Sysadmin Field Notes - Personal Archives

January 16, 2008

So I've been at my company for over five years now, started as an administrator/build person, then moved to development. Now I'm starting a new path, Business Analyst.

The how's, why's and anything else I learn along the way will be posted on my new blog,
Business Analysis Deconstructed.

This blog will morph a little to contain more personal stuff, more general commentary, the occasional thoughts on development or system administration. But subscribe to the new feed to see me figure out the business analyst role, and see if my hunch about it being one of the most important parts of the development cycle is correct.

October 1, 2007

Fun stuff, my Amtrak train derailed. It was pretty mellow, no one was hurt, I didnt even notice. I'm live blogging my derailment :-). I've been on the train for ohhhh, 2.5 hours now, stuck between Crockett and Martinez. Hopefully I'll get home sometime, otherwise, send food.

August 11, 2007

Now I really know what a mile long line looks like. So lets do the math... The rose bowl seems to have about six gates or so, so if you have an event planned there that has half of the seats booked, how many gates would you open?

The answer is not "one". 50,000 people need more than one entry gate with 5 people working it and bag searching.

August 9, 2007

here's a picture of the grounds crew reliving the hashmarks at the Cadet's director's request. Which the crowd was none too happy about, but I can understand, having marched on some crappy fields in my time.

July 27, 2007

This has nothing to do with my usual topics.

So I'm coming home from work yesterday, and my parents watch the kids 'til I get home on Thursdays. They had already fed them so I needed food. Typically I'd grab some fast food or frozen food at home, but I went a different route.

I stopped at the grocery store, and for $5.51 got some fresh red snapper, and carrots. While waiting in line, googled for red snapper recipie ('cause I can't spell), and decided to make the first one off the list.

About 35 minutes later, I was eating a Cajun style blackened snapper fish with rice and sauteed glazed carrots. For about six bucks, the same or likely less than I would have spent on fast food. And healthier too (I used much less butter than either of those recipes called for).

Stop at the grocery store next time you're on your way home and needing dinner, you might be surprised how cheap/healthy you can come up with a dinner.

February 20, 2006

Here are a few photos of the pain the asslight fixture I changed. Sometimes home improvement is annoying. The photos are annotated with the story.

Really, I just wanted to use "drywall" as a keyword.

September 8, 2005

Moving! We're in our new house now. Moving with kids is tough. Moving the week before your first release candiate for a high profile project is even tougher. My office is a rats nest of cables and totally disorganized since the kids tore it apart while I was at work today.

The saddest part is that Hudson doesn't think of this as home yet. He keeps asking to "go to the old house." He's a little freaked out and emotional about it, but he's hanging in there.

We also traded in our cars for a minivan. I'm fine with the minivan, that's no problem. But since I needed a car to get to work, we took ownership of my grandparent's 1990 Corolla, with disabled person plates and everything (yes I'm ordering replacements and no I wouldn't dream of actually parking in a disabled spot). That's the decidedly less sexy part about trading in our cars, but it just didn't make sense to carry a big payment on a car that only went 100 miles a week.

It truthfully all seems pretty petty in comparison to what's going on in New Orleans. Work projects, moving, iPod announcements...who cares? It just sort of feels like going through the motions a little bit.

August 21, 2005

I had both boys all weekend long. Damn they are cute. it's sort of an interesting thing, being soley responsible for the welfare of two other human beings, especially ones you love so much. It's so much fun, but at the same time it's totally draining. The attention and effort required, without ever getting a real break (unless you count an all-too-short naptime) is just a lot for one person.

I love the kids, and we had a blast, but that doesn't make me any less tired. And I didn't get any of the work done I wanted to this weekend, but I think work has taken enough from me at the moment; the family had to come first for at least a weekend (sorry Lorin and Aman if you're reading this, I'll get the offer codes finalized as soon as possible).

August 15, 2005

Is this blog dead? Almost universally it seems that when I start to have meta-content apoligizing for not posting in a while, that's te beginnning of the end. At the moment though, it just turns out that crunch time on an impossibly scoped project might be the wrong time to also try to buy a new house. Plus, Erik came back and got his computer.

So quick update:

• Our old house is sold.
• We closed on our new house.
• Quicken loans sucks.
• I am now a Mac user

I'll try to reopen the flood gates, but tonight and tomorrow morning instead of playing with my new toy, I'll be building out page flows for marketing offer landing pages. Nuthin' more fun than that.

