Been incredibly busy, hence this space has been empty. But we have finished our downstairs bathroom! It no longer looks like it's missing everything except the basics (toilet, sink, soap, and towel).

I worked from home yesterday, which was nice. Far more productive than a day at the office; amazing how that works.

I came in today, though, to find out that someone here abruptly quit yesterday. The whole thing is kind of shrouded in mystery. I suspect he actually gave two weeks notice, but since he's apparently going to work for a competitor, he was asked to leave immediately -- this is actually a company policy.

He was fairly high up, too -- director level.

Too tired to think now. Need more sleep.

From my brother, who is spending a year in Rome on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome:

Just wanted to send along some photos I took from St. Peters where they were reading the rosary after the Pope's death just a bit ago. As soon as we heard the city bells signaling the death, Lisa and I jumped on my motorcycle and went to the square where there were already tens of thousands. I didn't want to use flash since it was a service, but I wanted to give some sense of the scene there.

Photo credits: Michael Cuthbert

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Trogdor was a man...
He was an... LR(1) man!

Alas, OpenOffice, you are becoming a bloated pigdog which is more annoying to use than your evil twin.

If I could, I'd cut your code down to size using highly lethal martial arts techniques. It'd be like kung fu on a cracker!

Heh... it still strikes me as a tad unusual to see a stock reported as being "up $400":

AIG shares dropped $1.25, or more than 2 percent, to $56.95 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Berkshire Hathaway shares were up $400, or 0.5 percent, at $87,400, also on the Big Board.

I saw the headline: "Jackson Prays With Terri Schiavo's Parents"

My immediate thought was: Michael Jackson is out there now? Can this get any weirder?

Now killing you with three square+ meals a day!

Because they're not about to be outdone by Hardee's Monster Thickburger (1,420 kcal, 107 g of fat), Burger King is rolling out their Enormous Omelet Sandwich (730 kcal, 47 g of fat) for breakfast. Note that a Whopper comes in at a comparatively modest 700 kcal/42 g. I think I'm going to start a chain which sells slabs of deep-fried lard (maybe with some beef boullion cubes for flavoring) in between two slices of bread. Or are they already doing this? I'm no health nut, but.... gaaaaaak.

Total size of my tax returns this year? 90 pages.

Ok, if I, say, owned a sole-proprietorship business which dealt in foreign securities and was trying to hide income in various places, then this might be acceptable. Alas, my life is nowhere near as exciting -- except when it comes to taxes.

Fortunately, not all of these are pages to be mailed in. Some are for auditing purposes. But still...

Oh, and electronic filing? I don't use it. It saves the government money, sure. But they charge $16 for it. Huh? Sorry, but if it saves you money, you'd better be passing some of that back to me. For $16, you're getting the ol' paper returns.

Not a Starbucks every block

In today's business briefs, it was revealed that Pittsburgh ranks incredibly low on the number of coffee shops per capita.

#1 was Anchorage, with 2.8 per 10k people.
#2 was Seattle, with 2.4 per 10k.

Pittsburgh was #142, with 0.5 per 10k.

Now, if they had done the number of bars and pubs per capita, I'm sure the story would've been considerably different.

Why you shouldn't use bad file sharing programs...

My cable modem was on the fritz over the last few days. Comcast came out today and found out that:

1. Another crew had installed an amplifier on the line in my neighborhood.
2. The amplifier I had was no longer necessary -- in fact, it was overloading the signal on the cable modem.
3. My cable line had a (fairly old) block on it, making us all wonder how the modem ever worked.

Anyway, after they left, I found the response to be a tad sluggish. I pulled out a network analysis program... and found that my line was being barraged with requests from Gnutella (think Napster) clients.

This pissed me off. There's no way I could block them, either. So I decided to write a program to accept their requests and send garbage back. Then I discovered that Gnutella has this "server discovery" feature -- a server can say, hey, you might try this other server over here, it probably has good stuff, too. At the suggestion of some guys on IRC, I implemented this feature -- except my version returns the addresses for the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America. I'm sure they'll be interested.

Moral of the story: don't steal my bandwidth.

Graphic headline which pretty much tells the entire story:
Shark splits snorkeler

Just yesterday, I was remarking to coworkers that, despite being here for almost ten years, I have yet to get jury duty.

In the mail today, I received a summons from the U.S. District Court for jury duty.

Doh!

In case you haven't seen it (I hadn't, until today):
Flying lawnmower

Since many of you are dorks yet don't subscribe to (and shame on you!), I'm crossposting this...

[E-Mail to Gorton's Seafood customer service of Gloucester, Mass.]

Hello,

Please forward this to the person(s) in charge of tuning the process control mechanics -- this might be valuable feedback. Thanks.

I just purchased a package of Gorton's Beer Batter/10 Crispy Battered Fish Fillets (net weight 18.2 oz), lot #5025G2. Upon opening the package, however, I found only 9 fillets and one... well, battered fish bit. (See attached image).

However, realizing that the product is sold by weight, I decided to weigh the fish fillets. My setup isn't the greatest -- I used a postal scale, since it's the best apparatus I have in my house -- but, being an engineer, I found the results interesting. (Your process engineer will, too. I promise.)

First, I weighed the box (see image). It came out to 1 oz and a small fraction.

Then I weighed the box plus the fish (see image). To my surprise, it came out to ~20.5 oz. That's ~19.5 oz of product in a box claiming 18.2 oz!

This is a bit alarming, because most consumers will be annoyed at getting only 9 fillets -- when, in fact, Gorton's is providing them with more fish than promised.

The fish, incidentally, was very tasty. We had it with some country-style french fries and tartar sauce. I am very pleased and will continue to purchase Gorton's products. (Incidentally, would it be possible to get a tour if I'm ever up in the Gloucester area?)

Thanks, and regards,
Dave Cuthbert
dacut@kanga.org


The nine fillets and ... nugget?

---

The weight of the box

---

The weight of the fish and box

Into the obscure parts of TaxCut...

