[sdiy] 300-400 student hours of work, tossed out by our custodial staff

[Chris K]

Outch, my condolences, in a perfect world whoever decided to throw that 
stuff out should get fired, but alas school bureaucracy chances are 
someone will turn the tables.

- ck

Aaron Lanterman wrote:

>
> Most of you know that in the Fall and Spring 2006 semesters, I taught 
> a special topics class on the Theory and Design of Music Synthesizers. 
> (If any of you have ever been curious to see how I lecture, most of my 
> lectures from the Spring semester are up on the website in RealVideo 
> format. You probably only don't know that if you've recently joined 
> the list.)
>
> The final project consists of designing, prototyping, and constructing 
> a modular synthesizer circuit. I had two boxes, one containing the 
> projects from the Fall and the other from the Spring. I was fortunate 
> to be able to show these to Paul S. in person a few weeks ago ad get 
> his feedback.
>
> My eventual plan was to mount them all in a nice case with a nice 
> front panel, and put it the Music Dept. so that Tech students could 
> make music for years to come with circuits my students designed and 
> built.
>
> I showed off the circuits when I spoke at our graduate seminar. Since 
> my parking deck is some distance from our main classroom building, I 
> left the boxes under a table in our mail room, planning to come back 
> on another day at night when I could park closer and get the boxes 
> without fear of a ticket.
>
> On Monday, I went to retrieve the boxes of circuit boards, and they 
> were gone. Further investigation revealed that, on Friday, the 
> custodial staff mistook them for trash and threw threm out.
>
> I was willing to go dumpster diving to retrieve them, but it turns out 
> it had already been compacted and shipped off; contemplate hundreds of 
> dollars in parts and around 300 to 400 person-hours of time in 
> construction and debugging, crushed and hauled off to a landfill.
>
> The designs are still documented in reports and schematics (I still 
> need to post the projects from the Fall), but the wonder of the 
> students' unique first-effort constructions is now lost.
>
> I am beyond angry-beyond-comprehension and gone to 
> depressed-beyond-comprehension; want-to-punch-someone-and-scream has 
> now gone to crawl-in-the-corner-and-cry.
>
> - Aaron
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>
>
> Dr. Aaron Lanterman, Asst. Prof.
> and Demetrius T. Paris Junior Prof.  Voice:  404-385-2548
> College of Electri. and Comp. Eng.   Fax:    404-894-8363
> Georgia Institute of Technology      E-mail: lanterma at ece.gatech.edu
> Mail Code 0250                       Web:    
> users.ece.gatech.edu/~lanterma
> Atlanta, GA 30332                    Office: Centergy 5212
>
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