July 8, 2005

A ton of people just had their lives destroyed and it makes me sick to my stomach to think about it. There really are no words; we should all show London as much support as they showed for the United States during our dark hour. Clearly terrorism is a global problem, and one that no nation can fight alone.

July 7, 2005

It's official now, MLS ID: 50057150. If you're looking for a 3bd, 2ba in Folsom check it out. We had people call us for showings the first day; crazy. We'll of course sell it in a day, and then need to scramble to find a place (we might still not be 100% sure what city we're heading too).

Sorry Mom and Dad, I have a feeling we might be crashing at your place for a while...;-) Although it is a seller's market; we could probably ask for and get a 45 day escrow.

Update: Wow. We went on the market at 2:00pm and had an offer by 8:00pm.

June 8, 2005

Update: Vacation so far.

May 9, 2005

Happy gold branch day everyone. What does that mean to you? Nothing. Well, it means more postings here. It's my gold branch date for my all consuming work project. Which means the workload is finally trailing off significantly. No more 90+ hour weeks. I've got several new projects kicking off now, and this one to still launch, but that still can't compare to the previous workload. My family and friends should get me back now, and I'll be dribbling out thoughts I haven't had time to since the crunch started.

Of course, I do have half a semester's worth of schoolwork to do in a week, so maybe I'm not quite done with the craziness yet. :-)

At any rate, the more astute of you might think I'm a crappy project lead for allowing such crazy hours to be required to deliver the thing. You'd probably have a point. There are a lot of reasons, I'll just say that we lost one developer that didn't get replaced, we lost a week or so of development for environment problems (shared dev environments, in this day and age, really?), and we could have spent an extra 3 months figuring out the scope if we wanted to be sure but no one gave us that option.

I'm only going to get better at this. Just wanted to say welcome back friends, readers, and family.

March 23, 2005

A little bit of humor to tied you over, some bad album covers at: Mental Drippings

March 2, 2005

As a bonus for reading my blog, I will pick out the coolest pictures in my latest batch so that you do not have to load the giant, uncategorized index page.

• Icicles on the car
• Carson sleeping on dad
• The boys
• Riding the train
• Hudson at the park
• Hudson making cookies
• Hudson flies a blackhawk
• What a ham

There are some other good ones too, but I grow weary of HTML.

March 2, 2005

Can you believe that I'm not even finished with the Dark Tower yet? I'm getting there, but at 5 minutes per reading session it's going slow. I really don't even have 5 minutes to waste these days.

For all the buildup in my head, so far I don't think it's disappointed really. We'll see how the end does, but so far it's a conclusion worthy of such an epic long lived tail, and that's pretty rare to find I think.

March 2, 2005

School is slipping. I had to punt this weekend on my essay so I lose 10%, because I had tons of work to finish. I finished my programming assignment and sent it off with exactly 59 seconds to spare. And it has a little cleanup bug (which I diagnosed in about 45 seconds because I had no choice); for some reason the parent process was cleaning up the IPC semaphore before the child processes were done with it...I guess I could have checked to see if anything was using it first, but I don't know how the parent was getting there, since it was supposed to be wait()ing for all of the children. Odd.

Anyway, school is slipping, family is slipping. I feel like if I spend more than about 15 minutes doing just one thing instead of 2 or 3 at a time, I'm falling behind. Which truthfully, I probably am.

Oh well, come May hopefully things will get at least a tiny bit better. If it does't, then I'm going to forcibly adjust my work life balance to put it where I want it; this is not a sustainanble pace. Certainly no one has demanded it of me, I have no one to blame but myself. :-)

January 24, 2005

What I am turning into? I get excited about Nordstrom's half-yearly sale for men then I do about smarthome's half-yearly sale.

January 10, 2005

After "limited edition" dealer markup, it's probably around $30k, but can you think of a more fun car than a souped up, turbocharged Miata? I certainly can't...

January 6, 2005

I have a feeling that by the end of this project, I will have gotten quite a ways towards my new year's resolutions. I've already made more phone calls and connections with people this week that I think I have in entire 2 years previous in this position (2 years without switching jobs, a record for me). Because this project promises to be so all-encompassing while I'm at work, I'm also going to try something new for me, which is leaving work behind when I'm done for the day. I've always blurred the line between time spent working and off-time...answering/checking email, working into the night, etc. I'll certainly have some long hours, but when I'm not working, I'm going to try actually not working.