Why I'm glad I don't write accounting or tax software...

Post-October 22, 2004 Attorney Fees And Costs Related To Certain Unlawful Discrimination Claims
Enter here attorney fees and court costs paid after October 22, 2004, for actions settled or decided after that date involving certain unlawful discrimination claims, but only to the extent of gross income from such actions.

For more information, see IRS Publication 525.

I got bored while waiting for e-mail replies today. So I wrote a program which lets you change the default "READY" message on the printers here. I then mentioned it to a few coworkers.

One printer is now displaying the current CDN stock price.
Another says, "Paint it black."
The last compliments you with, "Nice pants."

The interesting thing is that this will also work on the printers in San Jose. Hmmm...

Boeing has ousted their CEO (at right) for having an affair with a younger exec (who did not report directly to him). My question is: What the hell was she thinking?! I mean, c'mon -- the whole point of having an affair is to have a "fling with some hot thing" or sleep your way to the top. This is like being your own personal sexual welfare system for rich, old, wrinkly guys. She ought to be arrested for having criminally bad taste. (Yes, in case you're wondering -- this is with tongue firmly in cheek)

I am tempted to take a road trip. In particular, I'd like to see the burning mines in Centralia, PA and various abandoned tunnels and road bits on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

As a kid, I had fantasies of digging in my parents' backyard and finding an underground cave or tunnel, either natural or manmade and abandoned. This was not exactly likely in SoCal, given that most development there is new and on granite rockbeds. In Pennsylvania, though, this could very easily happen.

Back in Pittsburgh.

Holy cow... have you played with Google Maps? It's a lot closer to what I've wanted in an interactive map. You can pan by dragging the mouse on the map, and it loads the new pieces right on the map -- no clicking on directional arrows to go to a new page.

They suggest trying searches like "Hotels near San Francisco." Here's the result for Brothels near Essex Junction, VT.

On a whim, I decided to buy two computers today.

Yes. Let's have an hour-long meeting first thing in the morning and agree to do nothing.

RAGE.

Ah, you must visit zug.com.

These pranksters sign their credit card receipts with interesting names. They leave IOUs to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority from Mariah Carey. They got U.S. Senators to send jokes to them.

You could easily kill a couple hours at work on this site.

The corporate online directory is not the way one should find out that he reports to a different manager.

There's a piano in my living room now. Weird.

Drunk birds crash into building's glass
Forget Amazing Grace and Ave Maria. I want John Deere tractor noises at my wake.

Grr. ETrade won't let you transfer funds from one account to another without jumping through some hoops and waiting n days. I somehow have two accounts -- one is in my name only for the Cadence employee stock purchase plan, the other is a joint account.

I am hoping to buy a share of Berkshire Hathaway class B stock. I'd prefer to get a class A share, but at $90,900 per share I can't exactly afford it. :-\ (Heck, class B shares -- the "inexpensive" shares -- are at $3,033 today.)

The price is so high because Warren Buffet refuses to allow a stock split. I agree with his philosophy behind this, but the impracticality behind it is a pain.

Carly's reign of terror has come to an end.

Oof. Authored an eight page spec today from scratch, ideas and all. That meant I was pretty much cranking away at the keyboard for nine hours straight. I was amazingly productive, though, and it felt good to get so many words and diagrams onto paper (err... well, onto electrons and then magnetic domains, at least), even if it's just a draft.

I'm especially happy because it's eight pages of meat. I blatantly disregard our formal spec templates because they're full of verbiage that nobody reads and simply distracts from what's real.

The main reason I cranked out so much so quickly, though, was that the presention of this was suddenly moved to tomorrow morning (from Friday). Or so I thought. Only after I had gotten it out and sent it for review did I find out that the meeting is a week from tomorrow. Oops. Still, though, it's a good feeling to know that I still have what it takes to grind this stuff out.

Watching people go into the VP's office, coming out, and then cleaning out their desks.

Some folks have inexplicably bizarre fetishes.

Verily, I am enjoying my time off. I don't know if I can go back to work (well, at least at Cadence, anyway) at this rate.

Today, I paid various bills and taxes, had Chinese food from the real Chinese menu at the Lucky Chinese restaurant (a favorite haunt of my Chinese coworkers -- and now I understand why), and cleaned my office (at home) a bit.

Tomorrow, I'm going to start on my taxes, though I don't expect to finish; I'm going to have to review the finer points of capital gains tax laws. Ugh. (I'd feel less bleh if the capital gains were actually anything substantial, but it's just the Neolinear stock I bought back in 2000.)

I can't deal with work anymore. I'm taking tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday off.

I'm also trying to use up my three floating holidays because they don't pay those out if you quit or are laid off. The latter is a real possibility -- basically, the animosity between myself an my manager was reflected in my performance review. (This actually pleases me in a sick way... I'm hoping to get laid off so I can get the severance package.)

Can anyone make heads or tails of the Levitra couches?

Stuck in Chicago. My 2:30 flight was canceled, rebooked on a flight at 10:20 tomorrow morning.

My cats are going to be pissed.

Thanks for all the well-wishes and condolances. It means a lot to me. My grandmother's wake is set for Thursday, funeral and burial on Friday. I'm flying out on Thursday, returning on Saturday.

---

In lighter news, I thought I'd share an exchange at work outside my cube:

Coworker 1: Did you see that e-mail I sent?
Coworker 2: I don't check my e-mail every five minutes. I have work to do.
Coworker 3: Not for long!

(Yes, it was intended as humorous, not malicious.)

My grandmother passed away at 6:30 this morning.

I find it incredibly amusing that "god uses emacs" and "god uses vi" both produce exactly one hit.

(No, not a Googlewhack, because I used quotes and three words.)

How spooks saved Ukraine

The New York Times has an excellent article on how Ukraine's spy agency averted a civil war [6 pages] in the recent election.

If this weren't in the NYT, I'd swear it were an excerpt from some fictional Tom Clancy work. I also can't believe that they were able to get this information.

