Starting NFS statd:                                        [  OK  ]
Starting keytable:                                         [  OK  ]
Initializing random number generator:                      [  OK  ]
Starting pcmcia:                                           [  OK  ]
Mounting SMB filesystems:  _


<sigh>

Oooh... VMWare 4 released today, and I qualify for a free upgrade. This pleases me greatly. :-)

Um... not much to report. Going to Chicago this weekend for my grandma's 80th birthday. Work is very busy. And we're celebrating Tam's birthday today.

Hm. Seems that another direct report to our CFO has been fired (our applications engineering manager, in this case).

In the last year, of the six people who worked for him, four have been fired (with cause -- not laid off). Not exactly a ratio to brag about...

Earlier, I sent out this:

As everyone recalls from the last employee meeting, one
of our goals this year is to announce ISO 9001 certification
status by DAC '03.  I'm pleased to announce that we're now in
the final stages of implementing our ISO 9001 procedures.

Since the ISO 9001 team has been getting a number of questions
on how this will affect our work, I've put together a brief FAQ:

1. Why are we attempting this?

A number of customers have been asking for ISO 9001 certified
software; traceability (the effects of a change) is greatly
enhanced when software development follows the ISO 9001 flow.

The EDA industry has been horribly lax at achieving this level
of certification.  Neolinear plans on being the first significant
EDA company to announce that it has achieved ISO 9001
certification, thus removing a significant roadblock to customer
adoption.


2. How will this affect developers?

As stated, ISO 9001 is all about traceability.  We have automated
tools (currently in beta testing before rollout) which will allow
us to monitor the effects of each commit made to our code bases.

This will require some cooperation on the part of the developers.
Starting next month, all commit comments must be formatted in the
 Traceability XML format.  It takes some getting used to, but
eventually becomes quite readable even without the traceability
tools.  An example is:


">http://www.w3c.org/traceability-1.0.dtd">
">http://www.w3c.org/traceability/schema">
  
    
    
    
      
        
      
    
    
      This is a sample commit comment.
    
    
      
    
  


In recent years, security has also become a significant issue.  All
such commits must be PGP signed (we have installed the Gnu PGP tools
in /opt/tools/gnupg-1.2.1 for your convenicence).


3. Does this only affect developers?

Of course not!  ISO 9001 is a company-wide initiative.  As you may
recall, the last few years have seen a rise in forging of company
press releases to manipulate stock prices.  We will be implementing
the PGP signing of all communications outside the company.  IT has
configured the SpamAssassin software to drop all incoming messages
that are not PGP-signed.

Software evaluations will also follow a rigorous ISO 9001 process.
During the evaluation process, we usually see a number of NeoCell
technology files and/or NeoCircuit device files undergo a number of
tweaks.  These changes will all be documented according to the above
format; AEs and Sales will be trained during the week before DAC.

ISO 9001 recommends (but doesn't require) that all file formats be
stored in the easily-parsed XML format.  The DAC timeframe is too
short for us to migrate; however, we will be migrating our file
formats to XML for NeoCell 4.0 and NeoCircuit 3.0.


4. I have a comment/suggestion about the process.

Great!  The Neolinear ISO 9001 team is eager to hear how the process
can be improved.  Drop us an e-mail at fool@neolinear.com.

I just now got this:

This message bounced when I tried fool@neolinear.com:

================================
[Name withheld]
Neolinear, Inc.
4801 South Lakeshore Drive, Suite 201
Tempe AZ 85283
[Phone number withheld]

How much of a guarantee is a pgp signature on a software change, considering 
that our internal network is hardly secure, with passwords being sent cleartext 
all the time?



================================
[Name withheld]
Neolinear, Inc.
4801 South Lakeshore Drive, Suite 201
Tempe AZ 85283
[Phone number withheld]

To which I sent:

[Name],

The security algorithm employed is very time-sensitive.  Thus, spoofing
such a commit message wouldn't work if, say, I signed it on *April 1st*
and used a one-time pad with an MD-5 digest tachyon.

Dave

Over the weekend, the air conditioning in our server room failed. The temperature rose to ~105°F, and the servers crashed. The jobs I had scheduled to run didn't.

This does not please me.

Did you see in the morning light?
I really talked, yes I did, to God's early dawning light
And I was privileged to be as I am to this day
To be with you. To be with you.
To be with you. To be with you.
To be with you.

Listen. I have arranged this display for... for all of you
people to... to come here this evening, and I... I know you have
been searched, but what you... you don't realise is that in the
back of it -- the Maltese Falcon -- I have it...

Ooh, right... Honda makes motorcycles, too.

My loyalties are divided. I swear by Honda engineering... heck, if they made a cereal, Honda Flakes would be the only cereal I'd buy.

Again, I have this odd craving to be on a motorcycle. I've never been on one, mind you, and up until, oh, a year or so ago I had a strong aversion to them. Then I started having dreams that I was riding on one and enjoying myself. Weird.

Anyway, today I spent a few minutes peeking at the Kawasaki web site. (Yeah, it's a rice rocket in my dreams -- the Harleys still don't appeal to me.) I'm a bit surprised how inexpensive they are (I figured that they cost as much as a normal car; you know, the whole women's swimsuit "less is more, you're paying for style" phenomenon). No, no, still not going to get one...

Polarbee, which Ninja model did you get? (I kinda like the Ninja 250R and 500R...)

Heading back down to VA this weekend; this time for a friend's wedding. Ooh, should be fun.

Shredding? Ew.

There are no good guys, there are no right answers.

Never attribute to conspiracies and cabals that which can be attributed to arrogance, ignorance, or sheer stupidity.

Excellent four-part essay in this week's Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria on the "Iraq" situation. Will post a summary and review later. (For now, you'll have to read it yourself to find out why I put Iraq in quotes.)

Writing the code module that just won't die for now...

Inexpensive camera for sale

This is all your fault, . :-)

One of our field support engineers filed a bug today saying that the splash screen should have a blue border.

I only wish I were kidding.

Why I'm Glad I Didn't Take That State Department Job

For those of you who are game theoretic types, you might enjoy this.

The whole Iraq fiasco has moved international diplomacy to a new arena... one with a big top tent and three rings.

The positions of the U.S. and France have become so hard-line that either side would lose face (and, therefore, diplomatic influence) should the U.N. vote definitively either way for or against a war. The only way out of this impasse is to have another nation -- which can't be any of the position-taking states: U.S., Britain, Spain, France, China, or Russia -- propose a compromise position.

Which is what we're seeing with Guinea, of all places. Yeah, the headlines now say "U.S. May Revise Draft Resolution on Iraq," but this idea of postponement (last I've heard was April 17th) was the Guinean Foreign Minister Francois Fall's initiative. This will buy time; I'm getting increasingly convinced that waiting Hussein out (exile? internal coup?) is the only way that will prevent diplomatic feathers from getting... well, not just ruffled, but outright plumed.

