Guiness Popsicle

Click on the Guiness popsicle for details of how to build your own.

In other news, the drywall is going up nicely on the coach house. All that remains is taping and mudding. Today I plan on planting grass seed.

Chase Corporate Challenge.

Ran the Chase Corporate Challenge today. My official time was 29:57. Yes, I was basically sprinting to get in under 30 minutes. That's a record time that has been my goal for about five years. (They say that it took about a minute to get to the start time, so I actually did better than this for 3.5 miles... about 8:20 per mile I'd guess... and this through a lot of traffic: 16,000 people!)

This means several things happened. First, I got in good shape from playing soccer all winter and all spring. Second, the taped-up twisted ankle I got on Sunday didn't stop me. Third, cramps in my left leg due to the over-tightened bandage on my left-knee didn't make me stop.

In other news, the drywall is going up. It got delivered today, and will be going up starting tomorrow.

May pilgrimage

Pictures from the annual May Pilgrimage, with full size images. If anybody wants to make prints, use the full size images for best results. I wish Picasa would let you generate a link to the originals, with thumbnails and intermediate size images.

Lori and Tom's Party

Pictures from Lori and Tom's Party.

Shure Thing.

There is a rock band playing in my living room. It's like having my own private concert. It's only 9:22, so the neighbor's can't even really complain.

So, two days ago at 3pm or so, I find out that they have decided to build a few boards on a four day turn and they will be showing up on Tuesday. Yes, that's yesterday. That means I stopped writing test-plans and started porting code like a mad man. My schedule had me convinced I had plenty of time to write test plans before I started coding. Not so. I'm having meetings tomorrow with my manager, the project manager, and the team to discuss our schedules and clarify why this happened.

Fortunately I did get a software load to build today, a total hack, but it built. I got it to load on the demo board too. That's pretty good progress for one day I'd say.

Melanie soldered the parts on the board for me, and by 4:15pm I had what was supposed to be a working board. She had put the power supply, LED's, and switches, and that should have been enough. There's really not much to programming the board. Only two pins, reset and background. So when it didn't just go, Leif (the guy who I inherited the code from), Melanie (who did the schematic) and I, decided it must be a short somewhere. At 6:30 or so they went home, and a few minutes later, after looking closely I noticed that the processor was placed down 90 degrees away from the way it should have been. I put a post-it note on Melanie's monitor. She's not going to be too happy about this. I think that probably means the part is trash, if not the whole board. But it buys me another day to finish my code.

I've got a 9 am meeting tomorrow, so I've got to go to bed soon. Insulation and lawn mowing will have to get done some other day.

Long day.

This past weekend I did no insulation.

Today I finally did, but I'm still not done with the work. One of the guys at work is starting to joke that I've had "two days" worth of work left on the insulation for the last three weeks.

Today I did put up a platform to do the insulation above the stairs. And I did finish putting up all of the insulation on the second floor besides the stairs. So all that is left is the stairwell and filling in the spots on the first floor. I'm getting there slowly. Anybody know if the staples are really necessary if the insulation stays in place on its own? Maybe I can leave out some of the staples to save time. A lot of what I did is not stapled yet.

This past weekend I went camping with my dad. We did our annual pilgrimage to Wisconsin, complete with nine-mile hike. The weather held out for us. Blue skies and puffy white clouds. Beer and Brats and Bacon. It was beautiful.

Got to sit in my hot-tub Saturday night. It's beautiful. I'm going to like this even more than having it under the pine tree, out the back door. It's now up high enough that all I saw was roof-tops, the pine tree, the hickory, blue sky, puffy white clouds, airplanes, the moon, stars, then pink clouds, purple clouds, dark blue sky, stars, very dark sky, constellations.... gosh it's getting late. Oooo ... it's cold out...

I go back inside and there is a rock band in my living room in the middle of playing a song. I guess I was in the hot-tub for quite a while. I sure felt good after that though.

Saturday night Liz Griffiths had a party. All the old folks were there. I ended up at Darien's place till four in the morning and then up at TBP (Taco Burrito Palace #2). I slept in.

Soccer sunday went well. This time nobody broke a leg. Report on the guy who got hurt:

"It was a broken tib-fib, and he had some pins put in, and he went into surgery that night, and they gave him a morphine IV." If he went to surgery on a Sunday night, it must've been bad...