I'm not sure why I invest the time in doing stuff like this, but here's the start of my latest project...

Some links to entertain you:

Do you use Firefox? Take a look at this serious bug.

Like riding ferries? Like Norway? Let MSN Maps help you. Or, if you'd prefer, you can see more of Europe on your trip.

Via , some nerdy LOTR humour.

And, lastly, a page with some funny/interesting/bizarre movie clips.

Buggery

Wow. CBS has posted the complete independent panel investigation report [PDF, 234 pages] which led to the ousting of four CBS executives and, possibly, Dan Rather himself.

Apparently, blogging substantially accelerated the questioning of the documents. Interesting.

I'd like to know how to go about making a living doing this sort of investigative work. I'm very impressed by it; it's not the typical regurgitated bullshit that you would get by hiring a consulting firm.

I mean, doing this in a way other than ignoring my normal work and blogging during work hours. :-)

---

I spent a few dollars yesterday to pick up a copy of SimCity 4. Aww yeah. I've missed this game. This version, though, is a bit more complex than I'd care for. In particular, I don't care for the interactive dispatching of police and firemen (what city has the mayor doing that?) and the interactive missions that pop up allowing you to gain karma and/or money. SimCity is not an action game, and should not strive to become one.

The soundtrack, though, is superb. They even allow you do download it.

There's a report that Texas improperly spent Homeland Security funds on a trailer to take lawn mowers to lawn mower drag races.

Yes. The National Drag Racing - Lawn Mower Association has more details about this event.

I feel like I've now seen the entire Internet. National Watermelon Promotion Board

Bonus points if you can figure out what Google search resulted in getting to this page.

For those who haven't heard, LiveJournal was acquired by Six Apart, the makers of MovableType and TypePad. I'm somewhat baffled by this; I guess I still think of LiveJournal as a hobby-slash-community-project thing rather than a business. From a business perspective, I can't see how this benefits Six Apart unless they make substantial changes to LJ, contrary to 's claims. Either make it a showcase for your technology (move it all to MT and integrate LJ-specific features into MT/TP) and/or consolidate LJ and TP to reduce your costs.

Having been through an acquisition myself with many promises made and broken, I think Brad is being terribly naive here. Ah, well. It's his company, not mine.

---

In unrelated geek news, I have strung together a set of filters which now copies any non-spam mail sent to my normal e-mail address to my cell phone. We'll see how well this works.

I happened to come across a page describing surgical debriedment of abscess subsequent to self-envenomation -- with pictures.

In other words, the page documents the lancing of an abscess. Now, this is commonly-performed technique in a doctor's office -- the catch here is that the patient was a cobra snake.

I wish I did, but I don't have anything to add beyond what's already been said about the earthquake/tsunami disaster other than to reiterate that it's a good time to consider donating to aid groups such as World Relief.

In other news, Alaska Airline's main competitor now has a website. Go visit SkyHigh Airlines. Be sure to read their inflight magazine, Good Intentions; this month's headlines include "Introducing Bench Seating" and "Personal Space: Get Over It." They also have a new partner, Noah's Livestock Transfer.

Rage.

I'm tired of trying to work with the R&D teams in India, especially when they become abusive because they can't understand what I'm writing. The 12 hour time difference does not help. A problem which should take two hours to solve ends up taking a week or more.

I can't seem to get into the holiday mood, either. I think work has a lot to do with this. A lot of people are leaving -- not for vacation, but permanently. Office supplies are dwindling -- coffee, paper towels, soap -- and we're startion to ration. I was going out and buying some of this stuff out of my own pocket, until I realized that this just allows our VP to continue to ignore the situation. No decorations anywhere, no group holiday lunch, not even a "happy holidays" e-mail from the VP.

I also just heard from our IT guy that he got yelled at because we freed up some disk space yesterday. See, IT charges us according to how much storage space we use; by freeing up some space, we decreased a revenue opportunity for them. WTF?

Magical résumé, work your stuff!

Is it alarming that I'm bored enough at Cadence to consider going back to grad school?

The Designated Hitter as Moral Hazard [NYT, registration required]

In a paper presented at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in January, Bradbury, the economist, and Drinen, the mathematician, noted that the rate of hit batsmen is 15 percent higher in the American League than in the National. [...] After they controlled for pitcher quality, batter quality, game situation and other factors that also contribute to hit batters, they found that the designated-hitter rule itself "increases the likelihood that any batter will be hit during a plate appearance between 11 and 17 percent."

Holy crap, part 7493

IBM is getting out of the PC business. [NYT] [AP] [TheReg]

This annoys me, as I'm typing this on an IBM ThinkPad next to my IBM NetVista at work. While IBM's products have neither been on the bleeding edge of performance nor cheap, they've been quite reliable and well engineered (IMHO). "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Don't entertain me. Inspire me.

---

Thanksgiving was fun; Tam's family came up here, so there were nine people and two cats in my house. It sometimes felt a bit crowded, but, hey, what can you do? And it was always good to see my niece and nephew.

Unfortunately, it appears that the virii inhabiting our bodies used this as a chance to find new hosts. Tam stayed home sick today, and I didn't get in to work until 12:30. Ah, well... nothing important is going on at work, anyway, which says more about the state of things at work than my sickness.

My car was also a bit sick -- it had a hard time turning over this morning. Sounds like the battery is going (which doesn't surprise me -- it's due for a battery change methinks). I just hope it has enough juice to get me home or to an NTB store.

Nah. The US isn't an overly litigious society. From The Register:

A New York woman who ran up debts of $951,000 on her Amex account is sueing the company for $2m for allowing her to hammer the plastic, Newsday reports.

Antoinette Millard, 40, says American Express should have realised she was mentally incompetent when she opened the sky's-the-limit Centurion account. Her court filing states that American Express "knew or should have known that [Millard] was acting impulsively and and irrationally at the time she entered into contract". She cites anorexia, depression, panic attacks and "head tumors" as contributory factors to her mental incompetence.

