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rsw@jfet.org


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Tue, 27 Dec 2005

old friends, new progress

Vacation has treated me well thus far. I've been slaving away at my makeshift workbench, the coffee table in the family room—now the home of two laptops, my trusty Tek 2465 (brought along from Austin in lieu of my usual Christmas companion, my PS2), a breadboard, and assorted signal and power wiring for the whole thing. My work thus far has produced a reasonably large amount of PIC code, a brand-spanking-new PCB layout, a couple really nifty high-voltage circuits, and a newfound appreciation for the GNU PIC utilities, notably gpasm and gpsim.

Today Dave Crimmins, a friend I haven't seen in something like three or four years, came over and hung out for an hour or so. He just got back from Iraq three days ago—he was in the Army in Korea just after we got out of high school (yup, we still have an active military presence there) and was called up from the reserves a bit over a year ago. He was in an engineering crew sweeping roadways for explosives, and had some interesting stories to report, from Iraqi police helping the insurgents plant bombs along the roadways to the overblown reports of the quality of the Republican Guard. Quoth Dave, "It would've been fun to go out and fight those guys in the desert—it would have been like a video game." Indeed.

I'll probably go get a drink with Dave later this week, and will certainly pass along any other interesting stories I hear.


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