how much pressure would be required to compress all 16 of them at once.

When I was finished building the testing device I was shocked and freaked out to find that I could not exert enough force to compress all 16 springs at the same time!

Last week my kick was watching videos about quantum physics and the general theory of relativity. I am just about saturated with that so it is on to something else this coming week.

One thing I think would be interesting is doing PET scans of various people while asking them to remember things or perform mental tasks. I would like to know if it is possible to quantify a person’s memory capacity.

Speaking of inventing, that may be my strong suit, but it has to just happen. I can’t force myself to invent something.

Thanks for the feedback!

[johngalt47]

I just remembered something else I invented.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s we did not have the internet. What we had were bulletin board systems or BBSes. I used AutoCad in those days to create and revise engineering drawings. Since I hated repetition and manual typing so much, I tried to automate the process where possible. One of the guys at work was an expert at AutoLisp, which was the programming language native to AutoCad. I preferred to program in Turbo Pascal. AutoCad supports a feature called scripting, which automates revising multiple drawings. The problem is that if there are many drawings, creating the script was tedious.

I thought of a way to automatically create the first script in the sequence by capturing a user’s keystrokes and writing them to a text file. I needed help with part of the program so I contacted the experts on one of the BBSes that I frequented. One of them responded and sent me the code I needed. I combined it with the rest of the code I had written and it actually worked!

[SquarePeg]

I'm smiling now, because scripting AutoCAD and writing AutoLisp is a minor part of my job that I enjoy doing. This activity is somewhat frowned upon, but I justify it by saying that automating any design process results in fewer mistakes and faster throughput.

Many years ago, I got called in to a job interview for a position as a Design Automation Engineer. I was just out of school (but I had a great deal of design experience already), so they thought I'd be a good fit. However, I decided that I wanted to do the actual design work and not support engineers who did the design work. In retrospect, I wish I had taken that job. Once you do a few designs, it gets tedious, monotonous, etc. But finding a way to automate a part of the process is like designing once and not having to do it again. Plus, there's more human interaction. Since then, I've looked for jobs just like this, but I've never seen one advertised anywhere.

Forcing myself to invent something.... I'm sort of doing that now. But I find myself coming up with new ways to do other things instead, and I wish I could focus more on those ideas rather than the thing I'm supposed to invent. Well, the Scanner Daybook is a great "device" for recording those "distracting" ideas. I'm working with PTFE now, an interesting substance. I'm trying to convince people that it's not reasonable to expect an assembly that contains PTFE to behave linearly over temperature because PTFE undergoes a phase change at 19C and otherwise responds nonlinearly WRT temperature. They just don't get it.

[inspiresuccess]

. I can watch a youtube video or read a little on whatever subject interests me at the time but I don't want to put any effort into it.

It sounds like you really enjoy life! That's a good thing.

The making money part, I don't have any suggestions right now. I'll see how your thread progresses once you've shared more about some possible work interests you might have.

Personally, I'm a "diver" so I may not be of much help, but we'll see. I'll stop back soon and read the rest of the posts here.