Why didn't I become an engineer?

Stupid, stupid me.  Why am I studying economics?  This afternoon, I had the great pleasure of going to an economics talk.  For those of you who have never had the pleasure of hearing an economics talk, let me explain what goes on.  First, there is a speaker.  Often he or she is a distinguished guest of the university, though in this case, it was man applying for a job.  After him, there are two assistant professors in the audience who are determined to prove to everyone that they're the smartest people in the room.  Then, there are two tenured professors who are determined to prove that they're actually smarter than the assistant professors.  Then, there are two more tenured professors who just like the sound of their own voices.  There's a grad student who's too dumb to realize he doesn't have any clue what anyone else is talking about.  Finally, there are about 25 people who are bored to tears, and struggling to keep their heads upright throughout this travesty.

By the time the hour and a half was finished, the speaker had made it through his introduction, and the assistant professor made it through 200 bullet points about how he would have estimated the equation he assumed would follow from the introduction, using data the speaker didn't have

So next time you're wondering why the Federal Reserve wasn't better able to prevent or respond to the financial credit, take comfort knowing that some assistant professor from Oregon has a really big penis.

But then it was over and the real fun started.  Last week, I purchased for myself a Texas Instruments ez430 Chronos Wireless Development System Tool in a Watch.  You know Texas Instruments?  They're the company that's really good at dropping revenue 68% and closing plants.

Let me tell you, this thing is really cool.  The watch has a temperature sensor, barometer, tri-axial accelerometer, and is fully reprogrammable if you're into that sort of thing.

Buying it was the easy part.  Figuring out how to use it was a little more challenging.  I have a wee bit of programming under my belt, but I've never had to deal with hardware/software interaction before.  For my first project, I was hoping to take advantage of the watch's accelerometer as an analytic tool to support my chronic fencing addiction.  The long list of things I hope(d) it could do would bore anyone who isn't a fencer, but the gist of it is I wanted to gain potential insight into a fencer's movement that might not be available to the naked eye.

Successful implementation of my vision includes lots of matrix algebra, which would most easily be performed in MATLAB, which is good for me, because MATLAB is the programming environment I'm most comfortable in.  All I had to do was figure out how to get MATLAB to interact with the stupid watch.  As I mentioned, I had never done any hardware/software interaction before, and learning how to do it required the frequent crashing of my computer as punishment for my poor code.

After just a little bit longer than it should have taken me to get the general interface programmed, tonight at practice, it was finally time to try it out.  The first thing I needed was a way to mount it on the fencer.  The watch is nice, but the hand position is far too erratic for my purposes (though measuring the hand would be a good extension of this project, Mr Assistant Professor).  So I co-opted an old heart rate monitor and some duct tape to make a nice little accelerometer belt.

Then I just had to sit back and wait for the data to come in.

In case you were wondering, the data I got was every bit as shitty and useless as it appears in that picture.  Well, not entirely useless, but not particularly useful as-is.  My linear algebra wasn't quite up to the task of filtering complicated tri-dimensional acceleration data and isolating the axes relevant to fencing.  So now I need to try to rewrite my data analysis using various tools I learn from Google.

But the thing is... this is fun.  Way more fun than economics.  Why didn't I become an engineer, where I'd have the luxury of working on fun projects like this all day long.  I'm sure being an engineer would suck if I actually was one, but from where I'm sitting, I am beyond jealous.