American Express has obtained a court order freezing $951,000 in assets belonging to the former vice president at the Brown Brothers Harriman investment bank. To add to Millard's woes, she is currently on $100,000 bail awaiting trial on grand larceny charges after attempting to relieve an insurance company of $262,000 for jewellery she claims was stolen, but allegedly sold. If convicted, she faces up to 15 years' jail.

For those of you going from, to, or through Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving, the tolls might be waived on the Turnpike tomorrow due to a pending strike.

If the strike lasts beyond tomorrow, fares will be a flat $2 regardless of distance traveled. It's normally ~$19 from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.

Complete the following sentences.

Answering a recruiting query...

I got a query from a recruiter with some large, random semiconductor company, and found the following question rather amusing:

7. Do you have legal authorization to work for any employer in the
United States without any restrictions at all?  If yes, please explain.

My reply: (and, yes, I actually sent this):

I'm sure the IRS, FBI, and other TLAs might not be happy if I started
working for La Cosa Nostra or other mafia groups, drug lords, terrorists,
etc.  So those are out.  Otherwise, I'm a native US citizen, never been
arrested, never even been audited... heck, the only tickets I've gotten are
for parking violations at Carnegie Mellon.  Hm.  Maybe my life is too
boring?

I'm not a vegetarian...

... and I don't even play one on TV, but this is just gross.

That's 1,640 calories and 100 g of fat, kids.

And back to Pittsburgh again.

I couldn't get a direct flight back, so I connected in Denver. Aside from getting up at 3:30 am to catch the 6:00 flight and sitting next to someone who was built like a linebacker from Denver to Pittsburgh, it was a good flight. Denver splits the trip into nice halves, and it's an easy airport to get around; contrast with Chicago/O'Hare, which is 75% of the way to Pittsburgh (so you have an annoying puddle jumper-ish flight to deal with), has terminals spaced halfway to Milwaukee, and tends to cause luggage delays.

Spent most of yesterday hanging with my cousin, Jane, in Monterey. (If you're stalking me now, well, Hi Jane!) I hadn't been there since I was a kid (fourth grade?). Very nice area. Very expensive area. Not as far from SJ as I thought it was (though I was still feeling sleepy on the drive back... even though it was only 10:30). I also found out some curious family secrets I hadn't known before.

Saw The Incredibles with some college friends on Friday night. Excellent movie. I highly recommend it.

The conference/forum -- which was the main purpose for this trip -- was Thursday, but was mostly unremarkable. There were two good presentations, about three fair ones, and the rest were kind of a waste of time.

Annnnnd... I return to San Jose with a vengeance. Or at least a yearning -- a now-fulfilled yearning -- for In-N-Out.

Oh, this is sad.

Cadence gives you an award when you reach various service milestones. I don't have any, coming from an acquisition, but my prior time counts for ~4 years of service; I should receive one next year.

Anyway, this story isn't about me, but our sysadmin, Bill Schrier. Bill just reached the 3 year service milestone and received an extra vacation day and a plaque in the mail. Yeah, managers can't be bothered to hand it out at a meeting or anything. That's anticlimatic.

What makes it sad is that the plaque recognizes "Venkat Schrier for three years of outstanding service."

Yeah. They couldn't be bothered to get his name right.

Maybe Venkat is the guy they're going to outsource his job to? :-P

I'm fine

Thanks for the well-wishes. :-) It's just office politics. Short story: I answered a number of random questions for coworkers in Tempe last week without knowing why they were asking these questions. They edited my responses down, removed any sort of context, spun up story about how myself and another guy here allowed IP (intellectual property) to escape the company, and submitted it to our director. It has no basis in reality, so we're safe, but now I have to deal with the aftermath.

Thanks for the knife in the back, assholes.

Anyhow, here's a very Dilbert moment at work. Take one news story about a 12-year old Arkansas girl who won a $10,000 savings bond by blowing a 16 inch bubble at the Double Bubble National Bubble Blowing Contest. Take one bag of Double Bubble gum left over from Halloween. Take three coworkers on a slow Monday at work. Hilarity ensues.

I did manage to blow a 10" bubble. I'll have to work my way up from there...

Arlen Specter

Ah, I'm so glad we (Penna.) reelected Arlen Specter to the Senate. Powerful guy who is also very level headed... and likely to be the head of the Judiciary committee overseeing the appointment of 3-4 Supreme Court justices in the near future.

Excerpts from an AP wire story:

The Republican expected to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee next year bluntly warned newly re-elected President Bush on Wednesday against putting forth Supreme Court nominees who would seek to overturn abortion rights or are otherwise too conservative to win confirmation.

"The president is well aware of what happened, when a number of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster," Specter added, referring to Senate Democrats' success over the past four years in blocking the confirmation of many of Bush's conservative judicial picks. "... And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning."

With at least three Supreme Court justices rumored to be eyeing retirement, including ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Specter, 74, would have broad authority to reshape the nation's highest court. He would have wide latitude to schedule hearings, call for votes and make the process as easy or as hard as he wants.

While Specter is a loyal Republican - Bush endorsed him in a tight Pennsylvania GOP primary - he routinely crosses party lines to pass legislation and counts a Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, as one of his closest friends.

A self-proclaimed moderate, he helped kill President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship. Specter called both nominees too extreme on civil rights issues. Sessions later became a Republican senator from Alabama and now sits on the Judiciary Committee with Specter.

Ok, I know that some people have claimed that they want to leave the country if Bush was reelected, but isn't this a bit extreme?

Naked man jumps into wheel well of Australia-bound flight at LAX

Nous sommes désolés que notre president soit un idiot.
Nous n'avons pas vote pour lui.

More election musings...

Lots of distractions today. Every time I try to edit a bit more code, someone comes by with either a question on unrelated code or random comment about the election. I don't think much work will get done here today, by myself or anyone else.

Ah, well.