I think it might work now that I'm not in operations, and I won't be getting paged for any wacky production problems. Plus, I'm just a normal tech lead. For the first time maybe ever, I have just have a plain old job description instead of some weird niche role as "the guy who gets everything that would otherwise fall through the cracks." It's a little different, but as long as I'm busy I don't care.

This is a rambling, entry, mostly pointless other than as a personal journal entry; feel free to ignore it.

January 1, 2005

I hope everyone had a good time. Personally, I'm looking forward to 2005. I've got a great family, a good job, and great friends. And some decent but cheap sparkling wine ($4.99 at Trader Joes; totally drinkable...awesome).

New year's resolutions:

1. Improve my people skills.
2. Get Hudson sleeping through the night.
3. Release my image database program.
4. Kick ass on my phat new work project.
5. Fixup bigdis somehow; it was/could be a really decent community, it's just been neglected so long...oh how Perl is a cruel mistress.

December 14, 2004

Okay, it's the winter, but no one ever wrote a song about winter break. I'm done, the textbook cartel screwed me over again, and I should have aced both my finals. 6 more units down.

Who exactly is getting rich off of textbook sales? I doubt it's the schools, I don't suspect it's most authors...that leaves publishers or distributers. They must be making enough money so that if anyone were to ever think it was a good idea to actually buy books back at a decent price, or otherwise go against the norm that someone named Guido would show up on their doorstep to "send them a message." Bastards. How do they always know which book I want to keep the least and make sure to launch a new edition of that one making my version worthless.

When I become a professor, I'm simply not going to require a textbook, especially if I'm not going to use it. Myabe 20 years ago when it was harder to come by updated information on your own this edition diarehha made sense, but with the internet making searches for new material only seconds away, there is no need at all other than gouging to release a new edition every semester.

November 12, 2004

I just logged into my yahoo for the first time in a long time. I had put some companies that I followed (our company + some competitors) into the stock ticker...today, it looks like this:

OGNC	N/A	N/A

SCNT	N/A	N/A

VIAN	N/A	N/A

FIRE	N/A	N/A

ACOM	N/A	N/A

RAZF	N/A	N/A

SAPE	9.10	0.00

MRCH	N/A	N/A

All gone now...

November 3, 2004

That I claimed that "all the details" about Carson were available via my next entry on October 29th, but they really weren't. By "all the details" I really just meant vital stats and pictures. The real details are still to come. I've got some more pictures to upload and I'll probably be doing a large update to the kid site.

October 31, 2004

Tired of spending 15 minutes a day cleaning out spam, I'm trying a "security code"/captcha solution. We'll see how it goes. I know visually disabled users can't post directly, but it's either this or turn comments off and then no one can post. Of course, the spammers will likely get around this shortly too (OCR on this is too easy).

Anyone who wants to post a comment and can't for some reason can email me and I'll post it for you. If this doesn't work, I'll be looking for some comment moderating plugin.

Stupid, slimy, bastard spammers.

October 29, 2004

Here are the pictures. Details to come, I'm going to bed.

Update: Fixed my broken HTML, and here are some more, cuter pictures from the morning after (much better light).

October 28, 2004

We started inducing labor naturally last night; got it going pretty well, but things died down as we both got tired and tired of walking around. It should be hours, not days at this point though until little Carson escapes into the world. Wish us luck!

Update: I accidentally despamed a nice comment from Gary Potter, someone's blog that I read. Sorry about that...my eyes were glazing over from tons of spam and lack of sleep after the baby was born. It's all restored now (I still had it in the mt-blacklist email).

Anyway, the next entry has all the details. Carson's our second kid, and we love being parents.

September 24, 2004

I thought it would be fun to list everything we've done to our house, inside and out, since we moved in. We've been here about 2 years, 9 months now. In no particular order we've:

• removed 600 sq. ft. of carpet and put down tile,
  
• replaced the kitchen countertop with stone tile,
  
• repainted/resurfaced the kitchen cabinets (contractor),
  
• had three 40-50 ft. trees in the backyard chopped down (contractor),
  
• Taken out 4-5 shrubs from the front and about 19 from the backyard,
  
• replanted the front side area,
  
• replanted the front area of the house,
  
• ground 4 stumps,
  
• replaced 130 ft. fencing,
  
• new kitchen sink & faucent,
  
• new door to garage in Kitchen,
  
• new baseboards for 75% of the house,
  
• painted the exterior (contractor),
  
• got a new composition roof (contractor),
  
• painted the entire interior,
  
• repainted hudson's room and added new baseboards and chair rail,
  
• new dual pane windows all around (contractor),
  
• new range hood,
  
• all new exterior lighting fixtures,
  
• removed dry rotted patio cover,
  
• removed cracked (from root) 20x15 concrete patio,
  
• cleared and planted grass in the dog run,
  
• diagnosed interior wiring problem and replaced interior outlets,
  
• ran network cable through the attic and walls,
  
• ran coax (for sat and antenna) through the attic and walls,
  
• installed recessed lighting in the kitchen,
  
• cleared and put gravel in the dog run, and
  
• installed new interior light fixtures.
  

