Warning: Life Under Construction

What a week! You would've thought that the end of the world was about to strike and the wicked sins of mismanagement were about to be called in for atonement. All this because a tester built in the early 90s had died on Monday. Production halted. The wailing and gnashing of my company's 'leaders' began.

Ahh, pressure. Enough heat and pressure makes a dirty, soft lump of coal into a shiny, hard diamond. I don't know about shiny but I do believe that I became more valuable when the pressure for a replacement test system hit my 'to-do' list on Tuesday. Just so there is no misunderstanding, the big boys that I work for are reasonable. They wanted everything running in just a few days and without spending any money. Lucky me. And I'm not saying that because it's National Sarcasm Month. I really mean, "Lucky Me!" If the powers-that-be had not had a moment of weakness a few months ago and spent $4500 on a programming system called LabVIEW, I would not have been able to save their bacon from the fire this week. So instead of taking me about two to three weeks to write a new program, I was able to create it in 16 hours! The hardware end still took almost 40 hours to build. Of course, in order to not spend any of their retirement money on much needed equipment, I had to rob parts from another major project project. But that will be a crisis for another day. For now, it's all good. In three and a half days, I had production running again by this morning, with much quicker test time too. Once upper management learned that money was flowing into back into their yearly bonus, life was good.

My bosses don't have a clue about the effort that it took get things going. Nor do they care. However, I was amazed by what I was able to do as a novice through the Labview programming format. So over the next few posts, I'll try to give you a better idea of how revolutionary this program format is and what you can accomplish in your business, research and development, and even school projects.