Part of me feels like ranting, "If Bush wins, I'm moving to {Canada,France,Europe,AnywhereButHere}." But I know that I won't actually move. Regardless of the outcome of the election, the United States will still be the best place on earth for conducting scientific research and engineering, hands down, in both our universities and in industry.

But we're riding the coattails of the investments during the space race and cold war. If we continue down this path, we will -- in 15-25 years -- find ourselves behind India and Japan, and possibly China. Less likely is Europe, for they need to get their house in order.

In other news, Matt (coworker) and I tried the new $3.99 pizza lunch buffet place today (Cici's). The catch is that the $3.99 doesn't include a drink; add in tax, and it's $5.65. Still cheap as far as eating out goes, but not cheap if you consider that a large pizza is about $8 (and sodas from the canteen are 40¢). The food wasn't anything to write home about, but wasn't bad, either.

We were debating whether it was a chain or not. Neither of us had heard of it, and the place didn't quite look polished enough to be a chain, but they did have custom-printed pizza boxes. A quick google reveals that, yes, it is a chain. A very large chain, though mostly in the south. This seems to be one of their few locations north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Got in late this morning to nurse a sick wife and cast my ballot. 'tis all good, though. I don't mind missing a bit of work that I don't care for. Any notion of "work ethic" was lost when they screwed me over, repeatedly, this past summer.

As points out, we have the old lever machines which look like they're from, and probably are from, the 1940s. I do worry whether they're actually doing anything on the backend, whether the old mechanical "chunk chunk click click click" counters are doing their thing.

Since I've been able to vote, I've been a registered Republican. Today, though, I pulled so many Democratic levers -- in fact, the only Republican levers were for Melissa Hart (House) and Arlen Specter (Senate). I find it alarming and sad that the party of Lincoln has strayed so far from his legend [*].

I do think that we need an electronic voting platform, but one that is open and can be subject to scrutiny by both voting/security experts and armchair forensicologists. I'm vaguely thinking of spearheading a technical effort on this front... hmm...

---
[*] I say "legend" rather than "ideals" because we have idealized the man and gloss over some rough spots: in a modern context, for example, he would be considered racist, and his handling of generals during the Civil War was not the best. But we do need to read his achievements in the correct historical context. So I don't have a problem with the elementary school textbooks that distill him as the hero who stood up to slavery and kept the nation together; we do need heros to look up to. Nonetheless, I would hope that anyone who has graduated from high school in the U.S. would realise that history is not as black-and-white as we'd like it to be. (Not the case, I know, but I can hope...)

Why, yes, now that you mention it, I am a complete dork.

Look down, and see the beggars at your feet.
Look down, and show some mercy if you can.
Look down, and see the sweepings of the street.
Look down, look down, upon your fellow man!

Bleh. So now Thunderchuck has decided that all incoming messages will be delivered to my Junk folder (and none of it will be marked as Junk mail). Oh, and this is with junk mail controls disabled.

Honestly, people. E-mail should not be this hard! It's only been a solved problem since 1970 or so.

Not being at Cadence's San Jose site means that we can't talk to anyone in HR in person. To address this (in as pitiful way as possible :-P), Cadence sends our HR rep to us for a couple days once every year or so.

I had a one-on-one meeting with her today regarding my situation. It went something like this:

Me:
Her: Hm. Sucks to be you.

It's about what I expected, really.

ARRGH

ARRGH.

And, no, it's not a rehash of Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Mozilla Thunderbird, the mail program I use, decided this morning that "Get messages" really means "Download them off the server and vaporize them."

No, not put them in the trash folder. Nor did it mark them as junk (I know that at least one was not junk). DELETED FOREVER. VAPORIZED. INTO THE ETHER.

HATE.

All men are created equal

All votes are not.

I calculated the relative "worth" of a presidential vote in each state by taking into account the number of polls taken in each state and the number of electoral votes for that state. (Exact formula: W = (P/Pavg)^2 * (E/Eavg), where W = worth, P = # polls, E = # electoral votes.) This presumes that the swing states are polled more frequently (generally true, except for California).

If the average vote is worth $1, then a vote in the top five states are worth: Florida, $43.95; Pennsylvania, $41.07; Ohio, $31.31; Michigan, $22.61; Minnesota, $10.12.

The bottom five: Nebraska, $0.0030; Idaho, $0.0024; Alaska, D.C, and Wyoming, $0.0018.


Data courtesy electoral-vote.com

Cats!

We now have two cats! Mostly back, but with white paws. Pictures coming shortly.

They're not officially named, but we've been calling them B.C. and Robin. See, the previous owner thought it would be cute to call them "Batman" and "Robin." Robin was ok... but Batman was definitely out. Somehow, though, I got on this mind track of Batman => Batcat => B.C.

We don't like what B.C. stands for in that context, but somehow the name B.C. is ok.

I suspect the names will stick.

How common are dacut's interests

Universal computers (266008) harry potter (126790)

Popular sleep (74482)

Common australia (11842) classical music (25623) dorks (11802) german (10798) japan (40926) japanese (18146) linux (13523) musicals (38098) mythology (42952) naps (10189) pirates (38111) programming (17681) scotland (13160) shakespeare (30453) tea (37189)

Specialist bach (6367) bluegrass (3761) cirque du soleil (3304) computer science (3004) fireplaces (1684) honda (2591) irc (6280) kangaroos (1691) logic (5619) macbeth (1537) maps (3469) melbourne (1762) miyazaki (1823) mozart (9277) new zealand (5988) nickel creek (2103) nihongo (1036) ninja (1994) python (1201) research (3369) san diego (5620) sydney (1759) the princess bride (9999) watership down (1210)

Unusual algorithms (548) anachronism (180) auckland (285) blue mountains (29) brisbane (564) cad (270) caltech (100) canberra (162) christchurch (139) colin powell (121) computer languages (38) copland (267) cymbeline (38) duality (515) earl grey (716) electrical engineering (506) finesse (40) flicking (36) fourier transforms (24) full metal challenge (19) group theory (100) junkyard wars (407) kawasaki (271) lisp (399) mathematica (55) maxwell's equations (14) much ado about nothing (655) new south wales (86) okinawa (395) padres (151) postscript (34) prince edward island (270) reverse engineering (224) rf (45) robert llewellyn (23) scheme (245) scones (545) scrapheap challenge (52) semiconductors (61) state department (28) throwing rocks (184) wellington (467)

Rare carver mead (3) cathy rogers (9) cult of dork (6) digikey (2) jenolan caves (1) remote procedure calls (1) unusual languages (2) wombeyan (1) wombeyan caves (1)

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Enter username:

InterestRank was bought to you by _imran_ and MemeLand.org

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How is it that none -- none! -- of you on my friends list have Cathy Rogers as an interest? This is simply inexcusable! In - ex - cus - a - ble!

My VP (i.e., my boss' boss' boss) has reneged on his agreement to transfer a requisition to another VP. So I'm in limbo again.

Strange phonecall...

I just got off the phone with John Cooley.

Now, I doubt that his name will ring a bell with anyone reading my journal, but he's fairly well-known in the electronic design automation (EDA -- CAD software for making chips) industry. He runs the DeepChip website and the Electronic Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG) newsletter. The latter is a monthly-or-so e-mail sent with selected letters and stories submitted to him; despite the name, it has expanded to encompass all of EDA rather than just Synopsys.

The letters in ESNUG are written by all sorts of people -- marketing droids, R&D grunts, the end users in the trenches, and sometimes an exec or analyst thrown in for good measure. The content ranges from marketing spin from EDA vendors to candid stories from the users. EDA marketing droids squeal with glee when they get positive spin in ESNUG, and recoil when the news is less than pleasing.

Anyway, I wrote him a fairly non-controversial update, mentioning the availability of a new open-source code management tool called Subversion which might be of interest to some of the readers. In a postscript, I mentioned that I enjoyed his recent presentation at the Cadence Usergroup meeting (entitled "Cadence: The good, the bad, and the ugly"), though one of my coworkers was disappointed because it was a well-balanced report rather than full of fireworks about all the crappy things about Cadence. (According to my coworker, "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.")

He apparently got a big kick out of this. The next thing I knew, he was on the phone, asking me about how others inside of Cadence felt, and wanted to know more about how the old Neolinear folks were doing.

It was a bit weird, because he is The Press, and only marketing spin droids are supposed to interface with The Press. But he wasn't really interviewing me or anything; just trying to get a feel for how things are inside of the beast-- er, Cadence. It's a bit like Wolf Blitzer giving George Bush a call to just shoot the breeze, but on a much smaller scale.

Lesson learned today: Never, ever, enter "*" in the "project filter" field of the Cadence timecard system. It will sit there for a good 5-10 minutes, and then fill the project list with stuff like:

I-CS0007-02-33z  SALES: Travel, international, Atlantic
I-CS0007-02-45a  SALES: Scratch left buttcheck, upper distal quadrant
I-CS0007-02-45b  SALES: Scratch left buttcheck, upper medial quadrant
I-CS0007-02-45c  SALES: Scratch left buttcheck, lower distal quadrant
I-CS0007-02-45d  SALES: Scratch left buttcheck, lower medial quadrant
I-CS0007-02-46a  SALES: Scratch right buttcheck, upper distal quadrant

Last week, I changed the motherboard on my computer to get USB 2.0 support (it was cheaper than buying a separate USB 2.0 card -- go figure) and fix some other annoying issues (I had a voltage regulator fall off; resoldering it fixed it, but it was flaky). Unfortunately, the sound card on it would buzz -- loudly -- every time I moved the mouse. Not surprising, given that the mouse connector was next to the audio out connector, and motherboard designers are not audiophiles and under constant pressure to eke out every fraction of a cent in the cost of making these things.

So, yesterday I purchased and installed a new sound card. The E-MU 0404 looked interesting -- external connectors (gets the signals away from the noisy interior), definitely in the "prosumer" line (it's meant for home studios). And it was cheap enough -- $99 -- that I decided to spring for it.

It is amazing. It's unbelievably quiet when no sounds are being made (with most cards, you get at least faint "ocean" white noise). And playing music on it, after living with crappy sound cards for years now, is like listening to a CD if all you've heard are tapes. And this is on the same old speakers I have.

Very happy. Amongst the best $100 I've spent.

More doodles

As I wait for a return e-mail...








Oh, and I have "Infectious Substance" and "Spontaneously Combustible" hanging outside my cube now.

I think "Dangerous When Wet" would be an excellent name for a swim team.

Doodles

To the original writers of this code...

Dammit, what the hell were you thinking when you wrote this crap? "Hmm, I need this bit of functionality. Oh, here's some code which does that. I'll copy and paste it into my code."

Have you people heard of functions? You know, those reusable bits of code they taught you on the first day of CS 1? Hell, we're not even talking about "advanced" concepts such as recursion, which is covered in the fifth lecture.

Oh, look. You wrote your own sort loop. It runs in O(n⁴) time. You know, there's this nifty algorithm called bubble sort which runs in O(n²) time. I think it's lecture seven.

No, I don't want to be reminded that they pay you to write this stuff.

By the way -- and I know this comes as a shock -- there's a mechanism which allows you to put arbitrary text into your source code which is ignored by the compiler/interpreter. They're called comments. Yes, I know it sounds a bit weird -- why would anyone want to put arbitrary stuff into their code that is ignored by the computer? Well, see, it doesn't have to be completely random. You could, say, describe what it is you're trying to compute. Maybe mention that there's an obscure side-effect you're relying upon in some call. The type of stuff that might help others reading your code understand what it's supposed to do.

Next week, we'll talk a bit about indentation -- yes, something else which is ignored by the computer but helps others trace out where your spaghetti loops start and end.

I just got spam from a company advertising 30% off my first order of custom peptide synthesis.