Yeah, I knew that crack sounded loud... ouch.

Showed Nick Lesher my place yesterday. Today he called to say he will want to move in. It looks like I've got a new roommate. If it gets too confusing with two Nick's, I'll have to kick him out. Thanks Rami for the reference.

So now I have even more work to do around the house to get ready for him. All the studio equipment has to move.

Hot tub madness.

Madness? Or anger, maybe?
I tried to hook up the hot-tub yesterday. I figured this didn't count as "work on Sunday" because the end cause was soaking in a hot-tub. But as it turns out, after filling the hot-tub with water, the circuit breaker pops as soon as you flip it on. Even if I disconnect all the wires at the hot-tub end.
It seems that our electrician, Bill messed up one of the connections. I couldn't find any mistakes. Hopefully he'll show up tomorrow and fix this problem. I don't want that water to start turning green on me.

Soccer Madness:
I'm playing sweeper, the ball gets past me, and I'm running just ahead of an opposing player. I'm running the wrong way, and our goalie, Brian, is heading straight at me. I yell "it's yours" and step off to the left a couple feet. The opposing player desides not to back down. As Brian reaches the ball, I'm right next to him. He takes a good swing at the ball and makes solid contact, first with the ball, and then with the opposing players ankle. Brian managed to break the guy's ankle despite his shin guard and Brian walked away with only a bruise himself.
That ended the game. They carried the player off the field and Wendy dove him to the hospital.
I had to walk off the field and couldn't watch this guy lying on the ground in pain. It reminded me too much of the situation in which I hurt my knee. I'm just glad it was his ankle and not his knee. Bones heal relatively easily.

On happier news: I figured out how I'm going to get my code done at work. All it took was a three minute question and answer session with Mr Manthei. The last couple days I was a bit stumped. The old code totally sucks and needs a re-write. It's full of NOP() loops and other arbitrary delay based timing, even for critical code. Several sections of non-critical code are preempting critical code. Very similar code is repeated. There is at least one unnecessary, undocumented, and uncommented recursive routine... worse, it is not obvious that the variable that ends the recursion will necessarily always end up false, preventing an endless loop.
Finally, the code is all based around an interrupt task that is definitely missing interrupts, and is running excessively fast. It's as good as doing everything in a big, un-timed for loop. Ick.
And this is my first for-profit programming project. Wish me luck.

I guess I didn't think about my latex gloves when it says on the back "do not use on rubber". I was cleaning some sap off of my hot-tub cover when my gloves started disintigrating.
Oops.
And of course the hot-tub cover is made of vinyl. Is vinyl also "rubber?" Hopefully I didn't cause too much damage.

Goo-gone also didn't do a good job of removing the hardened sap. Any chemical engineers out there know a solvent that will quickly disolve hardened sap, but not disolve vinyl?

Funny Pizza Video

A great little video. I smiled:

Pizza Party

Enjoy

1:24am... are you up?

I got a lot of insulation done today. I also started cleaning my hot-tub. I still need to do a good amount of insulation work. I also still need to do a lot of hot-tub cleaning work. I guess I'll work on that on Monday.

Big fat steak for lunch today. First firing up of the barbecue. Mmmmm. Good.

I went out to a show at Lilly's with Davy and Kathleen tonight. It was fun. I missed the "really short film festival" at the Abbey. But got a lot of text messages from Wendy who was there. I guess it was a fun time too.

Long week.

I worked on insulation yesterday and really wore myself out. Tonight I didn't do jack. Work is good, but I recently discovered that the code I am "porting" to a new processor will probably need some serious repartitioning. This will require a good amount more thought than I had anticipated.

Shure will not sponsor my team for the Chase Corporate Challenge, so I'll be running for Mindspeed. Maybe next year.

Tomorrow I wake up early and do insulation until I drop. I did by a couple of nice steaks from Costco, so I can take a break for a grilled lunch.

That's the new part. The washing machine is now fixed. I'm pooped. Work went well. Goodnight. 

I need to use a pliers to pry this piece off the axel under the tub. Notice the three sheared plastic pins that are missing. 