I think that's everything. I had no idea how to do almost any of that stuff when we started. I now have lots of nifty tools and just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

September 20, 2004

I realized I never posted pictures of the stump grinding results. So here are pictures of the stump grinder. Quite the effort. But the stumps were gone, and just these last two weekends I tore down the old decrepit fence you see in the background of these pictures. 130 feet worth or so. Blech. But the cool part is that this is the first thing we've done that's made the backyard look better, rather than worse. We finally reached rock bottom and are clawing our way back up. A timeline for those not familiar with the saga is in order (not sure about some of the dates).

• We move in (Jan 2002); backyard is nondescript, but servicable. Back fence needs replacing though.
  
• We buy a dog (miles)
  
• Miles eats the sprinkler valves and some sprinkler heads, causing 2-3 months of an arms race consisting of frequent sprinkler repair and ever more elaborate schemes to protect the valves from damage.
  
• Cyndie's mom keeps the garden alive by manual watering, add some ghetto chicken wire to keep miles out.
  
• Add ghetto chicken wire all around the falling down fence to keep miles in.
  
• End of summer 2002, we give up on the sprinklers. Grass starts to die, but returns with the rains. We don't mow it, it gets way out of control, then dies from getting trampled by the dog.
  
• Decide miles needs the sideyard/dog run to be where he hangs out, start by clearing gravel (move it to the other side yard). Add 2 yards of dirt and grass seed.
  
• Garden shows its first crop, corn is disappointing but tomatoes show promise.
  
• During our tile project, we discover that the big crack in the concrete patio is from a root under there.
  
• Learn we are not responsible enough to maintain grass w/o automatic sprinklers. Miles' side-yard grass dies and is replaced by 5 foot high weeds.
  
• Spring comes, grass dies without water.
  
• Dig out all the dirt in Miles' side yard, move it to the other side yard, and replace it with gravel, and a canopy to keep him cool.
  
• Cyndie's mom leaves, we stop watering, killing the garden (except for the tomatoes), and miles is given free reign of the garden area.
  
• Miles' canopy dies in the rain and is thrown away.
  
• Summer 2003, rip out the 18 or so ugly bushes inhabiting the back fence perimiter.
  
• Summer 2003, we rip out the dryrotted patio cover and tear up the 12x18 concrete slab. We go more than double over the weight limit on the dumpster (almost 20 tons instead of 10).
  
• End of summer 2003 status: Dead grass, 3 big, ugly diseased Cypress trees that drop lots of crap, nothing else alive really. No patio, just a sort of flat disrt area in front of the backdoor, flower bed is just dirt now that miles digs in.
  
• Spend the winter thinking, man, that clay that was under the concrete sure turns to some nasty mud when the water hits it.
  
• Spring/Summer 2004, decide enough is enough. Hire people to take down trees. They stack them on the side yard.
  
• 1 month later, rent stump grinder, grind down the back stumps.
  
• Rent dumpster, put trees in dumpster (along with ghetto chicken wire). Rock bottom; nothing alive in the backyard, rotten falling down fence, and a bunch of trash. Big pile of gravel and dirt in the side yard.
  
• Sep 2004; install new fence and clean up. Hurrah! positive movement. What we have now actually looks dilberately blank instead of accidentally overrun.
  

That's everything I think in the backyard. I'll see if I can find some good before/after pictures. Hopefully the after pictures will start to look a lot better soon.

September 9, 2004

I was just thinking to myself, "you know what the world really needs? Another Shaq rap album.

September 8, 2004

I had a migrane today and it totally wiped me out. So what on earth am I still doing up? I couldn't really tell you. I'm definitely tired and would fall asleep if I laid down, so it's not insomnia. I'm in one of my "I should be doing/learning something but I can't really concentrate so I'm just browsing around aimlessly on the web" kinda moods. Really a bad behavior that I'd like to eliminate because it leaves me tired, cranky, and doesn't accomplish a thing really.

