repak shawahb
it's like killing and eating a real live angel

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rsw@jfet.org


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Mon, 27 Feb 2006

hot lot

On very short notice, I'll be in Boston over the weekend for VI-A interviews. I arrive some time midday on Saturday and leave on an early morning flight on Wednesday. Cool beans.


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productivity

Last weekend was thoroughly productive. Friday I went out clubbing—starting at the Firehouse, we then hit Oslo, Glass, Barcelona, and then headed back to Oslo. Given that I was parked by the Firehouse, that amounts to walking across town and back twice—and thank God! because I don't know what I'd do if women weren't so fickle.

Saturday Cyrus, Marissa, and I hit Juan in a Million for the Breakfast Tacos Touched By Christ. Cyrus and I then went to Game Stop and Fry's, and there was much rejoicing (in addition to the music I detailed below, I picked up a used copy of God of War for the PS2 and a copy of the American Psycho DVD—woot). After that, I went to the office for a few hours and did some layout, then Cyrus, Matt, and I got dinner and played Starcraft.

Sunday it was biking with Alida in the morning/early afternoon (out along Bee Caves to Lakeway and back, almost exactly 20 miles and a thoroughly excellent ride, though quite hilly). Then it was work-on-car time: Dagny got synthetic rearend and tranny fluids courtesy of Specialty Formulations (yes, I shamelessly put "boutique" lubricants in my car. So what, wanna fight about it?). Also, some good ole "German Castrol" Syntec 0W-30 (it may smell like bubblegum, but it still tastes like motor oil). Thank you, Castrol elves.


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Sun, 26 Feb 2006

resurrection

Over the last week, I've been doing a metric assload of layout, which means I've consumed (in a manner of speaking) lots of music. Through a strange series of associations, I was thinking the other night about Nimrod from the Enigma Variations by Elgar, so I listened to it. Somehow this turned into listening to that entire CD, which contains what has become a new favorite among orchestral pieces, Elgar's In the South (Alassio) (check it out, it's hot). Having gone through that, I turned to some other standbys, including Mahler's 2nd and 5th symphonies (now do you get the title?), Beethoven, Shostakovich (a certain piano quintet never fails to bring a smile and a minor deluge of memory), Prokofiev, Strauss (Also Sprach Zarathustra remains, to my mind, the ultimate test of any speaker system), and more. Basically, what I'm saying is that I'm listening to more classical music than you can shake a stick at.

Today when we were at Fry's, I picked up some more Mussorgsky, Stravinsy, and Prokofiev, and also got my hands on Sir Andrew Davis's complete Dvorak cycle—a 7 cd set for $30. Bad ass.

Also on its way: more Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Brahms. You might be wondering why the hell I'm buying the CDs, and the answer is simple: you can't download good recordings of much of the more obscure stuff, and the recording makes a huge difference (my Beethoven cycle is an el cheapo one, and it's painfully obvious when you listen to it). Moreover, even the best classical recordings are pretty damn cheap compared to pop music.

I'm not sure I agree with this list 100%, but it's a damn good start. Get to work.


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Wed, 22 Feb 2006

fornicaliabound

Hey all you Bay Area peeps, this is a heads-up that I'm flying into SJC at 6:44p on Friday, March 31. Y'all betta bring it.


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Mon, 20 Feb 2006

Japan wins

There was a moment yesterday in which I realized why Japanese cars are just better. That moment occurred as I was finishing up a brake job that, on a Bimmer, would have taken the better part of three hours. That's because BMW doesn't design their cars to be quickly and easily maintainable. Acura (or their parent company, Honda, really), on the other hand, most assuredly does; as a result it took all of 10 minutes per wheel, including pulling off the wheels and putting them back on. As Matt points out, designing your cars not to fail (as the Germans claim to) is just not as effective as designing them to be quickly and cheaply repaired if they do fail—Gauss and Poisson just aren't on your side.


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Fri, 17 Feb 2006

heading 090

I got an email this morning letting me know that Woz's baby, the Women of the East Side Calendar, has been born. It's for a good cause, and it's eye candy. How can you say no?


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Wed, 15 Feb 2006

knock-down drag-out

This week I've called two meetings which have turned into the electrical engineering equivalent of a barroom brawl. This is a good thing—in the first one, we made two decisions critical to the way that we will proceed towards the tape-out of the two chips I'm currently working on, and in the second we discovered and subsequently fixed what would have been a show-stopping error in a modification we only had to make because somewhere between customer and marketing we were never told that we had to support a mode of operation we'd never before seen (in particular, ringing the telephone with both a positive and negative battery as opposed to just one big negative one, the historically preferred approach because (a) telephones are fully differential systems anyway, so you can get positive and negative tip-to-ring voltages even with only one battery, and (b) with a negative battery you don't get electrochemical corrosion).

Also, that was quite a friggin sentence.


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Fri, 10 Feb 2006

plasma facelift

How's that for a burning discharge?

To the right you see the new face of my plasma tweeter, i.e., my old Sony CDX-F7705X (now sans CD mechanism because it broke and I decided that if I couldn't fix it, at least I could have fun breaking it more). I'm using it for three purposes: further preamplification, audio filtering, and for EMI isolation of whatever is actually providing the audio. If I got an antenna, I could use it as a radio, too, I suppose.


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their powers combined

What do you get when you take an old Dell laptop power brick and a car stereo with a broken CD mechanism? You guessed it, a nifty-looking preamp for your plasma tweeter. Unfortunately, replacing the 22V zener in the brick with a 13V one to get something more like automotive voltages seemed to trip some sort of overload sensor, so I just went with the poor man's solution: a 4 ohm resistor in series with the supply drops the voltage by between 2.5 and 5 volts. So what if I'm burning 6 watts in the process? That's what power resistors are for.

OK, it's 3a. I've got a design review (attending, not giving) in 7 hours, so it's definitely bed time.


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Thu, 09 Feb 2006

moved in

As of last night, the last of my crap is put away. I'm officially moved into the manhouse. OK, well, not quite, since my bicycles, air compressor, and one or two other random things are still hanging around the garage of my apartment, but I plan on grabbing that crap on the way home from work tonight.

To save space at the manhouse, I'm just leaving my truck parked at work all the time. It makes me look very dedicated, since mine is the only car in the parking lot at, oh, 1a on a Saturday. Also, it means that I can move stuff even if I drive Dagny (my STi—had I mentioned previously that I've named her Dagny? Think: some linear combination of Gabrielle Anwar's character in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, and Atlas Shrugged heroine Dagny Taggart) to work.

On a different note, yay for design reviews. Two today, one tomorrow, and, to cap it all off, a meeting with the boss. Hooray.


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Sun, 05 Feb 2006

sharp lateral move

Sweet. Steelers won.

This weekend I moved from my apartment to Mike's house, where I'm now roommates with Matt and Cyrus (Mike moved out in observance of the end of his life, i.e., his imminent marriage to Katie. No offense to Katie, who is totally cool—mostly I just like making fun of Mike). After I grab the last of my stuff tomorrow, I'll be completely moved in.

Watch out, Woz: if you're not careful, I'll actually manage to move twice before you finish unpacking.


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