Why is diplomatic influence such a big deal? Is it just about egos? Well, no; the world is a fragile place, and it is the responsibility of stable nations to keep the balance. States and dictators that get out of line (such as Iraq, but also Burma, Indonesia, North Korea, Nicaragua, ...) need to be kept in check. This is done through a variety of means: (promises of) economic assistance, (threats of) economic sanctions, diplomacy, threats of force, and, regrettably, use of force. Sadly, if we were to do a 180 and back down on Iraq, we'd lose the ability to use threats of force. And, I'm sorry to say, we don't live in a world where straightforward diplomacy is 100% effective.

What depresses me is that the person playing this game the best right now is Hussein. It'd be an easy decision if he were fully cooperative and accounted for all the missing weapons, or if he completely blocked the inspectors and provided no evidence of weapons. Instead, he's baiting the West. If this were a trial by jury, yeah, all the evidence would point to his guilt, but there would be an inkling of reasonable doubt.

Anyway... yeah. I doubt that many diplomats assigned to the U.N. are getting decent sleep these days.

Why is it that printers are so adept at ignoring print requests? It seems like this is true everywhere I've worked or gone to school.

54 vodka /home/dacut/packages/x-docs: lpstat
Printer: Hp4000West@vodka (dest Hp4000West@Hp4000West)
 Queue: 3 printable jobs
 Server: pid 21580 active
 Unspooler: pid 21581 active
 Status: waiting for subserver to exit at 13:18:20.201
 Rank   Owner/ID                  Class Job Files                 Size Time
1      dacut@vodka+577              A   577 (STDIN)            3449678 13:15:38
2      dacut@vodka+595              A   595 (STDIN)            1579456 13:16:04
3      dacut@vodka+630              A   630 (STDIN)             481680 13:18:20

When I retire, I think I'll become a cat herder.

Eric Weisstein for President

Weisstein wrote the original MathWorld and continues to edit it. This is an invaluable resource for recalling all of those tricky math concepts that you were quizzed about on a midterm once upon a time and promptly forgot, but now find yourself needing to recall. Well, at least for us less than godly types who can't whip Bessel Functions of the First Kind out of our ass...

Well, today I checked in and was surprised to discover a few additional links. There is now a ScienceWorld which is a superset of MathWorld. Aside from the original mathematics category, there are catgories for physics, chemistry, astronomy, and a special biography section. Though far from being as complete as the mathematics category, I was very pleased to see a sections on Maxwell's Equations and the dear father of all electrical engineers.

Why am I being so lazy?

I know I can work harder, concentrate harder. I know that saying that the noise in the office is too loud is a pathetic excuse. I know that I can wake up earlier and get in to the office by 8:30 or 9.

I worked much harder in college. Four hours of sleep was a luxury then. I get far more than that now, almost double, and I still complain about being too tired.

Ok, time to work. I need three hours of solid productivity before my 3:00 meeting.

So IT demanded to downgrade my laptop because their boss (who's also the HR director and CFO) wanted it. Not that I really *need* a company laptop... I just had one because we had a bunch of old spares that nobody was using until now.

I was a tad puzzled... I told them that the laptop I had was a crappy Pentium 166, missing a few keys. No, no, they insisted; you have a PII 266 or 300, Toshiba only made that model with PIIs and PIIIs; but you can pick another laptop from our crappy spares pile. I double checked; yeah, sticker says it's a Pentium, and Windows insists the same. But I handed it over anyway.

I leafed through the pile of unwanted laptops. Found an IBM Thinkpad 600. Larger screen. Larger keyboard, no missing keys. No sticker, but I booted it up and... it's a PII 233. With more memory.

I'd ask for another downgrade, but I don't want to push my luck. :-)

Grah... grumble... mrah... lack of select() and poll() in Java... gack... threads... ugh...

Started Japanese class today. I should have been dead tired, having gotten five hours of sleep, getting to work at 8:30 am, followed by class from 6:30-9:00 pm.

But it was exciting! So many words coming back to me, just because I'm hearing the language again. Weird. Neural circuits that lay dormant for years are announcing their return.

And it's a non-credit class, so all the people attending are there because they want to be there. Fun.

God save the Queen!

Today marks the 51st anniversary of HM Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the throne.

God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the Queen!

We use Bugzilla at work to track various issues. IT started using it first, though now the product teams have started migrating their bug databases to it.

I could always tell when someone was about to be fired, though, because there would be a bug in there about revoking so-and-so's access, etc. I couldn't actually see the bug since those are restricted to the IT people only, but since that was the only use for restricted bugs, it was a fairly reliable indicator.

Well, until this morning. I noticed that bug 800 (we add about 10-20 bugs per work day) was restricted. Hm... interesting. I wondered who was going to be next. But then Matt, the NeoCircuit manager, told me that they've started restricting some of their bugs, mainly so that the field support people don't go into a whining tirade about how we're all a bunch of idiots for having such a bug in the first place and that we're not fixing it the way they think we should fix it blah blah blah. And, yep, turned out that 800 was the first such bug.

Fortunately, he added me to the Circuit group so I can see those bugs now and my previous firing indicator still works. Heh heh heh...

Grr. I'm tired of these projects. I want to be able to go away for a couple weeks, refresh myself, and *then* tackle them. Sadly, not an option.

Most of my peers are now managers; the guys who were managers before are now directors. I've adamantly refused to go that route, which may eventually burn me, but it's so far working out fine. Being in a non-product group, I'm regarded as some kind of technical consultant. Right now, I have managed to come up with a piece that's in high demand, though I'm struggling to get the design finalised. Once the product groups ship it, you see, I'm going to have to live with these decisions I make now.

I have a meeting tomorrow where I have to defend a lot of my design decisions in front of a few people who would like nothing more than to see my work axed. Bring your marshmallows and hot dogs; the flame fest begins at 2 pm EST.

Hm. I should probably get started on the powerpointing since it's already past midnight and all... Instead, I think I might play another game of Link Letters. :-)

Still trying to collect my thoughts post-Columbia.

If you're an engineer and this doesn't make you do some soul searching... well, you probably shouldn't be an engineer.

My condolences to all involved -- not only the astronauts and their families, but also the mission controllers, engineers, technicians, builders, planners, and others involved with the mission.

Right now, if I were working at NASA or a contractor, I'd be petrified. What if it were caused by something I had done? If I had spent a tad more effort on my designs -- exceeded the specifications by a tad more -- would those astronauts still be alive?

A 100% safe system is an engineer's dream. It's also unattainable. And that frustrates us to no end. But the struggle must go on.