I could do some homework; school started last week. I dropped my "internet" class because I'm going to try and challenge it. In it's place I put "Intelligent Systems". It's an area of computer science I know almost nothing about. I think the quest for "Artificial Intelligence" is never going to amount to anything on our von neumann, binary logic machines no matter how fast they get, so I've always just kind of viewed the field with skepticism and never dug very deeply. Maybe I'll find some interesting techniques that can be applied in actual work.

And of course there's a million things to be done around the house. We're getting the dumpster so we have to load it up, take down the back fence and load it up, put up a new back fence this weekend, prepare Carson's room, clean the house, wash the cars, wash the dog, mow and edge the front lawn, trim the hedges, fix the back sprinklers, install a back patio, learn a ton of stuff for my new position (I'm now going to be lead on -another- project), all while keeping Hudson in check and taking care of a very pregnant Cyndie. And I've got only about 5-6 weeks to do it all in (and some of those jobs are ongoing).

Calgon, take me away. I think I'll try sleeping now, since I'll have to wake up at 6 am tomorrow and take Hudson and Miles on their morning walk, or they will be very cranky.

August 12, 2004

I found CoversationYouCantStayAwayFrom on the C2 wiki today. I think my problem is that I can't stay away from any coversations...

July 19, 2004

I realized something yesterday. When I walk into a car dealership, I'm a tiger. Assuming that it's not a super-new, limited availability model I'm basically walking out of the dealership with it for $500 over the real invoice price. Sometimes I even enjoy the extended grind and the amusing things the salespeople do to try and deflect the inevitable. But at the end of the day if they won't do that price, then I'll go somewhere that will.

So why am I so iron-willed when it comes to car purchasing but all it takes from your average store clerk is "sorry we don't return items out of the package" and I back down? I thought about it and came up with:

• Car dealers tend to try some pretty slimy things, so I'm not worried about pissing them off or offending them.
  
• I know the invoice price of the car, and am familiar with the industry through friends and family, so I know what I'm asking for is fair and equitable for both sides
  
• If they don't give me what I want I'm sure I can go somehwere else and get it, so there's very little risk
  

I think I should learn some lessons from that and try to apply them elsewhere, namely:

• Be less giving; I'm trying to get something from someone for my (and possibly) mutual benefit, not make lifelong friends with them.
  
• Not worry so much about whether the arragment would be fair for both sides, just that it's fair to me. Let the other person worry about their side of the deal.
  
• Win some, lose some, either way life goes on. Very rarely is it the case that a negotiation is broken irrepererably by taking a well-argued position and sticking to it.
  

July 15, 2004

So it's a little bit scary. I've always been able to pretty much coast in my positions. I definitely would work hard for a while, but then I'd have periods of slackness. My new manager (to his credit), has not really built an environment where you can not give less than 100% and still succeed. I think I'll do fine, but it's a little scary; I mean, at this point it's not only my livelyhood but my familiy's as well that depends on my ability to be a real leader and motivate myself. I'm 99% sure I'll be fine, but a tiny bit of self-doubt is still creeping in.

I also just got back from a weekend in Vegas for Bryce's bachelor party. Loads of fun; good to get away from things for a while. Didn't gamble much; spent most of my time and money on food and drink. Mostly drink. I borrowed $100 from bryce and doubled it on the blackjack table, which financed the rest of my trip since was out of allotted cash. Went to Delmonico again; I was going to say it's my favorite before, but I don't think you can get a true sense of a resturaunt only being there once. Well, now I've been there twice and it's my favorite. :-)

June 25, 2004

It's official; I have a signed offer letter in my hands I'm sending back today that says I'm a developer now. So now less on-call, panicked phone troubleshooting. Which in many ways I'll miss, since that's really what I'm best at. Although I won't miss the false alarms and mundane problems. Or figuring out the problem in 15 minutes, then having to sit on the call for 7 more hours listening to people try and troubleshoot their broken systems.

I'm pretty excited to be launching out in a new direction. It will be great for my development abilities to write code every day, on a deadline. I get stuck a lot because I know what bad code looks like from studying so much of it. So when I start coding a project, I very quickly realize my approach is flawed and back off, so I don't finish a lot.

I'm good at reading code and finding bugs, hopefully after a while of doing it I'll be pretty profcient at writing it too. Wish me luck.

June 13, 2004

We found out the baby's sex on Saturday.

May 26, 2004

..the bravest person I've ever seen.

