Paper status: done and submitted.

Woohoo!

Um, hm. Now I just need to do all the stuff I originally had a week to do before tomorrow's group meeting. Doh!

IT 01506958 Ticket Submitted re: Problem FAC Plumbing

Hrm. I only wish we were kidding about this.

Paper at four pages, and I'm not even a third done. Uh oh. I may have to use my superpowers to shrink some figures to subatomic sizes.

Stupid Mathematica Tricks

Finally. What I've been struggling with for weeks. Now I just have to finish the paper... due Thursday.



Ever wanted a USB drive that floats in your bathtub?

My cubicle is now devoid of almost all personal effects and property (mostly books in the latter regard).

No, I haven't quit Cadence yet. However, cleaning out my desk and cube was strangely cathartic. It's like the breaking of a bond, a personal attachment, to something that has been dragging me down for the last three months. It also sends a message: I'm annoyed as hell and I won't take it anymore.

Yes, though, I have made up my mind to leave Cadence on the first seaworthy ship out of here. I have one very interesting lead, TJWCBDY (The Job Which Cannot Be Discussed Yet -- I've verbally agreed to keep this confidential for now, and NDAs will be signed soon), which will hopefully pan out.

The other nice thing about having an empty cube is that Cadence has a policy where, if you resign your job to work for a competitor, your badge is taken and you are escorted from the building *immediately*. Security will box up your personal effects and allow you to pick them up at a later date. Of course, I don't know how this applies to the former Neolinear office -- we don't have badges or security (yet). But I'm not taking any chances.

I considered making this friends-only, but upon reflection... you know, it really doesn't matter. Anyone with half a brain here knows I'm not happy. If the sterile cube doesn't reinforce this message, nothing will.

Sometimes 'E' does mean "Empty"

Just got back from a visit to my extended family's cabins up in Three Rivers, MI (just south of Kalamazoo for the geomichigraphically inclined). Got to see my cousin Jane, in town from Monterey, CA, right now; she says she'll return to Chicago in a year -- heh, we'll see if that actually happens.

My body is still recovering from the beating administered by my uncle Jim. I did a double session of tubing while he was driving the boat, see. He has a favorite spot on the lake which we've named Dead Man's Curve; sure enough, I fell off once on that. He also has a number of tricks he pulls; I was on the receiving end of both "The Slack" and "The Drunken Uncle." Much fun, much mosquito bites, much food, much muscle soreness, and again much fun.

On the way back, though, I ran into some trouble. My car (2000 Honda CR-V) has a 15.3 gallon tank and gets an EPA rated highway mileage of 25 mpg; I regularly see 27 mpg on long trips. For those keeping score, this is a range of 380-415 miles; mentally, I make this 350 to give myself a nice margin of error. I always set my trip odometer to zero after topping off my tank so I know where I'm at.

Normally (city driving), my "low fuel" idiot light starts flickering around 290 miles and stays solid around 310. Today, it came on at 305, right as I crossed from Ohio into Pennsylvania, but it stayed solid. Hmm, that's unusual, I thought. I was going to get gas after I exited the turnpike in ~30 miles, but figured I should stop at the next service plaza just to be safe.

I never made it.

A couple minutes after it came on, my car started sputtering while going up a hill. Uhoh. I pulled off to the side, collected my thoughts, and decided (on my very loving and patient wife's suggestion) to go as slowly as possible in the highest gear. This worked for a few more minutes. Then, on the last hill about a mile from the service plaza, it died. (45 minutes, five road flares, and a call to the Turnpike folks + AAA later, I was back on my way, thankfully.)

It lasted only 324 miles and got an astonisingly low 21 mpg. Grrrr. Obviously, time for a serious tune-up.

I need to add that, upon the engine dying and while waiting for the AAA truck to come, Tamara calmly pulled out a book and assured me that everything would be ok. Ah, I love my wife.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned this scheme (which makes me livid): Bush campaign asks Southern Baptists to provide church rosters.

Thank god for off-shoring. Well, sorta. Nobody in the U.S. would bother with my shell problem. After a few hours, someone in India picked it up and randomly decided to fix it. Unfortunately, it still takes a day before it propagates to all the machines out there.

Now, if I could just get them to unclog our print queue... :-)


Stolen from :

We think we know each other through our blogs, when really there's little that we know about each other sometimes. I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.

My shell -- the program which allows me to enter commands on the Unix systems here -- was set to /bin/tcsh when they converted us to the Cadence network. tcsh is a nice program, a vast improvement on csh. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist or is located elsewhere on most of the Cadence systems. Attempting to log in produces a "No shell!" message and (as a security precaution) I am automatically logged out.

I've filed a helpdesk ticket to have them change /bin/tcsh in my account to /bin/csh. I just got the estimated completion date: July 5th. Yes, five days to delete a single 't'.

Who knows how long this would have taken had I asked them to insert a character or, worse, a capital letter.

Parents came and went. Spent a lot of time working in the garden, which was good. Enjoyed their visit greatly. Introduced them to Loafers, which they loved. My mom took two loaves of the blueberry pineapple with her today.

Next weekend is Pip & Dan and company (Pip = Tamara's sister), and I think Anthony (= Tamara's brother). Then up to Michigan the following weekend, a weekend off, and then a wedding.