Hm. It's past 2:30 am, and I was in bed up until a few minutes ago. I couldn't sleep because I kept thinking, "Those machines [at work] are idle. They could be running useful batch jobs overnight and have the results ready when I get in."

Of course, said jobs didn't start correctly, so I've now spent the last 45 minutes debugging them to get them started, further throwing off my sleep schedule...

Ah, well. I usually look like a zombie at work, anyway. Why should tomorrow be any different? :-P

Happy New Year!

Well, been awhile since I updated. Anyway...

Went down to Tamara's parents for Christmas and had a pretty good time. Though it was a tad difficult being away from my family. Ah, well. Tam gave me a nice octagonal mirror etched with cats in an oak frame. Also got some books, a Nerf football-ish thing that glows in the dark and has a propellor, a number of DVDs, etc.

Unfortunately, we all got sick. It was either salmonella or a Norwalk-like virus. I was back in Pittsburgh when I came down with it; after taking a bath on Thursday night, I started vomiting and then passed out. Not good. Aside from being dangerous, I made a mess of the bathroom. Recovered by Tuesday-ish.

New Year's was uneventful -- neither Tam nor I are keen on celebrating what amounts to an arbitrary calendar day.

Lots of organisational changes at work today. I still report to the same chain of command, but the other groups either report to a different VP or had managers inserted between the group managers and product teams. Our applications engineering group (customer support) now reports to VP/Finance rather than VP/Sales, which is strange and smells of a "no-confidence" vote against sales.

Got a memo asking me to attend a meeting at 3, called by Glen (my boss' boss, and manager of the electrical group). He wants to know why the physical group asked me to implement a program module a year ago yet still has no plans to actually use it. Bring your marshmallows, kids, because there will be some flames at this meeting...

Work has consumed me these last few weeks. I'm not entirely sure why or how. But I can't stop thinking about the projects I'm working on.

The scary bit is that I don't mind. It's like work has become some kind of escape (!). Even my birthday just kind of came and went.

Part of it is that I have made significant, measurable progress on said projects, which always brings a high. Like a drug addict, though, I keep going for that next high, postponing other commitments.

At least I got all my Christmas shopping done on time.

(defun clMatchPermutations (match_rules objects)
  (let ((match_args (car match_rules))
        (match_body (cdr match_rules))
        match_fun
        (match_results (tconc nil nil)))
    (setq match_fun (eval `(lambda ,match_args ,@match_body) (theEnvironment)))
    (mapcar (lambda (argset)
              (when (apply match_fun argset)
                (tconc match_results argset)))
            (cdar objects))
    (cdar match_results)))

One of those deep-thought days. As usual, I had interruptions every 15 minutes or so, but I managed to shrug them off. I managed to get hard-core pattern matching algorithms proven correct and implemented (though not quite debugged).

Usually when I write code I feel like I'm being lazy, as if writing code is not real work. I don't usually get the euphoric feeling that I do after grunging out a difficult line integral or somesuch. Today was a nice exception. I feel like I did bona fide intellectual work.

Name that list!

France	167
Netherlands	158
Denmark	152
Canada	150
Britain	149
United States	138
New Zealand	135
Spain	121

dac is ideal for high performance applications

dac is a suite of components and controls that are data aware by design rather than merely data bound
dac is designed as a secure environment
dac is not responsible for lost or damaged files
dac is a caring school
dac is housed
dac is my second home
dac is a scientific society of the ministry of information
dac is a dac is a dac
dac is placed after an adc
dac is part of DAC Group Ltd which also owns a security guarding company, an alarm company, and a CCTV company
dac is also continuing to feature the embedded systems showcase highlighting vendors of embedded systems
dac is similar to the whole abc
dac is back
dac is to set the asd threshold voltages
dac is updated and disappears
dac is very thin [don't I wish]
dac is shown
dac is used to convert a parallel digital input
dac is david andrew clayton
dac is enabled or disabled
dac is os/2
dac is then processed or conditioned to produce the required output signal characteristics
dac is in the range of 2%
dac is now complete
dac is patent pending technology that stands for dynamic adaptive compiler
dac is pleased to be a part of the give the gift of sight program
dac is good news for MUNI
dac is authorized under the agreement
dac is also the first fully designed integrated circuit
dac is stored into counting registers formed from parallel data entry up/down synchronous counters
dac is a critical part of the signal chain
dac is a new festival of audio and visual arts located in Cambridge, UK
dac is also available in horizontal mount versions with overall height of less than 0
dac is growing and taking on a larger caseload
dac is India's national initiative in high performance computing and has been engaged in research and development
dac is insulated with PE foam skin which exhibits only 45 pf/m
dac is too small
dac is the primary communications vehicle between the home medical equipment industry and Cigna Healthcare Medicare Administration
dac is shown mounted in the upper forward part of the right window
dac is implemented and can be used for offset corrections
dac is properly configured in $cyril_conf/serial
dac is a direct out
dac is an association specially for abyssinians and somalis
dac is seamless from top to bottom
dac is transferred and how is it calculated?
dac is available to assist us companies interested in developing export programs
dac is fully compatible with this process and will automatically detect if a cd disk is hdcd encoded and then perform the correct decoding
dac is proud to support
dac is built using a 0
dac is substantially more sophisticated and costs more to build
dac is driving a servo amp
dac is composed of seven members
dac is less flexible
dac is expensive because of complicated adjustments and support circuitry
dac is a dual high speed differential digital to analog converter specified to operate from a nominal +1
dac is binding
dac is to create a consolidated float data set usable by scientists for
dac is a non profit organization that is dedicated to providing the children of our neighborhood with quality sports programs
dac is immediately on your right
dac is the new crystal 4390 24/96k
dac is entirely minimalist in form and function

Somehow my deadlines have mysteriously morphed without anyone bothering to tell me.

I'm working on [insert secret project here], and was supposed to deliver a rough usage model by Friday and the first-cut at a spec by December 16th. Somehow, this has morphed into delivering an implementation tomorrow.

Um... huh?

What's worse is that my customers are not internal. Cadence is expecting this, well, now-ish.

Who's responsible for this fiasco? I'd like to choke the living daylights out of him.

Back!

Back from the honeymoon on PEI. Pictures forthcoming.

But I'll leave you with this note: if you're an innkeeper, do not let an engineer have the suite with the jacuzzi tub.

Hm. Building Mozilla for 64-bit Suns takes a long time. As in I started last Wednesday; built during the wedding; and it's still building today.

The builds are getting interrupted due to various bugs in Mozilla itself (so I have to edit the code and figure out why the compiler is rejecting it). But, still... this is on a farm of 40 Sun Blade 100s.

My Athlon box at home runs circles around a farm of 40 Blades.

That is just pathetic, Sun.

I'm married!