They point out that they offer peptide modifications: phosphopeptides, biotinylated peptides, dye-labeled pepties, cyclic peptides, and many more. Free consultation on peptide design. Alternatively, I can have 20% off my first order on amino acids, building blocks, synthesis resins and reagents. And, yes, they offer Wang Resins.

I find this all very strange. Much like the first time I saw chip design software (which can cost upwards of $100k/license/year) being advertised on a billboard.

Woohoo! Caltech physicist David Politzer won the Nobel Prize in Physics! It's shared with MIT's Frank Wilczek and UCSB's David Gross.

From this year's makeup of Nobel winners, it appears that it helps to be named David and be bald. :-)

It's actually quite fun to be on the campus when someone wins the Nobel. I remember when it was announced that Rudy Marcus won the Nobel for Chemistry in 1992. Nate Lewis, Ch 1a prof., scrapped his normal lecture for a lecture on Rudy and his work. Lots of celebrations. General buzz. Everyone seems a bit happier.

[Fixed links -- thanks Carn!]

For those who have not seen it, SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X-Prize this morning.

This, to me, is huge. When I first heard of the X-Prize, I thought there was only an outside chance that it would be claimed by 2010. I figured that the chances of commercial space travel were remote in my lifetime; now, Sir Richard Branson has expanded his Virgin empire to include Virgin Galactic, already signing up passengers for flights in 2007.

Wow.

Personally, I'd like now to see follow-on prizes for the first commercial craft to do a full orbit in space and an orbit around the moon.

I just realised...

I made it through September this year without anyone dying on me. This is a marked improvement from the previous two years.

My internal clock has been off ever since I took that forsaken red-eye flight last Sunday/Monday. Going to work not long after the sun rises (~ 8 am) and getting home just before it sets (~ 7 pm) does not help. This has the effect of making me constantly sleepy, and what sleep I do get is neither long nor restful. Fortunately, I was able to spend a few hours yesterday doing yardwork in the sun; this seems to have reset things, as I got in to work early-ish yet feel awake.

In between my naps on Friday/Saturday, I managed to reassemble my computer. It needed a storage upgrade; it went from 40 GB to 250 GB (in a RAID-1 array -- I'm paranoid about disk crashes these days). I also used that opportunity to change the motherboard (it was cheaper than buying a USB 2.0 card -- go figure) and stuffed the whole shebang into a new case. Much shinier.

However, around the same time, my DSL modem decided to go kaputt. I put in a trouble ticket with Nauticom, my service provider, on Saturday morning; they claim to have 24/7 service. I called back last night; the tech told me that the DSL people hadn't even looked at it yet. Grr. This annoys me, because I had hoped to get a bit of work out of the way this weekend (and I didn't want to tail over to the office, 45 minutes away). This has angered me enough that I've started the process of switching over to the evil Comcast cable modem service which is cheaper and much faster: $50 and 4 Mbps vs. $60 and 512 kbps.

The primary reasons for using Nauticom in the first place were that we weren't sure we were going to have cable (when we moved, I was looking into a satellite dish), Comcast does not have a good reputation with their cable data service, and Nauticom's tech support was supposed to be phenomenal. Since then, we found that our house isn't suited for satellite, Comcast has taken many strides to improve their service (at least, they've been eliminating spam emanating from their network), and, well, obviously Nauticom hasn't been terribly responsive. Perhaps a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but both Tamara and I were not able to get bits of work done as a result of this; it's not just a "wah, wah, I can't check my e-mail for two whole days!" thing (though, admittedly, there's a bit of that).

Actually, I did manage to rig my cell phone to connect my computer through Verizon's data packet service. It's surprisingly fast (230 kbps -- much faster than anything one can get through a standard modem). It also eats into my minutes very quickly.

Ok, back to coffee and coding.

More for my own reference, but thought I'd share...

Electoral map based on latest poll data
PBS electoral map which lets you play "what-if" games
Job growth vs. time by president

Non-scientific poll

Just trying to get an update on a vital issue in this election year:

For a second, I thought that Keenspot had taken to advertising pr0n in their banners. [I wouldn't advise clicking on that at work, btw.] Ends up that it's not pr0n, but I think it's a tad risque considering that kids might peruse Keenspot (and that appeared on It's Walky!, not something more adult-oriented).

Work update: lots of stuff has happened, partially a result of me getting the conference award and raising my visibility within Cadence. Maybe? I'm not entirely sure. Anyway, to sum up: I had wanted to transfer to another group (CAT) within Cadence after the acquisition because what they do meshes very well with my interests. Problem was that this is outside of the Neolinear CEO-cum-Cadence VP's (Tom's) fiefdom, and he's very leery of losing headcount. (Never mind that I would still be working in the Pittsburgh office, interacting with people from his groups, and essentially enabling free--at least, to him--resources from CAT to work on various integration problems. That would make too much sense, see...)

This was communicated to me (by my acrimonious manager, Rodney; the food chain is Tom > Glen > Rodney > me) as an ultimatum: "You will work on what we tell you to work on, or you can go find another job." Given this limited set of choices, I chose the latter.

Last week, Glen (who happened to be in San Jose at the same time as me) stepped in and started making some waves. He essentially pointed out to Tom that he's going to lose me either way; by allowing me to transfer to CAT, though, I can still do useful stuff for him.

Yesterday, the approval for the transfer was issued. Yay!

So, it looks like I'll be staying with Cadence after all. I'll be working for Iain, who is fairly laid back and will be pleased to have me on his team. He also has a very thick Scottish accent, so teleconferencing will be interesting. :-)

Anyway, today I'm off to Calif. again, but this time to San Diego for a wedding. I'll be back on Monday.

Holy crap.

My paper & presentation won an MVP award for my section at the ICU conference.

I got an iPod mini.

Still kind of surprised about the whole thing...

Is it a bad sign when you've signed so many NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) that you can't remember who you can tell what to and to what it applies?

NDAs are the civilian equivalent of classified information. For the most part, it's all public knowledge; you're just trying to keep others from finding it and tying it all together easily.