There is the source of the rubber dust. That rubber piece is all torn up. The three plastic pins on the motor assembly look okay, but in the lower right, on the floor, you can see one of the three plastic pins that was sheared off. Another is stuck in the rubber piece. 

See the black rubber all around the hole? 

Here's a sign of trouble. At the inner shaft of the motor, there is black rubber dust everywhere. 

That's the motor, half way free. If I do this again, I'll be sure to remove the bottom clip first, because it's hard to remove once the weight of the motor is resting on it. 

That's the dryer disassembled. 

I got that call at work today.

The phone rang and said: "Dude, the washing machine is making a noise like it's running, and it fills with water, but it doesn't do anything."

So instead of doing insulation when I got home I had to come home to fix a washing machine. So far, I have gotten it apart, and removed the dead part. I'll buy a part tomorrow if all goes well.

I'll post pictures. I have some good ones. Right now I'm too tired, and my camera is still in the basement.

My right shoulder is still in very bad shape. I definitely did some damage to it. My left neck muscle is sore because I am compensating for the injury.

I got a fat check from the mortgage refinance. I'll be paying for that for the next thirty years. But at least I'll have a nice bachelor pad. If you're going to do it, do it right, right?

What happened to days Three and Four?

I guess the rest of the week went well, smoothly enough that I didn't make any entries into my blog on Thursday and Friday. Let me briefly catch up.

I actually felt I was getting up to speed pretty well. I was getting all the passwords, permissions, and software installed and configured. I had to actually get a form signed by my manager to get administrator privileges on my machine. I turned in my direct deposit form. (I had to ask about four people where to go to find the payroll department.)

I was shown the collection of music they have for testing. It's a pretty big collection, and available at my desk, which is nice.

The guys around me were in the process of debugging a large DSP board (12 inches square more or less.) They had a radiated emission at 600 MHz, which is a very unusual frequency because that's not an even multiple of any of the clocks on the board. I pointed out that it could be a board resonance. After all, at a dielectric constant (Er) of 4, on FR4 board material the propagation delay is 140ps/inch, so 12 inches amounts to a period of 1.68ns, which is about 600 MHz.

They were able to whack this emission by changing the grounding connections on the daughter boards, so it is not really an issue, but I felt good to be able to offer an explanation for why they might see this particular frequency of emission.

But just as they were whacking this emission, I looked over and Paul was listening to headphones and pushing on the fan to slow it down. I knew that was a bad sign. He had me come over to listen to fan noise in the audio. So the joy over elimination of the emissions was dampened by the problem of fan noise.

After work on Friday I stopped past my Aunt's house. They were going out to have Peruvian food. Had I known ahead of time I probably would have gone, but I had already decided to grab some dinner at the Flat Top Grill with Wendy from soccer. She had left me a voice mail. We ended up going out to 10 pin to go bowling as we waited for Oscar to finish eating with his cousin. Mike white and Taty showed up, and Mike got us free drinks and made our bowling bill disappear! What a nice roommate.

We ended up meeting Oscar, his cousin, and her friend out at SoundBar, but couldn't get in because Wendy had forgot her ID. 10 pin didn't card us. So we went back to Oak Park, got some Sub Tender, and called it a night. It was already pretty late anyways.

I worked in the yard Saturday with my brother. The dirt in the back yard is looking much closer to flat.

I managed to tear something in my shoulder pretty bad. Hot tubs should not be moved by one person. Empty hot-tub weighs 900 pounds. Nick weighs 135 pounds. My brute-force test push on the hot-tub caused a lot of damage to my shoulder. I could barely move my arm after a few hours.

However, with a 2x4 lever, the hot tub is easily moved by one person. Why didn't I try this approach first?

I didn't go out Saturday night, because I was very tired. I woke up early today, went to a fairly good first communion service at the 9:30 Mass at St Edmund. Then I played soccer. I was actually playing pretty well today, but the rest of the team seemed to be hung over and tired. We lost 2 to 1. I thought we had won.

Ashley roasted a whole Lamb on a rotisserie. It's Easter for the Greek Orthodox, so I guess that was his tip of the hat to the old tradition, despite being Catholic.

Tonight I will go to sleep early. I think I'm actually on an early schedule!