repak shawahb
a.k.a. gorgeous gergis

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rsw@jfet.org


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Fri, 31 Dec 2004

transmission from my sad old heart, lite

Ham-fisted. Yeah, I know. Fuck off.

New Year's Eve is upon us, or at least, upon me, like a latex shirt on a skinny Persian frosh. 12/31/04 came in like a fucking juggernaut. News, thoughts, confusion, suspicion. All that, says Dr. Randall Phillip. No Matilda, the drama doesn't stop. Moreover, Hippo, I owe you an apology that you've retrospectively refused to accept (and wisely, in the estimation of some, though not all who professed such an opinion—you know who you are—but none of that matters anyway, the whole topic is as incapable of supporting life as the Milk by this point, having rotted away and been vented many times—on the roofdeck and elsewhere), but I'll offer it again anyway, mostly 'cause I'm on the receiving end this time, and man is it fun fun fun.

So here's the story, told in a series of songs. Have a care for the perspective shifts—I'm not always me, nor am I always the same not-me when I'm not (me).

  1. Guess I'm Doing Fine—Beck
  2. I Want You—Bob Dylan
  3. Perfect Day—Lou Reed
  4. (I Kissed A) Drunk Girl—Something Corporate
  5. Mr. Brightside—The Killers
  6. Bottle of Blues—Beck
  7. Fight Test—The Flaming Lips

I'm not sure how the story ends yet. Popular candidates include:

Yeah, like I said, ham-fisted. See also Emo.

By the way, I was discussing the other day with a friend from work whether a person who is given to hyperbole can himself be described as hyperbolic. Is a person hyperbolic because their statements are? I say yes, since it seems to me an extension of (or a taking of liberty with) usage which is entirely unambiguous and perhaps somewhat pleasing to the ear. He says no, just because it is, in his estimation, an extension of usage, the act of which is reserved for those who have established themselves as great writers or linguists. What do you guys think? Am I going to have to become Chomsky or (Heaven forbid, given the twinkie implications) Tolkien before I can officially declare myself the winner of this one?


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Fri, 24 Dec 2004

another short Camaro story

I forgot to blog about this until just now, so y'all are getting two Anastasia stories back-to-back.

When I picked her up in Phoenix, I didn't even think to check whether everything was in proper working order with respect to environmental controls. This wasn't too smart, since it turns out that one of the levers that controls the flow of air of various types (cold, hot, a/c) is stuck. Fixing this is, in fact, second on my list of further projects (the first is tightening up the valve lash).

So there I am, driving through New Mexico at midnight or so, when I discover that I have no heat. Shit. Not really much else to report, except that I ran into a guy who was worse off than me—he was riding his Harley through the 32 degree night from San Diego to east Texas. As luck would have it, we ended up stopping at the same gas stations a couple times, and both times we sat around and commiserated while warming up over unreasonably large cups of coffee.

In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that was a character-building experience.


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auto maintainence made difficult

One of the reasons I've always wanted Anastasia (the '69 Camaro, remember?) is because there's nothing as wholesome and satisfying as wrenching on good old GM iron. Working on a Toyota is all diagnostic readouts and sequential multi-port niftomata. The car knows what it's supposed to do and why it's not doing it, and everything will be just fine if you'll only push the button labeled "Fix". A carbureted Chevy small block, on the other hand, is controlled by what amounts to a few mechanical computers, viz., the distributor, the carburetor, and the valvetrain. Getting the three of them to work in perfect harmony takes a kind of talent for listening to what the engine is telling you and making the necessary adjustments. The reward is the knowledge that you really understand what's going on under the hood. Now, if I could write my own ECU firmware for my Celica I'd be perhaps a bit more satisfied—but only if installing said firmware involved at least a little bit of grease and expletives.

Right now I'm on my way to Iowa to see the family (I just passed Texas mile marker 360 on Interstate 35). I'd probably be home already, but I undertook a bit of wrenching on the Camaro and wanted to finish it up before going home. It goes without saying that the whole ordeal took longer than I expected, but hell, that's the fun part, right?

When I bought it, the Camaro's drivetrain was in essentially perfect condition, with two exceptions: first, there was something of an oil leak from around the oil pan, and second, the valve lash needed adjusting. I decided that I'd attack the first problem by installing a new oil pan gasket. This, it turns out, is much more easily said than done. First of all, despite all appearances, one can not remove the oil pan without lifting the engine at least a couple inches off the motor mounts. I half-expected this to be the case, but was optimistic that I could somehow make it happen. Nope.

Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get the oil pan off without doing an unreasonable amount of disassembly. What, you ask, is unreasonable? Well, here's what I did do: removed the distributor, undid the motor mounts, disconnected the passenger-side exhaust, removed the starter, jacked up the engine as high as I could without crashing anything into the firewall. Unfortunately, that was only about an inch—more work room, but not much more. Unreasonable, then, is anything more than this (I suspect removing a good portion of the air conditioner system would have been the next step—yuck).

So now here I am with the oil pan loose and dropped a couple inches, but staunchly refusing to clear the front crossmember. What, you ask, does one do? Clearly, remove the old silicone-and-cork gasket working around the still-mostly-installed oil pan. Being extremely careful not to let anything drop into the oil pan, I scraped and pried and grunted and cursed and cried for about three hours to prepare a pristine interface for the new gasket.

The new gasket in itself was an adventure—turns out there are at least three different oil pan gaskets that have been used over time for the Chevy 350. Modern (post-1986ish) engines have the dipstick on the passenger side. Before that, the dipstick was on the driver's side, but depending on whether the engine is pre- or post-1975ish, the thickness of the front main bearing seal is different. Suffice it to say that I will be remembering the proper part number (Fel-Pro OS34509T, in case you're wondering) for a long time.

In addition to swapping the oil pan gasket, I changed the spark plugs. This isn't a terribly difficult jub, except that the A/C compressor was basically directly in the way of the plugs on the driver's side, so figuring out the proper approach angles was somewhat difficult. I hate the spark plug on cylinder #5. I know you wanted to know that.

Oh yeah, for good measure, I also ended up rewiring a bunch of shit because of a combination of 35 years of deterioration and some asshole who clearly didn't know the first thing about how to wire stuff to last. Soldering is fun.

I suspect that I'm going to be posting a lot about the stuff I do to the Camaro. I know you're all waiting with bated breath.


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Thu, 16 Dec 2004

from the ashes of the M6...

...comes (the) Phoenix, almost literally. Well, Scottsdale, actually, where I'm buying a "new" car this weekend—a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS/350 with the factory M21 four-on-the-floor manual. Red with black racing stripes, white interior, cowl induction hood, factory A/C (disconnected at the moment, but possibly to return once summer hits), factory front and rear spoilers, center console, total hotness.

It's the car I've always wanted, and now it is mine. I rule.

How, you might ask, did this come about? I was musing over what to do now that AllState has totalled out my M6, and I decided that I couldn't in good conscience replace it with one of these newfangled I'll-pump-the-brakes-and-shift-for-you just-push-the-button-to-go cars, at which point I remembered that one of my dreams since I've ever known anything about cars is to own this one. Put another way, life gave me lemons, and I'm buying me a muscle car.

Lest you think I'm about to get ripped off or that I'm being hasty, you should know that I've done a whole lot of research on this at various times, and so am somewhat confident of my general knowledge concerning first-generation Camaros. In addition, I'm buying the car from a dealer in classic cars whose previous customers seem quite satisfied, namely Hawk's Corvettes and Classics. Finally, I had the knowledgeable and friendly Mark Allen (coincidentally, the name of a good friend of mine in high school) of Auto Detectives inspect and appraise the car—and found that the car is worth about 20% more than I'm paying for it, with potential for even greater appreciation with a little time and some attention to nitty gritty details.

I think I'm going to name her Anastasia—first, it's a hot name, and second, it's derived from the Greek word for rebirth, apropos here both because of the Phoenix connection and because of the circumstances under which I'm acquiring her, scilicet, literally from the wreckage of my previous (and never-to-be-forgotten) beauty.


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if you haven't seen it...

...check out the NY Times Firefox Ad. It's pretty cool.

My name is in there somewhere... anyone else?


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damn japanese coders

Maybe I'm the last one to figure this out, but the TabBrowser Extension for Firefox sucks ass. Firefox runs about ten times faster without it. Plus, in 1.0, there's actually a real single window mode option.

Damn Japanese coders.


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Sun, 12 Dec 2004

update: my formerly-glorious-and-hopefully-soon-to-be-fixed car (or, why steering failures are no fun)

It's final. My car is no more. No one on earth had a replacement roof for her, and short of buying another car and tearing the roof off, there was no way to obtain the necessary parts. AllState declared my car a total loss.

Bye bye... I'll miss you.

Some of you may know that I had a catastrophic steering failure in my car while negotiating a twisty road at something like the speed limit (50ish, IIRC). For those of you who didn't, well, now you do. The result of this failure is about $10,000 in damage to my car, which will cost me my $500 deductible and whatever penalty AllState decides to apply to my premium.