In the meantime, everything at work is borked. IT decided to do the transition over to Cadence's network a day early, prompting the NeoCell team to build their hotfix release early, which means that my fixes didn't get picked up and various people are going to be extremely angry. Gerf. [*]

In other news, my transfer to the CAT group is held up in politics. My fate will be decided in a battle of two VPs. Surprise, surprise.

[*] Wonderful word I learned from expressing a vulgar form of disdain in a polite manner (think "sh*t"). I fully intend to incorporate this into my everyday vocabulary.

Initial impressions of Gmail

And thanks to for the invite. :-)

Wow. It's fast. I'm used to web mail being quite sluggish -- click, wait. read, click, wait. It's somehow faster than both webmail and IMAP at work. This probably says more about our mail server than Gmail...

I like the conversation feature, but I'm waiting to bestow praise on it until I see how well it handles a large number of messages in between. Mozilla can also do a conversational (threaded) view, but it's annoying to do that to your inbox (with all the non-threaded messages). Also, I've only used it to email other Gmail users so far.

1 GB is certainly a lot of space, but it's not "endless." My mail spool easily goes over that when I'm collaborating on a paper -- sending bloated Word documents back and forth... ugh. Maybe Google will fix this by writing a Word replacement? :-)

Unless Google has patents for this stuff in the pipe -- which I wouldn't be surprised -- I expect Thunderbird and other mail programs to adopt some of these features.

Gmail is not quite a Notes or Outlook replacement, though. As much as I hated Notes, it had some nice features (sending calendar invites, etc.).

Hrm. Getting up early is overrated. Fortunately, the Brits have been up for 4+ hours already, so I can view their news sites.

I didn't feel so great last night, so I took a nap -- from 9:00 to 4:00. Oops.

Passport lost. Much overturning of items in both home and work offices. Much fretting. Much looking up on State Department web sites about how much and how long it would take to replace.

Passport found. It was in a laptop bag I never use anymore.

Ooh, another graduation to celebrate. Go congratulate ('s sister) on her graduation!

Talked with Iain yesterday, the guy in charge of the group (CAT) I want to transfer to. This might actually happen... ah, so good!

Everyone! Go congratulate on her graduation today!

Insomnia. Check.

I don't know if it's this whole work situation or what. My mind just won't stop tonight. Down in the family room now, typing this, then a few rounds of Text Twist. Hopefully that'll solve it.

Apparently, John Kerry likes to ride his bike in my neighborhood. A bit surprising, since Teresa Heinz Kerry's house is over in Fox Chapel, about 15 miles away.

I imagine that, if he is elected, we may have road closures at random times.

In addition to Washington being served ice cream in 1789, Walter Hunt selling the rights for the safety pin for $400 in 1825, and Charles Osborne starting an 11 month bout of hiccups in 1922, MyWay's This Day In History featurette also has the following amusing item:

1920   The U.S. Post Office Department ruled that children may not be sent by parcel post.

I finished the first stage of wiring in my house (involving all the rooms which had computers). My house is now fully networked in wired and wireless fashion. I also attached a Prismiq box to the TV. It's an interesting toy for playing videos, music, photos, getting the latest in select news, etc., but has some quirks.

Work is... not going well. It sounds like I'm not going to be able to transfer to the core architecture and technology (CAT) group; instead, I'm in charge of a project with no resources and impossible and inflexible deadlines, and will be the sister project of someone who loves bureaucracy and red tape. Ugh. I've expressed my serious concerns about this, to no avail. I've been given until Wednesday to accept or decline this project, with the latter likely meaning declining continued employment at Cadence.

In the meantime, I'll be calling the folks at CAT (in San Jose) to see where things stand, and seeing if Network Appliance down the street has anything interesting. At any rate, I'm not pleased with the way Cadence is treating us.

Relaxing weekend, though. I've been watching the squirrels and birds come by. Yesterday, I went to a coworker's house for a graduation party (his daughter graduated from high school). Spring is nice in Pennsylvania.

Happiness is having animal crackers.

Hm. My username appears to trigger a bug in that stalker meme (which also generates horrendous HTML):

dacut's LJ stalker is !

is stalking you because another friend of yours told them you liked them. They are also deluded!

Logged ~800 miles over the holiday weekend. Tam and I went down to Roanoke (actually, Radford) Va. for Tam's cousin's wedding. It's pretty there, nice, but definitely the South. Not the Deep South, mind, but I was y'all'ed more times than I can remember.

The WVa/Va line on I-77 is inside a tunnel. They do have a small, almost unnoticeable marker in the tunnel (presumably to prevent accidents from people trying to read a large "Welcome to [W]Va!" sign). I thought that was rather curious. (It's our own redneck version of the Chunnel!)

As backwards as WVa is, at least their turnpike system is on EZPass. Ohio chose a completely incompatible system (ReadyToll), usable only on the Ohio Turnpike. Sheesh.

In other news, Cadence has decided to reneg on its agreements to the former Neolinear employees with regard to our stock options. We were supposed to receive a payment for our stock options on Friday's paycheck. For most people, this is $1000-$2000 (before taxes).

Nobody received this payment.

Queries to the Mergers & Acquisitions people were forwarded to someone in Legal, who basically said too bad, we'll pay them when we feel like paying them (verbatim: "the payment schedule for all former Neolinear optionees is in the process of being completed and signed off by the various departments involved"). It sounds like we will have to sue to get these payments.