For IBMer George Rhoten, programming was an easy A in high school. By that time, he’d already taken home the grand prize at the Santa Clara County Science Fair for his first seismograph and had aspirations to make hover cars, “like the kind you see in Star Wars.” After taking a Pascal programming class in high school and deciding computer programming was in fact what he wanted to work on, Rhoten joined Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and left with a BS in computer science and a minor in theater. Rhoten has been at IBM for 10 years now and is currently a Tivoli software engineer; however, his salary “helps fund his non-IBM projects for therapeutic tinkering.” Today, those include a homemade seismograph, a sensor used to control the tilt of a 3D object (his kitchen oven), and… making display cases. “I was severely disappointed by the quality and shape of the display cases that were out there,” Rhoten said. “The first one I made was to display my rock collection. The last one was for my wife’s Star Wars action figures.”
Rhoten’s first seismograph consisted of cardboard, wood, paper clips, rubber bands, washers, pencil, paper, tape, glue and a few other things found around the house. It recorded the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989. “That eventually turned into a science fair project, which won me $150, first place at the Santa Clara County Science Fair, and grand prize in my division (middle school at the time),” laments Rhoten. “Considering that I only had to pay $1 for the soft pencil for the seismograph, I thought it was a pretty good return on investment.”
Up next for Rhoten is a more sensitive seismometer with less noise, elimination of misreads of the sensor, and maybe more analysis tools including conversion to USGS format, automatic tweets to the world, and completely automated result publishing. He also plans to release the source code at some point.
Rhoten finds it hard to explain the complexity of his IBM job, simply described as “working with records keeping software for businesses.” Previously at IBM, he worked on International Components for Unicode – software that is part of the iPhone OS, Android, AIX, DB2, bank software, and lots of other non-Microsoft software. His take on IBM’s Smarter Planet campaign? “Big solutions for big business and big government in a big world.”
“It’s perfectly reasonable to let your mind wander to solve your problems. Just don’t let it wander while operating heavy machinery."
Sidenote: Rhoten's favorite joke
What did the Greek cat say when it entered a bar? μ μ μ
(The Greek letter μ is pronounced mu)
You can read more about George’s seismometer here: http://www.centralnexus.com/seismograph/
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