Before I sent it off to the shop, I took a couple pictures, which may or may not show up on wreckedexotics.com (yes, my car counts as an "exotic"—only about 1700 of them were built). Here, for your amusement, are the before-and-after shots (that's getting to be a theme here, isn't it?).

    Before:
    After:

Click the pictures to enlarge.


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Thu, 09 Dec 2004

hells yeah

The marathon design review has been defeated. Mike and I are punchy as all hell after being cooped up in a meeting room all fucking day poring over circuits and simulation results with Marius, Ion, Jiangtao, Zhiwei, and Shuang (though Shaung must have decided she was too good for my design review; she left somewhere in the middle of it).

Wow. Eight solid hours of circuit madness really fucks you up. Good thing I lifted before work this morning; I'd probably find it hard to build up the will to go to the gym right now.

Action items, here I come. Lessee... looks like 18 of them total—not too bad for a block this fucking complex.

By the way, I am now every ΔΣ's daddy. Just so you know.


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Wed, 08 Dec 2004

design review... defeated

10:45p: I'm done. Now I'm going home.

Man, I wish these things weren't confidential so I could post them. I know all y'all want to read my behemoth design reviews.


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coming soon to a conference room near... me

Mike and I were at work late last night, and at some point decided that The Right Thing To Do™ was to have a marathon design review. Today we sent out the following meeting announcement:

SI3240A (Quad Proslic) ADC & Calibration Design Review 
A Proslic Double Feature!

10am-2pm	Longitudinal Balance (CM->DM Conversion)
		Loop Compensator (Mike Mills)

		2 pole low frequency rolloff achieved using
		"cap multipliers"

2-2:30pm	Intermission

2:30-6:30	AC/DC ADC (Riad Wahby)

		Same ADC for both, w/slight modifications
		2nd order delta-sigma modulator

Yes, the picture was in there. Yes, this is exactly the text of the invite. Yes, it went to every engineer in the company.

We rule.


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the long dark tea time of my office

Something I forgot to blog about when it happened, but I will now: I discovered that Harney and Sons teas can be purchased from their website. This is awesome. As soon as I discovered it, I picked up a tins of Lapsang Souchong, Gunpowder Green, Yin Hao Jasmine, and Chamomile Herbal. (Yes, that's right, fully half of my purchase was herbal, i.e., uncaffeinated, tea!). This tea is so fucking good you'll crap your pants.

They say that Lapsang is an acquired taste, but I acquired it pretty fast, myself. It's a very smoky black tea, and it's become my staple tea. The Gunpowder is just a good green tea that's maybe a little bolder than most other greens; being a green, however, it just doesn't have the black's kick, so I generally only drink it when I'm not in the mood for the Lapsang. The Yin Hao, if you'll recall from Dana's collection, is ridiculously armatic. It's the best jasmine I've run across, though Harney seems to know this too—it's reflected in the price. The chamomile is literally fresh chamomile blossoms, complete with lots and lots of pollen; as such, I'm actually allergic to it up until it's brewed. This kind of sucks, since it's incredible-smelling, but once I get some water on it I have no problems drinking it. It does an excellent job of calming me down after a long work day of tanking on Diet Dr. Pepper, coffee, and the caffeinated variants in my collection.

I hear Harney's Earl Grey is fantastic; once I get some, I'll let y'all know. I'm also half-seriously debating some of their Top Ti Quan Yin, though it's fucking pricey.


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actual productivity

Infected Mushroom, I'm convinced, makes me work faster. Or maybe it just makes me feel like I'm working faster. Ministry of Sound remixes seem to do the same thing.

The real productivity-maker, however, is working late. The later it gets, the more productive I get. Weekends, being the ultimate "working late," are extremely productive. When you're there during the day, you almost feel like you have to be there—you're passing the time. Once you're there after hours, time is passing you. (Note that this also happens in communist Russia.)

I'm circling the drain on a design review right now, so things are feeling expa-kwispie kwunchie. Fortunately, I'm fairly certain I've covered my bases well and have things well in hand. Then again, I know I'm forgetting something. What?


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Mon, 06 Dec 2004

on increasing productivity

As far as I can tell, almost everyone who works in engineering behaves like Paul Erdos's putative mathematician: to paraphrase, we use caffeine to lower entropy.

The problem, for me, is this: when I drink coffee or, even more so, soda, I have to urinate. That means I have to stop what I'm doing, go to the bathroom, and then come back and restart. The inefficiency of context switches is itself a detriment to my overall productivity, not to mention the actual time spent evacuating. Clearly a solution is needed.