Why is the Fry's in Palo Alto look so crappy, both inside and out? It's like the ghetto Fry's. But how the hell can something be ghetto in Palo Alto? East Palo Alto, sure. Oakland, definitely. But Palo Alto? A few blocks from Stanford?

The expressway system here fascinates me. They're like quasi-freeways, usually divided, but with stop lights every few miles or so. I'm undecided on whether they're a good or bad thing -- I don't think I could make such a decision unless I commuted on them daily and/or lived near one.

I especially am intrigued as to how "Montague Expressway" got its name.

Conference started today (well, pre-conference seminars). Very enjoyable, despite having to haul my butt down to Santa Clara from SF at 7am. As usual, it was completely foggy in SF but bright and sunny in Silicon Valley. I'll have to do the same tomorrow, but in normal rush-hour traffic. Oy...

Spoke with someone from IBM's Essex Junction, VT site. Turns out she's actually the moderator for the session my paper is in. And she also oversees their chip design software kits, which we need a few bugs fixed in for our stuff. Heh; and my coworkers told me I'd never get IBM to fix these bugs! But, ah... IBM is a shell of its former self. So sad. Reminder to self: need to drive by the Cottle Rd site (where I interned years ago) so see how they've replaced the IBM logos with Hitachi.

As predicted, US Airways declared bankruptcy today, the second time in as many years. However, despite previous threats, they have agreed to keep flying and honor existing tickets. So I'm not as stranded here as I had thought. Drat-- er, I mean, phew. :-)

Hm... so the conference runs from 8am to 7pm tomorrow; I'm meeting with some folks for an interview/negotiations/dinner at 7:30pm. Ah, it'll be a long day. Better hit the sack.

Just had to remark on some observations at the Pittsburgh airport...

Lots of empty spaces in the AirMall, including (most annoyingly) the space that my bank, National City, used to occupy. Now I must shell out a zillion dollars in surcharges to use the PNC ATM. Grah.

It's almost dead here. There was *zero* line at the security checkpoint, on a Friday evening. While not usual in recent memory, this place used to be constantly packed when I first got to Pittsburgh.

A number of eateries are now sporting "Effective immediately, we will no longer accept US Airways vouchers." Ouch.

So I'm flying out to SFO today, and I'm supposed to return next Thursday. Given that my flights are on US Airways, I may very well be quasi-stranded out there if they file for bankruptcy this weekend and stop flying (as their management has been hinting). Doh!

They're just now saying that the recently revealed National Guard records on Bush might be forgeries.

That was my initial reaction upon seeing the documents (which was disappointing to me from a political standpoint, but I'm playing armchair forensic scientist here, not spin doctor). While they look fine for, say, anything produced in the 90's onward, the typesetting is all wrong for something supposedly written in the 70's. The key bit is that it uses a proportional-spaced font. This is impossible to produce on a 70's era typewriter or teletype.

Also, since when does a military squadron have a PO box?

Here are pictures of the document and what I think it should look like:

The joy I share with you today is http://hates-software.com/ .

Also, as a bit of a compromise (inspired, in part, by my manager's apology for his ranting outburst at me last week), I agreed to stay on at Cadence for a few extra weeks to help wrap up a project. In the meantime, however, I am permitted to search for new and better jobs.

I like to think of it as being paid to look for another job.

With thanks to ...

Sometimes, you just gotta wash your car.

Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated

I haven't updated recently because there hasn't been very much to say. Yeah, work still sucks. Whine whine whine. I'm sure you don't want to hear it, as I am sick of hearing myself thinking it. As for your next retort, yes, I am doing something about it, but I must be patient. At this point, I cannot afford to make hasty moves.

I was thinking about lightning today, as we've had a lot of storms recently. I came across the following map from NASA showing the frequency of lightning strikes worldwide. Sharing this because it's a well done map and the page itself is worth a good five-minute read.

Above: Data from space-based optical sensors reveal the uneven distribution of worldwide lightning strikes. Units: flashes/km²/yr. Image credit: NSSTC Lightning Team.

Good luck to all those starting school, either as students or teachers.

This is beyond insane.

Thursday is our normal group meeting, where we'll decide how to proceed on a certain task (I'll call it "Project X"; the technical details are long and mind-numbing, and I'll spare you -- this time).

The Product Engineer (PE) wants to get some customer input on this before we make our decision. So he's having a teleconference with said customer Wednesday night (said customer is in Japan; it'll be their Thursday morning).

The PE wants to get some slides to them before he has this meeting so the customer can mull the idea over. PE sends me e-mail at 6:30 (my time; PE is in Arizona) on Friday to have me send him slides that he can send to the customer. Of course, I've already left for the day and don't see it until Monday.

Monday morning. Fire (well, broken A/C) in the server room, authentication server is out of commission in the morning, taking down all of the workstations in the building. Only people with Cadence-issued laptops -- managers and above -- can check e-mail. In the afternoon, my manager (who was CC'ed on this e-mail) tells me about the need for slides.

Monday afternoon. Slides, random bugs that have suddently become urgent, etc., start sapping my time. PE starts pestering me (by phone, which I refuse to answer, and then by e-mail) about slides (which require me to take a zillion screen captures and edit them to show how I think it should look).

Tuesday morning. Finish slides, send them to PE (and my manager). PE promptly starts ignoring them.

Tuesday afternoon. My manager wants to have a meeting between me, him, and PE to discuss what I've proposed in the slides to make sure we understand the resources required. In addition, he wants to have a meeting before this before we call the PE. Meanwhile, PE continues to ignore slides. Work on critical bugs that I've been putting off for the slides, to the annoyance of the bug people.

For those keeping score:
Meeting: Thurday, decide to commit to project X
Pre-meeting: Wednesday night, get customer feedback for meeting.
Pre-pre-meeting: Wednesday afternoon, decide what we can present to customer.
Pre-pre-pre-meeting: Wednesday morning, decide what we can discuss with PE.

And you wonder why Cadence stock is at $12, off a high of $40?