He he he, that was fun.
So today at work we did a little thing called 'cat-and-mouse'. Ticom Geomatics, the place where Jess and I work, does geolocation. For those of you not in the defence industry...which should be most of you...geolocation is the science of scanning the airwaves for signals, listening to those signals, and then determing *precisely* where they came from. You don't have to understand the science, really, but Ticom has a bunch of antennas set up in various places around Austin and software that connects all of them. That software listens for various signal types and the does *SCIENCE* on them to tell you where it's coming from. Well I'm part of the algorithm development team (the people in charge of the SCIENCE), but I haven't gotten to see how the actual program runs yet.
Well that all changed today. They sent some people out into the world to pretend to be 'bad guys' and had them talk over walky-talkies. We sat in a room at Ticom and ran the software that does the geolocation.
It was neat. We set everything up and the data started flowing in, and as soon as we started getting hits, we were able to narrow down our search and eventually we tracked down where the 'bad guys' were and send a team (a guy in a car) out after them to attempt to make 'visual contact'. And it worked. We sent him to the right spot.
The really neat thing, though, was that we could listen to what they were saying, and there were a couple of times where a familiar voice came over the airwaves. Yep, Jess was out there spinning out code names and encoded phrases and all sorts of stuff so that we could track her down. I told them if they wanted a really good geolocation, I could just call Jess up and ask her where she was. She also said she used codename 'Bear' a couple of times, her nickname for me.
Overall it was educational and interesting, and lots of fun. Also, Jess is adorable.
-N
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4 comments:
I was the "Plumber". :)
Haha. Sounds like a riot. Are you sure that falls under the heading of work?
Today I am headed up the hill for the "Local Traffic Meeting" which is not as exciting as it sounds. But there is free food and a chance to network with some ppl from town, so I've got my science face on.
S
So we filled out a Sprint survey...what features would you like on your phone, what features would complicate your phone, what feature would you miss most from your phone... and Noel had the best answer for the last one: the ability to receive calls. :) He's so funny, I laughed for a long time after that.
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