What to do? As I see it, we have a few options: install urinals under the desks of engineers (much like Phinney's coffee can urinal from his days of playing Civ2 in his office late into the night while supposedly finishing his Master's degree); install catheters; or get caffeine users to switch to a pill vector ("Good news! It's a suppository!"). These solutions all have their problems, but I think the third is the one most likely to gain wide acceptance.

Now that I think about it, however, there's a problem: when I need to urinate, my rate of work speeds up: I want to get to a stopping point, so I work faster under pressure (literally) from my bladder ("pushing down on me, pushing down on you..."). Perhaps those small productivity boosts prior to urinating outweigh the cost of getting up and going to the bathroom—especially in light of the fact that my rate upon returning tends to be not quite all the way back to "resting." That is to say, maybe I'm actually increasing my average work rate by fighting the urge to pee while working towards a stopping point. If that's the case, a urinal would allow me to settle into my steady-state work rate, which could conceivably, over the course of the day, go into decline because of the lack of constant prodding from my bladder.

Then again, if not for having to pee, perhaps people would consume even more caffeine, making them that much more manic and raising the resting work rate to the point where they more than break even.

Someone ought to do some research on this. I'll volunteer myself as a test subject, as long as I get the urinal and not the catheter.


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Closer

I went and saw closer with Cindy yesterday, and we came out of it in complete agreement: it was hawsome. Tim didn't want to go, claiming that it would just be another chick flick. If anything, it's an anti-chick-flick—and an at least partial mind fuck.

The RottenTomatoes synopsys doesn't really do the film justice; unfortunately, even having seen the movie, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better one that didn't have some kind of spoilage in it. Suffice it to say that, while some of the visuals are quite beautiful, this is a completely dialogue-driven movie that runs parallel to (or at least in the direction of) Your Friends and Neighbors—it's an exploration of "modern" (i.e., completely fucked up) relationships, manipulation, heartbreak, and other such pleasantries. I daresay, if you enjoyed YFaN, you'll like Closer at least as much.

The best part of the movie, hands down, is Clive Owen. His character is both excellently written and extremely well-played, riding out various tumult with a cynical, piss-off-you-nonce style that is at once ruthless and light-hearted—a man that knows he's already in the handbasket and has decided to rock it because it seems like the ride to hell will be more entertaining that way. Natalie Portman does a good job as well, though her character isn't nearly as complex, her main qualification seeming to be the "moronic beauty of youth" (Owen's description), something NP has in spades (insert Slashdot Natalie Portman joke here). Jude Law's character was the easiest for me to hate, though I'm sure legions of giggling girls might be stupid enough to feel sorry for him. The biggest surprise for me was Julia Roberts, who wasn't nearly as annoying as she usually is. Yes, she could still eat an apple through a fence (I've finally come to terms with the fact that her unfortunate facial structure ain't going anywhere), but she did a respectable enough job with her character that she didn't make herself an impediment to the rest of the movie.

Closer does a lot of time-jumping, and the cues are worked into the dialogue in a way that would make Hippo scream something like "blah blah blah blah expository blah blah blah." Honestly, there was no attempt to be extremely subtle in cueing the jumps; this is likely an inherited feature of the play from which the movie was adapted, where dialogue-driving is almost a necessity. This lack of sophistication is ultimately inconsequential: that the jumps happen is more important than how you find out they do, and any attempt to mask them would just worsen the experience.

If I have one complaint, it's this: while the male characters are reasonably full, the women are pretty flat. My bitching is tempered, however, because in a way it almost seems like a statement about the role of women in the lives of the male characters. Moreover, the mysogynist in me offers encouragement in the form of Jay's sentiment from Clerks—"there's one bitch in the world, man. One bitch with many faces." Naw, I'm just playin', ladies. You know I love you.

So what, then? Go. Go see it. It's good. Also, watch for the previews of the new Bill Murray and Kevin Spacey movies. Both look like they'll be worth a return trip to the theater.


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Wed, 01 Dec 2004

but seriously, folks

I gave my mother my copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius last time I was home. When I went over Thanksgiving, she gave it back to me, having finished it, and stole my copy of Infinite Jest (which I didn't even get a chance to read!). My fallback position is Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, a reasonable translation of which I've finally managed to locate and purchase.

I need suggestions for books to read after I'm done with my current crop; at my present consumption rate (i.e., some function of the product of the frequency and the duration of my stints on the elliptical machine at the gym) I'll be out soon.

Howard Stern was talking about blogs the other day on his show. Not really anything constructive or particularly intelligent to say, but he did say something absolutely hilarious: the word "blog" sounds like an oral-sex-induced gag. Say it enough times and you'll be damned if you don't think he's right. Gives the blogosphere a whole new meaning.

Blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog.


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here is a picture of a stapler


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