And I'm so happy! I've never been so happy in my life.

Despite last minute fiascoes, everything went off almost perfectly. It was kinda cold and wet on Saturday so we had the ceremony inside, in the backup room. Ah, well. We still got to take pictures outside and all of my friends and relatives got to see the fall colors in their fullest.

And, wow, do I have some terrific friends and relatives! Everyone was so helpful and cheerful. It sounds like everyone enjoyed the rehearsal dinner, reception, and post-wedding barbeque we had. About 95 people attended!

And, of course, I now have a wife whom I love and adore very much.

I don't want to work on this anymore.

This problem has no solution because it's subjective. So I'm writing a metasolution through which people can write their own quasisolutions. Or something like that. Yes, it's about as exciting as it sounds.

I see these electronic design kits for what they are: a lot of patchwork built upon patchwork with tiny pieces of string and small staples barely holding the whole thing together. Any time I try to build something on top of it, another part comes toppling down. After awhile, it gets very frustrating.

I want to scrap the entire thing and rearchitect it myself from scratch. Sadly, that's about as practical as the phone company ripping out all the wires at once and replacing them with fiber. Or the waterworks digging up all the streets in Pittsburgh at once, removing all the rusty old pipes, and laying down new pipe.

Rome wasn't built in a day. But this software sure looks like it was.

I get no respect.

scaryr: Oh, I know what to name your eventual children, by the way.
kangadac: Uhoh.
scaryr: You can have two girls and a boy or three girls.
scaryr: Ada, Pearl, and Pascal/Pascale.

The board of directors are here, and we had to hob-knob with them during lunch. Add that to a 110 minute meeting at 9 am this morning, and today should suck.

But it doesn't, because I got my Beauty and the Beast DVD from Amazon today! Woo hoo!

That's gotta hurt...

I had a 2:15 appointment to interview someone for a testing position. Oddly, I found John, the guy who was supposed to interview him before me, sitting at his desk.

Me: "John, did you trade with someone else?"
John: "No... X and Y both decided this morning that he was all talk."
Me: "Did we at least take him to lunch?"
John: "I dunno... they decided this around 10 am."
Michele (office manager): "Oh, we did. But then we took him to the airport five hours early."

Heh... how bad do you have to be that you don't even make it through half of the interview?

Also, I'm not sure what's happened, but the most recent updates to Google have caused it to start sucking ala Altavista. I'm getting a ton of irrelevant links and 404s on the first page, and frequently on the first link. Suddenly, clicking on "I'm feeling lucky" doesn't seem such a great idea...

I haven't updated in awhile out of fear that my entries would be too angsty.

That fear hasn't abated, but oh, well...

Less than three weeks to the wedding. I'm getting a tad weary of being asked if I'm excited. I'm not excited. I'm fretting. People say that no matter what happens, it'll turn out fine. Then they proceed to tell me the things they would've done differently. Gee, thanks.

Work is getting more stressful. My usual workload has tripled, mainly because there are a few others who are bored and have decided to get their noses into things that I've worked or am working on.

I can't find my cell phone for the life of me. The last time I used it was at my desk at home. It's neither there, nor in my backpack, nor at work.

My car needs its 30k mile overhaul. As if I have the time to do that now.

To access my 401(k) plan information, I need a PIN number. However, to access their customer service representatives to get a PIN number, I need a PIN number. Anyone see a problem with this?

To-do list, redeux

Ok, let's see...

• Get tuxedo measurements from groomsmen


• Try to contact the few people who didn't receive invites because they've fallen off the face of the planet


• Finalise caterer contract


• Make some prototypes of constraint templates


• Get noise canceling headphones


• Give Tam feedback on honeymoon plans


• Order rings


• Get marriage license

I am back.

And I'm exhausted.

My grandfather passed away at 1 pm on Saturday. I'm glad that I could be at his bedside.

The funeral was yesterday. I was one of the pallbearers; it was an honor.

I didn't touch a computer for a week, and didn't miss it one bit. Though now I have 450 emails to catch up on, and don't have a clue as to what's going on in the outside world. I also am now way behind on wedding planning. I need to get back into my routine.

I think that things are going ok with my family. They're figuring out what to do with my grandmother, who needs near-round-the-clock care.

Drove back from Chicago yesterday; got to Pittsburgh around 1:20 am.

Most of all, though, I miss my grandfather.

... well, to-do list will have to wait. I have to head out to Chicago... looks like my grandfather only has a couple days left. :-(

My to-do list

Things seem to be cropping onto this faster than I have been taking them off as of late. Not that I couldn't keep up; I'm just being lazy.

This is my attempt to break my laziness through public humiliation.

• Get tuxedos


• Get addresses for remaining invites that were either returned or never sent


• Call caterer (where's my menu?)


• Get prescription filled


• Water plants


• Make curry


• Implement MTM query functions for NeoCell


• Make some prototypes of constraint templates


• Get wedding program to Pastor Janet


• Meet with Tom regarding professional development


• Get noise canceling headphones to drown out loud damn annoying tech writer who sits in front of my office (just had to shut the door... grr...)


• Make honeymoon plans more firmish (plane tickets?)

I've just about had it with Linux.

It's not as great as the proponents claim. I can't believe an environment this buggy and architecturally flawed will ever be accepted into the mainstream. The NFS implementation is god awful... it's been losing my home directory every 10 minutes this morning. (No problems from our Sun or HP boxen.)

And the device drivers... eaugh.

I'm close to the snapping point and either installing FreeBSD or writing my own microkernel system from scratch.

Garrrgh!

It's Saturday... the band is playing... honey, could you ask for more?

Today's A Prairie Home Companion was a reply of a May 2000 show they did at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

Just listening to Garrison Keillor describe Pasadena made me miss it. And Caltech, as well.

And I'm starting to enjoy Nickel Creek (one of the guest bands on the show).

The social aspect to IRC and fora...

Ok, Josh, post your comment *here*. :-) I'm prolly going to take some flak just for talking about this, but here goes.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to put out an entertainment product (e.g., Avalon) and manage the fan forums (and by this I mean discussion boards, e-mail lists, IRC channels, chat rooms, ...).

Managing a forum when you're the creator makes it (seem) official, regardless of whether this is intended. If (when) the people on it get out of hand, it makes your product seem less polished. Take steps to correct this, and you're accused of trying to stifle "free speech" or manipulate people or other nasty things. It's ends up being a lose/lose situation.

Which brings us to the #avalon "problem." It (the version on Nightstar) was once the official real-time discussion forum. Of course, some people hung around quite frequently, and a community/clique (you choose the connotation) formed. Time passes. Those people have now gotten to know each other. Any newcomer is going to feel, well, like a newcomer. He/she will be at a disadvantage. Some people enjoy being in those shoes, but many do not. If the channel is still "official," this presents an image problem...

