Shamelessly blowing one's own horn
Oct. 8th, 2008 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
murakoziHot on the heels of the dinosaur toy post, I just got a phone call from the project manager. To quote Invader Zim: "Why am I so amazing?"
The contract that takes up most of my time at work right now is a followup to the one I was on last year. It's being run by the same entity, just from a different location. Unfortunately, the #2 gov't guy on the contract seems to have an axe to grind. It was more than apparent at the kickoff meeting last month that he's got a hostile attitude toward both my company and one of our subcontractors. I dunno what caused it, but it's there.
So last week, he decides to 'test our capabilities' by sending us a file with some sensor measurements and other data with the instructions that we were to report back this week telling him what's significant about it. Of course, the first thing we did was to send copies to the subs and our KY office and have a conference call. We had another the next day, Friday, to see what everyone's preliminary thoughts were.
Now most everything about this was technical beyond my understanding. I'm not one of the subject experts, after all. During the discussion, though, it came up that there were UTM coordinates - minus the zone data - given for the two sensor arrays. Somehow one of the people decided that the coordinates were in a national park in California. The question was brought up whether we could be sure of that since we didn't have the zone for the coordinates. It got bounced around a bit, then people kind of decided that analyzing the sensor data was more important.
Since I had nothing better to do, or at least nothing I could contribute to the sensor stuff, I poked around with the coordinates. The CA location was in zone 10. I decided to see where they pointed in other zones. Using a UTM/lat-long converter, I got rough lat/long coordinates and plugged 'em into mapquest. Each different zone was 6 degrees east of the prevous one. So I printed screenshots of each location across the US and looked to see what I had.
Well hey, zone 11 was in Nevada, smack dab in the middle of an Air Force base. that looked interesting. Zone 12 was just south of Ft. Carson in CO. Some of the other zones were near potentially interesting spots too, including one not far from our KY offices. Heck, going around the world they passed some spots of interest in the middle east as well.
But knowing the Gov't, the NV one kind of jumped out. There's a lot of stuff done at that location. Unfortunately, Mapquest's satellite view didn't zoom in to all that great an image. So I went to Google maps. Fortunately, the rough coordinates were smack in the middle of an easily identifiable chunk of mountains so I was able to locate 'em easily enough. Zooming in there, I noticed a water tower like structure and near it an isolated building. Not far away were some other buildings and a couple little compounds.
So I printed pictures, showed 'em to the PM who thought they were interesting and such. Yesterday, while we were preparing the report to give to the gov't, he asked a couple questions that'd come up. The govt's response to one of them was essentially "If you don't find the location, you've failed." So we prettied up the screenshots with some labels and such and gambled on Nevada.
The call from the PM just now was him telling me he'd just delivered the report. The gov't guy was apparently suprised that we'd identified exact site.
Yay me.
So by sating my own curiosity on something we'd thought wasn't important, I managed to end up lookin like a wunderkind.
The contract that takes up most of my time at work right now is a followup to the one I was on last year. It's being run by the same entity, just from a different location. Unfortunately, the #2 gov't guy on the contract seems to have an axe to grind. It was more than apparent at the kickoff meeting last month that he's got a hostile attitude toward both my company and one of our subcontractors. I dunno what caused it, but it's there.
So last week, he decides to 'test our capabilities' by sending us a file with some sensor measurements and other data with the instructions that we were to report back this week telling him what's significant about it. Of course, the first thing we did was to send copies to the subs and our KY office and have a conference call. We had another the next day, Friday, to see what everyone's preliminary thoughts were.
Now most everything about this was technical beyond my understanding. I'm not one of the subject experts, after all. During the discussion, though, it came up that there were UTM coordinates - minus the zone data - given for the two sensor arrays. Somehow one of the people decided that the coordinates were in a national park in California. The question was brought up whether we could be sure of that since we didn't have the zone for the coordinates. It got bounced around a bit, then people kind of decided that analyzing the sensor data was more important.
Since I had nothing better to do, or at least nothing I could contribute to the sensor stuff, I poked around with the coordinates. The CA location was in zone 10. I decided to see where they pointed in other zones. Using a UTM/lat-long converter, I got rough lat/long coordinates and plugged 'em into mapquest. Each different zone was 6 degrees east of the prevous one. So I printed screenshots of each location across the US and looked to see what I had.
Well hey, zone 11 was in Nevada, smack dab in the middle of an Air Force base. that looked interesting. Zone 12 was just south of Ft. Carson in CO. Some of the other zones were near potentially interesting spots too, including one not far from our KY offices. Heck, going around the world they passed some spots of interest in the middle east as well.
But knowing the Gov't, the NV one kind of jumped out. There's a lot of stuff done at that location. Unfortunately, Mapquest's satellite view didn't zoom in to all that great an image. So I went to Google maps. Fortunately, the rough coordinates were smack in the middle of an easily identifiable chunk of mountains so I was able to locate 'em easily enough. Zooming in there, I noticed a water tower like structure and near it an isolated building. Not far away were some other buildings and a couple little compounds.
So I printed pictures, showed 'em to the PM who thought they were interesting and such. Yesterday, while we were preparing the report to give to the gov't, he asked a couple questions that'd come up. The govt's response to one of them was essentially "If you don't find the location, you've failed." So we prettied up the screenshots with some labels and such and gambled on Nevada.
The call from the PM just now was him telling me he'd just delivered the report. The gov't guy was apparently suprised that we'd identified exact site.
Yay me.
So by sating my own curiosity on something we'd thought wasn't important, I managed to end up lookin like a wunderkind.