I've been working on an infrared transmitter-receiver design for almost a month now. And there I was, as usual, staring at my breadboard, my thoughts pondering how best to amplify the received signal and filter out the noise. And while I was thus engaged, my eyes fell upon my old "Mechanix" set collecting dust in the corners of my shelf. Then, I looked back at the breadboard in my hands, and smiled. I had not really grown up, after all.

As a school boy, I spent quite a portion of my time screwing together nuts and bolts, taking delight in the little vehicles and models I could build with my Mechanix set. Now, as a college student, here I am plugging in transistors, capacitors and such kinda stuff into breadboards and thrilling myself with all the gadgets one could build with semiconductors. Though the former sounds like childish play, and the latter like engineering design, I see no difference. Both involve the simple joy one gets out of creating things - the simple, pure joy of creation.

Well, I happen to know many "practical" people who would argue that such feelings of joy are all just fantasy and do not work out in real life. But my experience (again, there are ones who would question what experience a teenager could have, but still…) and belief lead me to strongly insist that such joy is principal to happy life. Wait, wait, wait, let me not get too far-fetched, it at least is principal to tolerating all those analog electronics classes! ;-)