I'm beginning to understand why products which have garnered a fanbase -- whether it's Star Wars, Macintoshes, Porches, Sunbeam Toasters, etc. -- do not attempt to have any sort of "official" fan forum.

Now, Keenspot provides a forum for webcomics hosted there. I think it's best to prevent any sort of community/clique developing there for the reasons listed above. But people are going to want to discuss and form social groups, so it's good to provide links to unofficial, fan-run areas (with a huge "this is not official" disclaimer). If someone is turned off by one group, he/she can just go to another. If none of them are appealing, a new one can be formed...

With regard to the Keenspot-hosted Avalon forum, I think it's too late. If Josh tries to move it off-site, he'll be accused of those things mentioned above. Hopefully, this won't be too much heartache since Avalon is due to run its course soon.


Josh's earlier comment (posted to the previous entry) was along the lines of, "I thought that I was the only one with the thorn in my side, and that was 4-5 months ago" [i.e., it's not a thorn in his side anymore] [Sorry, Josh, I've lost the actual text! Let me know if I'm misremembering.]

Anyway, the impression I've gotten is that others want the connection removed because {they don't want it mistaken for an official forum, they don't like Josh, much of what takes place isn't Avalon-specific, just because, ...}. My intent was to provide a technical solution to the "you can't rename an IRC channel" issue. If people want to keep the #avalon name, fine by me.

It has become clear that the naming of the #avalon IRC channel has become a thorn in the side of many.

Before, it was mentioned that renaming a channel is not technically feasible (e.g., infrequent visitors might miss the announcement that it had been moved). However, I believe I have come up with a solution to this problem.

Visit #test30 on irc.nightstar.net. The ChannelMover bot will inform you that the channel is no longer in use and mention its successors. You will receive in invite to join #test50 (which on some IRC clients will cause you to automatically join the new channel). After a short delay, you will be kicked off of #test30.

This, of course, does not answer the question of what #avalon (on irc.nightstar.net) should be renamed to.

Questions and comments regarding the technical aspects of this are welcome (post a comment to this entry). Anything else will be deleted.

Hm. Interesting morning.

Been doing some build system setup here, trying to reduce the amount of network traffic going to our poor overloaded server. Problem is, compiling a compiler takes an awful long time...

Went to Waterworks Mall to deposit a check and do some browsing (Barnes and Noble, Radio Shack, etc.). Lots of police and media at the Ames store there; seems that an employee was stabbed while trying to stop a shoplifter. No ambulance when I got there, so it must have happened well before I arrived.

Got an Uncle Sam's pizza cheesesteak sub for lunch. Mmm... Not good for my waistline, of course, but my stomach is in bliss.

Tam's sick. We have the filters running full blast in case it's allergies, but it sounds like it's more than that. :-(

Intel Reduces Q3 Sales Forecast

Santa Clara, CA (DACWIRE) - During a mid-quarter analyst meeting today, Intel
Corporation executives revised their third-quarter sales forecast further
downward in a widely anticipated announcement.

Citing weak demand for personal computers and consumer items, Intel spokeman
Mark Wittenberg stated that the company hopes to sell "six, maybe seven,
Pentium 4 processors this quarter" after slashing prices on their main
product by up to 28%.

Sales of server and low-end processors followed the trend, with Celerons
targeted for eight units sold. Wittenberg declined to forecast sales for
their Itanium server products, but many analysts note that most server
vendors are refusing to use the chip even for free.

Hewlett Packard, which assisted in the early stages of Itanium's development,
reportedly "won't even touch it even when Intel is offering them $10/chip"
to incorporate them in their servers, according to Merrill Lynch analyst
Joe Osha.

Should sales of the Itanium chip continue to remain flat, Intel may be faced
with a tough decision regarding warehouse space. "We're evaluating our
options, but burying them in the Nevada desert seems to be our leading
choice," said Wittenberg.

A call seeking comment from Atari, which faced a similar decision in 1984, was
not immediately returned.

Surprisingly, this actually generates results:

158 sydney /usr/src/linux: find . \( name \*.c -o -name \*.h \) -exec grep -l 'NO!' {} ';'
./drivers/char/ftape/lowlevel/fdc-io.c
./drivers/net/skfp/pcmplc.c
./drivers/scsi/qla1280.c

Signs that it is going to be a bad Mondy

1. You realize that your car payment is due today (and the bank is an hour away).


2. You attempt to print a check for said payment, but the printer is out of color ink and refuses to print anything, including an entirely black-ink check.


3. You cut yourself while shaving. Badly enough, in fact, to require a band-aid on your face.


4. You dress for work, putting on a button-down shirt, dockers, black socks... and accidentally put sneakers on without realizing it.

Yes. I'm pretty much resigned to writing this Monday off.

Miserable day here. Very wet and rainy, amongst other things.

Computer wouldn't boot this morning. I'm awfully tempted to dump Win 2k -- it seems to get less stable with each supposed critical fix. This morning, winlogon wouldn't run (UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP blue screen). Grr.

We're on the second (and thankfully final) day of our engineering and sales meeting. These suck, because they're planned by sales. They're awful at planning, and what they do plan is utterly pointless. Our group found out that we were supposed to give at update about 5 minutes before the actual presentation.

Heading down to Virginia today. Hopefully the rain won't affect traffic on the turnpike. Heh. Who am I kidding? :-)

Playing financial whiz this evening. Or pretending to...

All too often, I get the feeling of, "Dang, are they billing me again, already?" when reviewing my statements. But every time I go and check, sure enough, it's time for them to bill me again.

Except this time.

I discovered that my web site operator (the folks who host kanga.org on a machine somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey) have been double billing me for the last six months, i.e., billing me twice a month instead of once. It's a small enough amount that it's slipped under my radar screen.

I think it's a bona fide error, though, no malicious intent. There were some changes to my account around that time when it started, so I'm guessing it's operator error. We'll see what they say...

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

;;

;;  journal.txt

;;  dac's journal entry

;;

;;  Copyright (c) 2002 Neolinear, Inc. All rights reserved.

;;  $Id: journal.txt,v 1.1 2002/08/19 13:22:30 dacut Exp $

;;

 

Yes.  I think work has finally gotten to me.



 

Don't much feel like working, so I'm ripping CDs to MP3s. I have to say, though, that the LAME encoder used by default in CDEx is, well, lame. Fast, yes. But, oy, does it produce an annoying ringing sound.

Using Blade instead, which is much slower but higher quality. Also allows higher bitrates.

I also have an annoying pain in my gut that's been there since last night. It does seem to be focused on my right side, but I wonder if that's just my imagination since someone I know just had his appendix removed. Seems to be diminishing... if this keeps up, though, I'll have to see a doctor or something.