May 19, 2004

Oh, and I finished my computer organization class with the final on Monday. Didn't knock it out of the park; time ran out on me as I tried to remember how 2-way set associative caching found which slot the cache line had been put into. The moral there is twofold;

• even if you need change for parking and you're running late, you don't have to get a 32 oz. soda and then drink the whole thing and
  
• it's hard to concentrate when you really, really have to go to the bathroom.
  

All of which is okay really, since it's curved and I should have done well enough to maintain my A. We'll see I suppose. Four more units down, 42 or something more to go.

May 10, 2004

In the gross but hilarious department,
tapeworm!

May 10, 2004

After a few hours of debugging, I finally finished what's basically the final lab for my computer class. It was somewhat cool; in our circuit simulator program, we were to build basically a tiny little computer (would have been state of the art 45 years ago). It's tons of fun debugging programs written in pure binary on a register level, let me tell you. I went through 10 versions of the microcontroller before finally getting it right. Good feeling to have it done though. Now I just need to finish lab 12 as well, since it's apparently due tomorrow, but is supposedly no big deal. It's just a simple thing, done in Verilog to get us used to it.


I will say it's pretty cool knowing in this much details how the internals work. You can sure build up amazing levels of complexity.

May 3, 2004

I went ahead and watched it. I figured I didn't want to miss possibly the worst made for TV movie ever. I was not disappointed. It's one thing to come up with a plot based on impossible and ridiculous science, but at least throw us a bone. Give us a reason why not only is California falling into the sea, but why everyone just accepts this complete load of hogwash as the truth. An evil wizard put a hex on the planet, aliens used a special ray beam, something. Please don't chaulk it up to plate tectonics...Maybe next they'll make a movie called "falling from the sky" where air pressure stops working and all the airplanes fall out of the sky until we launch a space mission to detonate an atomic bomb in orbit or something (because all catastrophic problems on the earth can be solved by detonating an atomic bomb apparently...).


Anyway, the peice of crap wasn't even in HD.

April 30, 2004

Oh come on...so I finally bring home a port replicator from work so I can fix my cable, keyboard, and mouse situation and actually reclaim some desk space. For reasons unknown, the IBM laptop on the device itself doesn't have a ps/2 keyboard or mouse port, just USB, so I couldn't plug it into my KVM (keyboard-viedo-mouse switch; control 2 computers from one keyboard, monitor, and mouse).

So now I plug everything in, and in a seemingly never-ending parade of PC frustrations, my current keyboard doesn't work with it for some reason. Well, to be more specific, it doesn't work through the kvm switch with the laptop. WTF? Plugging it straight into the laptop works fine...so I think, well it must be the switch. But trying another keyboard through the switch works fine. It's only this particular keyboard, through the kvm switch.

Sonofabitch. I've never seen an "incompatible" keyboard before. They either work or don't work. This blows.

April 26, 2004

Lab 10 is working now. I encountered a few problems:

• I had accidentially used an output pin instead of an input pin for the clock and reset signals on the CPU datapath module. Big suprise that that didn't work. There went 1 hour of my life...
  
• My program file had dos linefeeds unexpectedly, which was choking my perl script to convert it into the hex file for the prom.
  
• My program had two bugs in it. Turns out that hand coding binary instructions into excel, saving as a .CSV, running it through a perl script to convert it to hex, then building a PROM module in logicworks with that file is not the easiest development workflow. :-)
  
• I padded the wrong side of my opcode as coming from the instruction register, so when I was supposed to be putting the index of the opcode lookup table in the MPC, I was really getting something quite different.
  
• I put my SRAM and PROM module backwards in the memory, so I was initially trying to load stuff out of the RAM, and of course there was nothing there.
  
• My input devices enables needed to be inverted based on the address selection.
  

That was it. Just a few things. Overall I think unit testing the small peices took more time, but was highly useful in the end, since I knew they worked (although it really would have helped if I had unit tested the datapath, even though it would have been complicated. Then I would have discovered the inverted clock problem). These hardware thingees get amazingly complex. I'm not sure how I ever would have diagnosed the problems if I didn't have 10 years of pretty good troubleshooting/debugging experience. There's definitely a lesson about unit testing here.

