I remember how excited I was when I wrote a few lines of assembly that made an LED blink on a pic14f84, I was super excited the first time I installed Gentoo and worked through the LFS book. At the top might be the first time I used KDE and got X11 working! Oh, and vimtutor!
Nowadays, I've noticed that the moments things get mixed up with money (i.e. programming professionally) the excitement is replaced for at best pragmatism and at worst drudgery.
Thus for me I find excitement in things that I can't possibly think how they can be cash from, like learning Esperanto or Racket, photography, cooking, HAM radio...
It's kind of like when you pay your best friends to help you move and the best friend dynamic changes because you are now his "boss"...
“Guys, it’s taken you 90 minutes to clear out this room. I gave you a 60 minute deadline. I’m deducting one beer and one slice of pizza from your payment.”
Have you tried out Software Defined Radio yet? It's amazing what you can do with GNU radio and a $20 USB dongle. I build a flowgraph that picks up the local VOR Aircraft Navigation Aid, and plots the direction to it, all by reading and experimenting.
You can also play with audio, to get a feel for the otherwise silly concept of negative frequencies, and how they actually turn out to be useful. It's fun stuff.
I took a look but it was very brief given that I broke my RTL-SDR :-D but I was using it to decode FM radio RDS (probably bit more that what I could chew!)
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I remember how excited I was when I wrote a few lines of assembly that made an LED blink on a pic14f84, I was super excited the first time I installed Gentoo and worked through the LFS book. At the top might be the first time I used KDE and got X11 working! Oh, and vimtutor!
Nowadays, I've noticed that the moments things get mixed up with money (i.e. programming professionally) the excitement is replaced for at best pragmatism and at worst drudgery.
Thus for me I find excitement in things that I can't possibly think how they can be cash from, like learning Esperanto or Racket, photography, cooking, HAM radio...
It's kind of like when you pay your best friends to help you move and the best friend dynamic changes because you are now his "boss"...
“Guys, it’s taken you 90 minutes to clear out this room. I gave you a 60 minute deadline. I’m deducting one beer and one slice of pizza from your payment.”
STRIKE!!!!
hehe!! Exactly
Have you tried out Software Defined Radio yet? It's amazing what you can do with GNU radio and a $20 USB dongle. I build a flowgraph that picks up the local VOR Aircraft Navigation Aid, and plots the direction to it, all by reading and experimenting.
You can also play with audio, to get a feel for the otherwise silly concept of negative frequencies, and how they actually turn out to be useful. It's fun stuff.
I took a look but it was very brief given that I broke my RTL-SDR :-D but I was using it to decode FM radio RDS (probably bit more that what I could chew!)
Fortunately, the price keeps dropping, you can probably replace it for less than you originally paid.