Bah. I'm a wimp. I'm typing this from work.

Hm.

"Today's air pollution forecast for Pittsburgh: Air Quality: Unhealthy. Pollutant: Ozone." It's also supposed to get up above 90. Ugh.

Maybe I should try working from home today. Hrm...

Return from Paradise...

Well, I'm back. Interestingly, while I was in the air on US Airways, they filed for bankruptcy. Fortunately, they didn't force us off the plane at 33,000 feet.

Reunion was terrific! Sooo many people I haven't seen in ten years. They're all doing well; most are married with one or two kids. Most are still in the San Diego-ish area, but somewhat northward -- many people are fleeing to Temecula due to absurd housing costs in Escondido (where I'm from, about 40 min north of downtown SD).

Just as before, the cheerleader/football people were pleased to see us geeks, and vice-versa. I guess we had an atypical class in that regard. A lot of them were taking honors classes and such, and certainly did not fit the "dumb jock/airheaded cheerleader" stereotype. This pleases me.

Sandy Eggo!

Heading off to visit my ol' stomping grounds. It's my high school class' 10th reunion.

Yes, that makes me an old geezer to many of you. But I'll be an old geezer in San Diego, so :-P

Wedding invitations: done!

Well, the first batch, anyway, which is everyone we had addresses for. We were over the 1 oz limit, so they're all going out with 60c netstamps rather than the 37c normal stamps.

Lowest zip code: 02139
Highest zip code: 99762
Shortest distance: 0.3 miles, zip code 15232
Longest distance: 7,503 miles, Okinawa, Japan 901-2303

Got my Lord of the Rings DVD today! Yay!

Morning meeting went ok. Jon (NeoCell chief) pointed out some deficiencies in my (very abstract, very high-level, very rough draft) design, which is a good thing. Not what I wanted to hear, of course, but sometimes what I want is not what is good for me. This feedback will help me to refine the design.

Nonetheless, the idea is fundamentally sound, or so it seems. Unusual, yes, and there's a large risk of customers refusing to adopt the idea. It could be a big flop. But what invention that was worth a damn did not have such a risk?

Of course, the riskiness of an idea is not an indication of its goodness. As mathematicians would say, riskiness is a necessary but not sufficient property of a good idea.

I'm not feeling well, and I don't know why.

I've been jittery the last few days, butterflies-in-the-stomach-type of a feeling. On the plus side, this has suppressed my appetite a bit. I'm guessing it's stress-related combined with my excessive intake of coffee.

I'm proposing a fairly dramatic shift in direction of some projects at work, which brings the necessary politicking. Campaigning for a technological decision is not unfamiliar territory to me, but it still wears me down. And then there are the wedding-related items, a trip next weekend, trying to play money-manager with stocks, ... oy.

At least it looks like we're going to get some desperately-needed rain here today:

The National Weather Service says severe thunderstorms may develop
over the head of the Ohio region this afternoon and tonight.  Wind
gusts could exceed 60 mph and hail could reach 1 inch in size.  If 
rain amounts go over 2 inches, there will be ponding of water in  
locations with poor drainage. 

The high heat and humidity will help develop scattered thunderstorms  
by late afternoon. National Weather Service Pittsburgh expects a  
front, from the Great Lakes, will move slowly southward across the  
head of the Ohio region tonight... and this may help storms to become  
better organized and severe.  

Consequently, the skywarn net may need to be activated late this  
afternoon and tonight.  Stay tuned for updates.

I've given up trying to use the Sun workstation on my desk at work. It's painful. Sun equipment used to be prime stuff; not anymore. The cheap PC next to it is much faster.

Though not as fast as it could be. I opened up the disk defragmenter, but, surprisingly, it didn't look like there was much fragmentation. Well, at first. There were only a few spots of blue on the "Analysis Display," while a good 95% of it was solid red.

Then I saw the legend: "(Red) = Fragmented files (Blue) = Contiguous files". Heh... oops.

My headphones broke today. This wouldn't normally be a newsworthy event, except (a) they were a gift from my parents, and (b) I quite liked them, as they were very comfortable to wear and produced a nice sound.

On the up-side, I think I can fix them with a dab of superglue.

I seem to be in a devil-may-care attitude about work as of late. Not that I don't do it. Just that the code I'm writing is architecturally clean, and I'm refusing to bend to our product teams' demands to pollute it so they can integrate it more easily.

dacut@hogwarts.ac.uk

How cool would that be?

Mm. Rain. I like a good rainstorm. Though I might shut down my computer after I write this, since it's a thunderstorm.

Purchased a cheap GPS unit today (should arrive Tuesday-ish). I've wanted to do some mapping for awhile now. Combined with the old laptop I acquired at work and some home-brew software in the works, I should be able to make my own maps, figure out where I got lost, etc. I enjoy wandering.

Not much else. I'll spare my few readers the usual rants about the screwed-up-ness of the NeoCell team and corporate life in general.

The Dow Jones is down more than 250, and was down 300 at one point. Gulp.

Yet I reaffirm my position by putting in a buy order (in an index fund which tracks the market). Either Tam and I will profit at others' irrational market fears when this all blows over, or the U.S. will collapse and any money we have will be worthless in the market, in the bank, or in our pocket.

When viewed this way, there's no question about what to do. Buy. Why everyone else is selling puzzles me.

Anyway... back to work, and no more day trading today. :-)

Solaris to me: "Idiot. This disk doesn't have the magic number."
Me: "Um... ok. Put it on."
Solaris to me: "Sure. Which of the 27 format commands would you like to try?"
Me: "Well, uh... how about this /sbin/fdisk thing?"
Solaris to me: "WRONG ANSWER!"
hee.
head hurty worse
Me: "Uh... how about /sbin/fdisk /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0?"
Solaris to me: "WRONG ANSWER!"
Me: "Uh... how about /sbin/newfs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0?"
Solaris to me: "WRONG ANSWER! Seeing a pattern here?"

Been awhile since I've posted. I've tried a number of times, but never quite got the motivation to finish an entry.

Anyway, finally got the wedding invitation paper. Now the onus is on me to get them done. Which means we need to figure out wording, finalise guest lists, etc.

I wanted to go visit my brother in Germany some extended-ish weekend in August, but it looks like the >$1500 plane fares will prevent that. Blah.

On the other hand, I did get my ticket for San Diego today. Well, almost. I have a voucher from USAirways for $105 (from a ticket I purchased but never used). You would think that USAirways' booking would be able to deal with that. Nope. I have to go to the ticket counter at the airport today. Bleh.