April 25, 2004

So without having mom around to deflect Hudson for the weekend, I got basically zero accomplished and now I'm under the gun to finish my lab for tomorrow. Lame because I know how to do it, but even though I "unit tested" a lot of the individual modules, I still get the feeling it's not all going to work when I put it together. Not the least of the reasons is because I found myself writing a perl script to convert the binary-looking output of a spreadsheet I'm using to write the microprogram into hex. Here's the resulting ROM if you're curious:

1048de
1248de
1848de
2048de
2848de
3048de
3848de
4048de
0008fa
000ede
001dd6
002cde
000002
000002
000002
000002
084cde
000002
084cde
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
084cde
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
084cde
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
084cde
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
084cde
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
000002
084cde
000002
000002
000002
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084cde

For the curious, that's (if it ends up working that is) some tiny bits of code to make the fetch and decode portion of the fetch-decode instruction cycle of the computer we're building. Now cross your fingers and hope the whole thing works; we'll know in the morning because right now, all those tiny little lines are blending together so I'm leaving it alone for the night, for better or worse.

April 18, 2004

So in preparation of the new baby, I moved out of my office this weekend. Our computers now share a set aside office area in the once vacant family room. It actually works out pretty nicely. I have a place to sit my work laptop, so I can use both computers at once now, as well as not have to live at the kitchen table to work. I installed some shelves for my most common reference books as well. It actually turned out very nice. I'd take and post some digital pictures, but our digital camera got dropped on the tile once too many times and no longer takes pictures. Oddly enough, it does take movies though.

The old office will now become Hudson's room, freeing up the existing baby room for the new baby. We'll upgrade our bed to a king size, because Cyndie can't sleep with Hudson and I on the existing queen size so she's been retreating to the way uncomfortable futon every night. Then the queen will go in Hudson's new room and become his bed. That's a big bed for such a little kid...

April 13, 2004

The following things are now official:

• Once you have kids, vacations are no longer relaxing
  
• I'm going to join the development team and write software full time
  
• I'm exhausted.
  
• Our digital camera has been dropped on the tile one too many times and is now kaput.
  
• I am going to be very busy with my computer science homework for the next 2-3 weeks.
  
• I will be coming in 4th place in my fantasy basketball league; not bad for the first time out.
  

Good night.

March 31, 2004

So today I go to Seattle for my 7th, 8th, and 9th hour of process documentation meetings in the course of the last three three weeks. I will tell my boss today that I would like to switch groups officially, and become a software developer. For the first time I will join the other side and be getting paid to produce software as my primary job function. A whole new set of challenges for me will come with this new job, and I'm looking forward to them; mostly I will be able to develop some confidence that I don't have right now, since I haven't written a large body of software and that's how you get better at it.

March 29, 2004

Title says it all. I need to

• drink more water,
  
• eat more veggies,
  
• cut back on meat,
  
• eat more fruit, and
  
• excercise more.
  

Drinking water is easy; I love it, just sometimes forget about it. Excercise I don't mind either. Fruits and veggies however, cause big problems; I don't like them at all. This means I seldom eat them, and when I do they fail to satisfy me. Yes, I'll eat a token side of green beans while chomping down a 32oz porterhouse steak, but for all of my life and for the moment, they remain nothing more than an accessory to the main course. That needs to change. A whole lot of crap is going into my body right now, and that I think, along with the stress of life is wearing me down.

Changing just requires willpower right? I must find the right source of it and dip into the well. I theorize that this would give me more energy, and help me get back to my center.

March 17, 2004

I didn't make it into work yesterday, because a truck ran into my train. It hit about car 2, I was in car 4 and didn't notice anything except some noise in the wheel wells and the immediate smell of fuel. So they stopped the train, and we all got out in the middle of a marsh and they returned us to Davis, then to Sacramento.

The truck was completely mangled. The front of it was just sort of disintigrated and the engine block, the only thing up front that survived, was sitting in the middle of the road.

Made me glad to get home and enjoy my family for the rest of the day.

Moral: Never mess with trains.

3/19 Update:
Here's a more detailed article with a picture of the truck.

February 20, 2004

You know what? So far the plan is going okay. Things are easier to stomach, I can let things slide. I don't feel like I need to throttle anyone. That's all a good start, even if I can't exactly articulate what my new philosophy is yet.

One aspect of it is definitely the finding of other bright, enthusiastic, and in some ways fed up people within the organization and connecting them together. The more allies you have, the more likely it is that we'll be able to make a difference. I actually started thinking today about what it would take to have an active, thriving "underground" in a large corporate setting. Some sort of invitation-only discussion group for exchanging ideas, information, and plans so that people in diverse groups could coordinate their movements. After all, those on the other side, who are not so helpful, coordinate their actions all the time: constant meetings, email, phone calls....seems only fair that we should be able to organize right back.

