Up a bit early. Fever mostly gone. Off to church to see Emily play with the Folk Orchestra. They kicked ass, as has been their habit of late. Emily is the best one in her row.
Home. Took a brief nap to recover from church then headed to the Waterfront. Got fitted for my third wedding tux in the space of a year (only one was my wedding), then bought shower gifts and some miscellaneous household items.
Home again. Emily and I took a long nap as she put a 90 minute string of cheesy movie trailers up on Netflix streaming.
Dinner was left-over birthday cake. Exactly what my worn out body needed.
Up late, feeling sluggish. Turns out I had a mild fever.
Fever put the kibosh on most of the day’s plans. Ended up watching Netflix all day. Finally saw Network. The acting was great but they could have trimmed maybe half an hour from the runtime without losing much. Or maybe that’s the fever talking.
Up rather late. Took the day off from work. Emily’s Birthday! I believe she’s somewhere around 29.
Made a lovely pancake breakfast for Emily. Used frozen pancakes since we were short on eggs and needed them for the birthday cake.
Emily and I spent most of the day cleaning and preparing the house. Emily baked a delicious Black Forest cake. I made a trip to the state store and East End Brewing to pick up some libations.
Sneaked in a check of work email. Turns out vendor and customer found an error in the driver that I managed to introduce with a well-placed typo when trying out a fix (there is a world of difference between ‘=‘ and ‘&=‘ in C).
Party got into full swing around 8. Lots of fun. Amusing stories, interesting beer (highly recommend picking up East End’s Toasted Amber session ale while you can still get it). Conversations about politics, conversations about conversations about politics.
Up early; biked to work. Starting to get the hang of it again.
Long phone call with customer and vendor about possible audio issue causes/solutions. Customer’s equipment can’t find any sign of the control line noise. Agreed that vendor would send some folks to customer’s office as they are quite close and have more specialized equipment.
Biked to Nicky’s Thai Kitchen in the North Side for lunch. Some really great Thai food that’s just far enough from the office that we can only justify going there when we have bikes.
Finished up a long-neglected project testing kernel patches provided by a contractor. Patches checked out so I pushed them into the development tree for our product.
Up surprisingly early. Headed to the bus stop a full 20 minutes early, only to remember that the bus I wanted to catch was nixed in the last transit cuts. Waited an extra 20 minutes.
More phone calls with vendor and customer regarding audio work. Added some instrumentation that should make control line noise more visible in a scope or logic analyzer. Managed to work on some of my project backlog while waiting for test results (still pending).
Picked up my bike on the way home from work. