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

[Loscha]

That is severely harsh.
I've had not that much work and money thrown out by people i lived
with -- thinking that my Crumar Crucianelli electric piano was junk
because it didn't switch on! Never mind the 240 germanium transistors
in it. The TOS chips.
Was probably just a fuse, but, I'll never know.

I'm gonna go and have a cold one on your honor.
Because, as strongbad says, a one that is not cold, is scarcely a one at all.

(a cold Dr Pepper that is  -- despite it being $2.50 a can in
Melbourne, and I'm a diabetic -- I was looking for an excuse to have
one anyway!)

-Ed

On 4/11/07, Aaron Lanterman <lanterma at ece.gatech.edu> 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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