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!