09:06 am - Some pictures from the wedding
I was dopey and left my S70 at the hotel, so all I have is cellphone camera pictures :(
( Read more... )
(whine)
I was dopey and left my S70 at the hotel, so all I have is cellphone camera pictures :(
( Read more... )
And here's how I know.
Me: "This is stupid. Can I start a fight about it?"
Higher-up type figure: "I'd love to too but it's not worth it. Let them have it."
Me: "OK."
(lack of fight ensues)
Me: "Oh, it went pretty well. I think they were expecting me to start a fight, and were surprised when I didn't."
amusedI spent a lot of time working with embedded wireless devices at my last job, so you'd think I'd have learned these things. Or at least, that it would have sunk in.
Radios suck.
Tip #1: Don't run a radio without the antenna plugged in. All the energy that is supposed to go into the antenna, goes back into the PA and causes it to self-destruct.
Tip #2: Observe proper static procedures when dealing with open antenna ports. GaAs circuits are extremely static sensitive, and RF outputs don't have protection diodes. And, yes, I mean it.
Tip #3: When you ignore #1 and don't bother plugging in the antennas, don't leave the antenna wires floating around randomly under the wireless board, so they hit the various exposed components. The exposed components really don't like that.
Anyone want a Ralink PCIe wifi card with a busted power amp? It still works... at a range of about 10 feet!
I have a new job starting in October.
And a 45% raise, better benefits, and a 401k match to go with it.
Maybe even bonuses.
It'll be nice to work for a company that's actually profitable.
Hi, Motorola. Hope it works out.
We had a bit of rain last night and this morning.
The sump pump didn't want to turn on, and there's some modest seepage in the basement, but the house is fine.
We missed the worst of it, but we went to go gawk.
( Pictures galore! )
It's 10 am on Saturday and power has been out at my house for about 18 hours.
For some reason our neighborhood seems to be prone to extended outages. Last time we had a huge wind storm come through, our power was literally out for 2 days; it came to be almost exactly 48 hours. I've never lived anyplace where power was unreliable before - it's always been occasional few-second burps and maybe an hour on a very rare basis. Here, those 2 second burps become hours and the hour on a rare basis becomes days. I pay for living in civilization, but the infrastructure is like living in the sticks!
In fact, my parents (who live in the more uppity part of town) had an outage of a few hours last night, but their power went out long after ours and came back much more quickly.
Anyway, what happened was that yesterday some we were talking about storms at work and I looked and saw a rather ominous line of red in the radar when I went to our west. After talking to nekosensei I decided to head home right before the storms were to arrive, and by the time I got home the wind had picked up a lot. I just made it, though when I was pulling in an unsecured gate in my driveway blew in and slammed into the car, fortunately hitting the side-view mirror and knocking it back but doing no real damage; after pulling the car into the garage I went inside. The power failed seconds later; I had to go out and pull the garage door down by hand.
These impressive storms rapidly blew through our area --- winds of over 70mph. We have a bunch of branches down in our yard (including a dead branch of our enormous silver maple that we've been thinking needs to come down for some time), although oddly the cracked but hanging-on branch of the ash is still attached to the tree. Fortunately, the high winds were short - ten minutes or so - and aside from the no-power condition there was no damage to anything of note. nekosensei was worried that one of our sick pines in back broke, but it turned out that both were still standing.
We do have a bit of power, thank goodness. The previous owners of my house had gone in with the neighbors to the north and the south to buy a generator for these extended power outages, and they've graciously offered to extend the arrangement even though they bought out the prior owner's share when he moved out. (They should have asked me - I would have been happy to buy in, it makes a lot of sense.) Last night before we left for my parents' house we plugged our sump pump into the generator just in case (not that I've ever seen it go on - I wonder if it even works, but it's never flooded) and when I came home (about 8 hours after the outage started) I plugged in the refrigerator. So at least our food is cold and our basement is dry for the moment.*
For added fun the network at work is out too, and as a result my 'colo' server (which is currently living in the machine room of my employer's office) is also offline. Most likely the power is out there too, but since I have no easy way to check I'll need to go out there later today and see what's going on. I'm posting this from my illegally tethered iPhone**, and if it weren't for my phone, all the computing in my life would be useless. I don't know if that's an argument for or against it...
* as an aside: during the last extended power outage, we didn't have the generator for the first 24 h or so, because an idiot neighbor tried to fire up said generator without permission and used 2-cycle oil/gas rather than straight gasoline, totally clogging up the works and requiring it to be dragged out to be fixed.
** Man, is tethering slow on an old 2G phone. Upgrades are so tempting.
We have a big, undisciplined rose bush in our yard from when we moved in.
I hear the previous owners cut and pruned it relentlessly to keep it under control.
I have no interest in that. It looks great anyway.
My social calendar is obnoxiously overfull lately.
...
My former advisor is looking to expand on some of the work I did as a graduate student, and I was really looking forward to working with him on it. In fact, I'd volunteered to use some of my Copious Free Time to actually do some hardware and bootstrapping for him. But it looks like I won't be getting the free time I thought I would be to work on it, and so now I feel bad about it; there's no way in the world I'll be able to get it done.
Hopefully I can still help out on some other aspects, though. Add a trip down to Urbana to the list.
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I have a Mac programming book on my desk I haven't managed to work through in almost a year.
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Wedding calendar: 3 in june, one in august, 1 in september, one... sometime.
I need to make hotel reservations. And move a play.
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It's also time to mow the lawn.
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