At least the voucher brings down the airfare to a reasonable level. USAir has the only direct flights from Pittsburgh to San Diego (by virtue of Pittsburgh being one of their hubs), but they charge quite a bit extra for them. It would've been cheaper ($340 vs. $475) for me to fly through Chicago on a comibination (!) of United and American flights. With the voucher, the difference is only $30, which doesn't bother me. I like direct flights, but not at a 30% premium.

Oh. We (Neolinear) made money last quarter! A lot ($1.7M). This surprised us, given the economic downturn. And we didn't even have to cook the books. :-) Even our stingy CFO said it was a good quarter.

On the downside, I've managed to crash Cadence about five or six times between yesterday and today. That's worse than our tool, and they (supposedly) have a real product validation team. EDA tools suck. We make Microsoft look good. Heck, we even make Sun look good.

I win. For once.

Yesterday, I received permission to use a private Cadence programming interface. This allows me to write code that is better integrated with their stuff and saves me about 8 months worth of work trying to hack together my own equivalent interface.

Today, I just got an additional pair of golden handcuffs slapped on me. Apparently, we had an excellent quarter so they tossed a few thousand stock options my way. It's all on paper, we're not publicly traded, and I don't fully vest on this new set until July 2006, but still... this pleases me.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who appreciates a clean, consistent architecture.

If the NeoCell team were to build a house, you would have the most immaculate, well-built hallway ever. Every right angle would be 90.0000 degrees. The ceiling would be exactly 10 feet. The walls would be Pantone White 773, with the lighting set so that you could see where you were going, without a dark corner in sight.

But every room off the hallway would be in a different style, with trap doors looming, gaping holes in the ceiling. Doors would be broken off of hinges. To get to the master bedroom, you would need to enter the bathroom, crawl through the medicine cabinet into the kitchen, watch out for the exposed wiring near the sink, and open the refrigerator door to get there. When you finally got there, you would find that someone had parked their car on the bed.

The ironic bit is that the subcontractor for each room would be extremely proud of his work. There would be no inspection; after all, each subcontractor was hand-picked and to have his work second-guessed would be an insult and a wasted expense. A year down the line, the general contractor would wonder why he can't seem to sell that house.

Grr... Injured my left middle and ring fingers today, making it difficult to type.

Tam and I had fun swimming, though. We were out on Lake Arthur, and came across a huge slab of concrete about four feet below the water. We puzzled at first: was it an old parking lot, or boat ramp?

Tam finally figured it out: it was old U.S. 422. Yep... they just made the lake right over it, without bothering to remove the highway itself.

The injury came while I was clearing away algae trying to find the yellow diving line... I jammed my fingernails right into the slab. Ouch.

Tam and I went to Moraine State Park yesterday and went swimming in Lake Arthur. Muchos fun.

And then I went to Dick's Sporting Goods today, because they were having a sale. And bought, of all things, a wetsuit. Hopefully, this will enable me to continue swimming through September or even October. Oooh...

Well, not this October. I'll probably be frazzled with last-minute wedding stuff. But, eh, it'll be there, waiting for me... :-)

Heh... yes, it exists. RFC 3251: Electricity over IP

I'm tired of dealing with wedding plans that mushroom out of control.
I'm tired of people trying to pass the blame.
I'm tired of careless drivers who yak on their cellphones, weaving in and out of lanes, not using their turn signals when they change lanes, and leaving them on when they don't.
I'm tired of control freaks at work who think it's their job to tell others what they can't do.
I'm tired of excuses.

According to their website, the 7-Eleven company has 385 stores in the United States.

For comparison, there are 8,924 in Japan and 2,908 in Taiwan.

I find this somewhat amusing and disturbing.

... I toured these townhouses today, and they're nice. Right on the Allegheny. Five minute drive to work, 30 minute walk.

$300k, though? I think that's a tad high, and I don't think I'd enjoy paying a $2400 mortgage every month.

I'm unhappy when a release build is horked.

I'm downright pissed when I'm the one responsible.

The final numbers aren't in yet, but it looks like the stock markets will close very nearly unchanged. I guess a lot of other people had the same idea I had.

I did put in a buy order for 100 shares of WorldCom at 10c, but they stopped trading on it before the markets even opened. Ah, well.

I'm beginning to see why some stockbrokers jump out windows when the market crashes. (No, no, I'm nowhere near that mindset, don't worry. :-).

It's disheartening to see your hard-earned nest-egg vanish so easily. I've been watching non-trivial amounts of money vanish every day now for the last five weeks or so. Despite spending no money and working ten hours, I end up poorer when the sun sets.

Of course, you have to keep in mind that it works both ways. During boom times, I can sit and home on my lazy butt and make money.

In related news, I'm none too happy about WorldCom misplacing $3.8 billion dollars. That's not going to be good for the market tomorrow. (On the other hand, I already have my buy order in place for the index fund I invest in, so... :-)

Hm. The light fixture above my desk is flickering, and the wires are hot.

It doesn't take my EE skills to figure out that this is A Bad Thing™.

Is there any way to get objective information about what Arafat really does? Some sources claim that he supports terror, others say that the terror attacks are not connected to him, and still others are mum on the issue.

It seems that the informed sources, when it comes to the Middle East, are anything but unbiased. I'll have to resign myself to continued skepticism on the reporting on this issue.

I am so sore. But quite happy.

Just got back from a weekend trip to a cottage out near Ligonier. Went swimming last night and this morning in a pool/pond (constantly getting fresh stream water, and has all kinds of random fish in it). Given that I don't usually swim and don't get as much exercise as I should, I will be sore tomorrow. Eh.

Also had lunch with Tam and Alli (Tam's friend whose family owns the cottage) at the Ligonier Tavern (which was a surprisingly good restaurant).

Happy Birthday, Carn!

I think we're about to be bought by Cadence.

We got a strange e-mail from our HR director/VP of Finance regarding stock options, and how, from time to time, we should evaluate whether we should exercise our options and purchase stock. I thought nothing of it at the time.

This morning, however, Cadence sent out a press release regarding a customer success with NeoCell, one of our products (Cadence markets and sells NeoCell). In this press release, there is not a single mention of Neolinear, and no mention of NeoCell being a registered Neolinear trademark. Management is brushing this off as an oversight. In my experience, though, marketing droids tend to be obsessive about making notes about trademarks.

I don't want to work for Cadence. They tend to squash any innovative ideas, internally. Their turnover rate is abysmal -- most of their good coders left.

scaryr: I don't trust sushi at all
scaryr: It's got a real mean streak.
kangadac: If it's mean, um... that's not right.
kangadac: It's raw, yes, but not *alive*.
scaryr: I still don't trust it.
scaryr: Sushi betrayed my great-uncle, actually.
kangadac: How so?
scaryr: Sold him to the Russians for a piece of tin.
kangadac: You sure you haven't been hitting the liquor cabinet?

Woohoo! Tamara () now has a LiveJournal!