While it's certainly not illegal, I can't imagine those we would be looking to replace would think kindly of such and organization, so it would have to live in relative secrecy. And ideally, all roads wouldn't trace back to a single, central source of control, lest that person become a scapegoat. Maybe make use of some typical resistance tactics (cellular organization, anonymous contacts, but then how do you know that the people are who they say they are and are actually trying to help).

It's a fun idea, but even if it doesn't get formalized, the general principle is there: make lots of friends with the bright people, don't make enemies of the powerful people.

February 19, 2004

I had a rough day, and have got a lot of ideas to get out, so this will be a little long. Blues riff in C, watch me for the changes, and try to keep up....

The corporate world (particularly when it comes to technology) does not have it's head screwed on straight. Managers can't manage, few implmentors can implement, and auditors can't audit. The end result is that all the fancy hardware and software we can bring to bear on business problems is at best wasted, and at times actively harmful to getting work done. Buzzwords on top of buzzwords, volumes of reports, studies, org charts, surveys, mission statements, and internal invoices for fake internal money that don't mean anything. A sea of words without purpose.

All of this comes at the expense of the user in a variety of ways, making working with computers typically frustrating and mysterious

None of this should really be news to anyone. What is news is that I surrender. I'm throwing in the towel (at least on a trial basis). I am, from here on in, going to do my best to not care about this dismal state of affairs. I've been fighting to get things done the right way, the efficient way, and to make people form arguments for their decisions for a while now, and I'm tired. Sometimes the oozing stupidity seems like it's crushing my body, making my head feel like it's going to pop off.

Now I'm not saying this in "I'm taking my toys and going home" sort of pouty way. No, the new plan is to try and work within the system, using the tools at my disposal to affect change. So I'm not so much giving up as trying a new strategy. I'm right at the breaking point right now, and I'm pretty sure things are going to get worse before they get better, so I've got to try something else.

I should coin a new word for this corporate silliness. You know it when you see it.

When a company spends $2 billion dollars and 5 years of development on a system that gets cancelled after a failed deployment to only a fraction of the inteded users, that's what I'm talking about.

When a company gives you a prototype application to test, and then tries to roll out the real one but it doesn't work so they just use the crappy prototype, and then the CTO gets a six figure bonus based on the "success" of this project, that's what I'm talking about.

When you've got a software tool that is heavily entrenched in what you are doing, and a few weeks before your project is due there's a management dictate to switch tools, and they stop supporting the one you're using, that's what I'm talking about.

There's the perfect word out there for this, I'll work on it this week and see if I can pluck it out.

Anyway, back to what I'll be doing to fight this in the future. I had been a rabble rouser; a ranting, raving, piss-and-vinegar filled advocate for analyzing things, and then. applying the solution that made the most sense for the owners. Although I discovered that managers don't like to be reminded that they are in the end beholden to the someone else so they changed their name to the much less powerful sounding "shareholders". I really have never made progress any place I worked.

So now, today I was hit by a slew of realizations, seemingly all at once (this is not a complete list):

• Things are not changing for the better
• Things are going to get worse before they get better
• Work is not my life
• But I need work to pay the bills

That's why I'm going to try something different. I don't know what shape it will take, but I can say there will be less (approaching zero) ranting about "stupid" decisions, more time spent discovering how the "system" works so I can effect change from within it, and more relaxation excercises. :-)

Besides, perhaps somewhere in these stupid decisions there are perhaps a few grains of useful thought that can be gleaned and applied? As much as a distaste as I have for them, those who develop those ideas probably have as much distaste for ours. Certainly there is decreasingly less value for me and my co-workers in dragging the same general concepts out and through the mud over and over and over again.

So from now on, I'm going positive. I can change the system, and I can make the company less wasteful with it's money. It's just not going to happen overnight.

We'll see what happens as I give this a shot. Less "evil", more "good". Maybe I should register goodrob.com as well? :-)

January 31, 2004

Last night I was at the Great American Music Hall for the Organic 10 year reunion party. No, I'm not hip enough for it to be my 10 year Organic anniversary, but they were nice enough to invite all former employees.

That's pretty cool of a company (well, more specifically the founder who I believe hosted the event) to throw a reunion party. Of course, in an ideal world they probably would have had more currently than former employees there, but that's the way the dot-com crumbles. :-)

At any rate, good time, ran into lots of old faces, and even cooler, avoiding drinking to excess (which is pretty tough for me when there's an open bar involved).