Up earlyish; showered and rode my bike to the shop for a tune-up. The rear dérailleur was slipping a bit when shifting, and it was due anyway.
Lunch with Emily at Aladdin’s Eatery. Great little chicken pita roll. Also the raspberry smoothie was delicious.
Walked home; played a bit of Mass Effect 2 (thanks again, hun!)
Out to Frank’s Bar and Grill 88 in Bethel Park for my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Lots of fun, with my grandfather going into rather too much detail about how he kept track of how long they’ve been married.
Back to my grandparents’ house for the “after-party”. Lively discussion of things family and political. Home late to pass out.
Continued work on audio driver. At vendor’s suggestion tried to make all operations local to the board (I was using a network filesystem for development). Unfortunately flashing the board took most of the day so not much real progress was made.
Dinner at Shiloh Grill on Mt. Washington (we had a Groupon!). Lots of fun, with the menu and overall experience nearly identical to that of Harris Grill.
Rode my bike to work; first cycling commute of the season. Perfect riding weather. Almost didn’t get tired or sweaty on the way in.
Lunch at DiBella’s (again). We are showing signs of addiction.
Very little progress made on the audio driver on my end. Starting to run out of things to tweak in my code. I’m reluctant to further the stereotype and blame the hardware but I need to double-check some possible hardware timing issues.
Office network ate itself toward the end of the day, making communication with the vendor impossible. Perhaps they found something.
Bike ride home went about as smoothly as can be expected for one so out of shape as myself. One disadvantage of living in Pittsburgh is that every hill you fly down on the way to work is one you must climb again on the way home. I think I heard my leg muscles crying.
Wrote two checks this evening. One was the final payoff amount for my car. The other was to my uncle’s church to buy Easter lilies in honor of his winning battle with leukemia.
Driver work continues, but no real progress made. Vendor people are working in parallel, so with luck one of us will find the answer soon.
Excited about the Gnome 3 release. Been using it at home for a while from the Ubuntu PPA. I’m told the experience is better on other distributions but I have it working well enough for now. I’ll probably check it out on my laptop when it hits Debian Unstable.
Home to play some more Mass Effect 2. It’s becoming an addiction already. I hope that the weather gets nice enough soon to draw me away.
Up early; turned 28 today. Running out of 20s. Somewhat disconcerting.
More audio driver work. Chip vendor has informed me that they are setting up a parallel system in-house so that they may try settings tweaks at a faster rate than the usual email ping-pong allows.
Lunch at India Palace. They must have known it was my birthday, since they put out gulab jamun (my favorite Indian dessert).
Home to find several birthday cards, all of which were much appreciated. Emily presented me with a copy of Mass Effect 2 for the PS3, which I’d had my eye on since it was announced. Played through the introductory levels after my guitar lesson. Looks every bit as fun as advertised.
Progress on driver performance continues. Seems every change brings incremental improvement, yet I still haven’t fully fixed the problem. Dialogue with the board vendor is helpful, and I believe convergence on a solution is imminent.
Stopped by the PennDOT center across the street from the office and replaced my driver’s license. New picture is every bit as dorky as the old one.
Home; informed of a party this weekend for my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Should be a great time, as my family’s parties tend to be.
Dinner was feta cheese omlettes and salad lovingly prepared by my wife, who then lovingly encouraged me to get ready to go to the gym.
Up a bit late; sorted through some papers and putzed on the computer.
Leftover lo mein from How Lee for lunch. It’s even good microwaved!
Went to a talent show at Emily’s church. Notable acts included: a man performing dance moves “inspired by” Michael Jackson, while not emulating him; an 87-year-old woman playing old Duke Ellington tunes on the piano, accompanied by the dancing man on stand-up bass, and a recreation of this Monty Python sketch featuring a four-year-old as the shop owner.
Went out with Greg, Ted, and Sara to see Source Code. Really quite impressed with this film. A worthy successor to Moon.
Still fighting with driver performance. Moving buffers around did not have the desired effect. Running low on options and time, as customer has a looming factory deadline. Have to look at DMA settings and see if some improvements can be made there.
Home then out to dinner. Tried the new How Lee. It was much more crowded than I ever saw it in its previous incarnation, which might be explained by the transformation of the food from “random greasy Chinese-ish food” to “only sort of greasy Chinese food that maybe had some thought and effort behind it”. Also some may have been there to view the men’s room artwork.
Returned to the Squirrel Cage (a.k.a. Squirrel Hill Cafe, a.k.a. the bar I frequented throughout my early-to-mid-20s) for the first time in a few years. It’s one of the few bars that still allows smoking, which is why I’d been gone so long. It’s still smoky, but the beer selection is still solid. Unfortunately for it there are now moreoptions with equal or better selections and no smoke. Maybe I’ll try again in a few years.
Work continued on the audio driver. Trying to hunt down the buffer allocation code to move a buffer into on-chip RAM but the Linux SoC audio code is made up of layers of indirection which complicate things like this.