Hm. This means I can get in trouble on here now... :-)

Just started a new LJ community. Hop on over to Questionable eBay Items.

Happiness is...

A box of Barnum's Animal Crackers and Irish creme coffee.

Science Fair Volcanoes...

...had nothing on me last night.

Tamara got me a root beer kit for my birthday last December, and I finally got around to starting a batch a couple weekends ago. We tried some on Sunday. It was awful. I think I didn't put enough sugar in, and the yeast started fermenting.

I decided to rectify this last night. I opened the bottle, put a funnel in, and started pouring sugar in.

Instant 4-foot geyser. Root beer *everywhere*. One girlfriend rolling on the floor, unable to stop laughing.

So, yeah. That was one pissed off colony of yeast. I'll have the last laugh yet, though, when I enjoy my root beer.

---

In other ponderables -- why is nearly *everyone* on my LJ friends list depressed? *Hugs* from Tam and myself. Cheer up!

Just after I got MorningGloryCam running and stable, my other computer (the one I usually use for e-mail and such) dies.

Fortunately, it's fixable. A voltage regulator chip was not glued to the board properly, and time and heat caused it to lift right off (and relocate itself at an odd angle). Unfortunately, I don't have the proper tools for this. As a result, DigiKey is now a few hundred dollars richer at my expense.

I'll be spending my time on this computer until Thursday or so.

Because n webcams aren't enough.

My plants get no privacy.

MorningGloryCam

This is entirely too cute.

Thanks to for providing this.

Fear the cuteness.

Well, it seems that CowbellTiara is a personal project by professional artist Akitu Taira. Pero, one of my office mates, translated the pages for me.

My boss is out of town next week, so that means I can show up to work anytime I want. Wait. I already do that. Hrm.

Oh, and it looks like CORBA won out. Time to dust off the CORBA books.

First, does anyone know what CowbellTiara is? I love the pictures I've seen from that page. Unfortunately, all of the information is in Japanese. (Hm, maybe I can get Pero to translate for me...)

---

Secondly, I've become the inadvertent sysadmin.

We have a ~1 terabyte directory, /zone, in which quotas are not enforced. So I've been dumping a lot of useful utilities into /zone/dacut. However, some of the soon-to-be-released items I'm working on are starting to rely on said utilities. Having software builds depend on the state of a user's directory is a no-no!

As a result, I started moving various items into their own directories. Then people started coming by. "Dave, do you know why {gcc,makeinfo,mozilla,etc.} isn't working?"

Heh. Turns out that word has gotten out that having /zone/dacut in your path is a useful thing.

Well, I'm spending the day recompiling stuff into proper directories. They needed to be updated, anyway. And the system I had for doing so was unmanageable. Some good will come out of this.

Hm. I desperately need to fix this ad-hoc RPC* mechanism I've created with something more standardised. The only problem is which standard?

There's CORBA, SOAP, DCOM, RMI, SunRPC, etc., which all have their pluses and minuses. The problem is that each one has what appears to be a fatal negative for this project. Grr.

*RPC = remote procedure call. This allows parts of a program to run on a different machine in a way that is (ideally) transparent to the programmer.

Troublemaker

Today is timecard day. I hate timecard day.

Well, I used to. You see, we fill out our timecards using a web application. Each time you submit an entry, it takes about 10-20 seconds for the server to process. There are at least three entries per day (clock in time, clock out time, and then you bill your time to one or more projects). This means that it takes upwards of an hour to fill out the timecard.

Since all my time is billed to DARPA, anyway, I have since written a script which automatically fills out the timecard for me. Even better, it randomizes the start and stop times slightly, filling in between 9 and 10 hours (which is reasonably accurate for the time I spend here -- anything past 8 is ignored, anyway, since I'm an exempt employee, so...).

So they do flip coins.

Here's how the National Weather Service has created this week's forecast for Pittsburgh:

AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PITTSBURGH PA
335 PM EDT SUN JUN 2 2002

IN THE FACE OF RECENT MODEL DISPARITIES...OPTED TO GO MORE THE ETA 
RUN FOR DAYS 1-2 THEN AVN FOR DAYS 3-4 AND MRFX AND RELATED 
ENSEMBLES FOR DAYS 5-7.

ETA HAS MIDWEST SYSTEM MOVING EASTWARD ALONG WARM FRONT AND 
AFFECTING THE HEAD OF THE OHIO REGION MONDAY...PERHAPS NOT TIL 
AFTERNOON FOR WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA AND NORTHERN WEST VIRGINIA. 
TEMPERATURES WILL STRUGGLE TO MAKE THE UPPER 60S. CONCUR WITH HPC 
THINKING THAT THERE MAY BE HEAVY THUNDERSTORM RAINFALL MONDAY 
NIGHT...CONSIDERING THE INCREASE IN MOISTURE AND LIFT WITH THE 
NORTHWARD MOVING WARM FRONT. THE AVERAGE RAINFALL IN MANY BASINS 
SHOULD EXCEED 1 INCH. 

ON TUESDAY...ETA HAS THE HEAD OF THE OHIO REGION IN THE WARM 
SECTOR...WITH HUMID CONDITIONS. THE ETA AND AVN SHOW AT LEAST TWO 
SMALLER SCALE SOURCES OF LIFT MOVING THROUGH THE REGION THEN. 
DIURNALLY THE BEST OPPORTUNITY FOR THUNDERSTORMS WILL BE AFTERNOON 
AND EARLY EVENING. 

THE AVN THEN SHOWS THE SPLIT UPPER FLOW OUT WEST DEVELOPING AN UPPER 
LEVEL TROUGH IN THE MIDWEST. THE OPERATIONAL MRF SHOWS THE DEEPEST 
DEVELOPMENT OF THIS SYSTEM WITH A CUTOFF BY THURSDAY. HOWEVER THIS 
IS AN ENSEMBLE OUTLIER...AND USING HPC THINKING FROM RECENT 
DISCUSSIONS...WENT WITH THE MRFX AND THE GENERAL LOCUS OF ENSEMBLE 
SOLUTIONS...THAT SHOWED THE MIDWEEK MIDWEST TROUGH PROGRESSING 
EASTWARD TO THE EAST COAST THIS WEEKEND. THIS WAS LIKEWISE SUPPORTED 
BY THIS MORNINGS AVN RUN. SO KEPT SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS FOR 
WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY...BUT THEN WENT TO DRY CONDITIONS FOR FRIDAY 
AND THE WEEKEND. 

FOR TEMPERATURES...WENT CLOSER TO ETA MOS FOR MONDAYS HIGHS...A 
BLEND OF ETA AVN AND NGM MOS FOR TUESDAY...AND MRF ENSEMBLE MEANS 
MOS FOR DAYS 4-7. ...GIORDANO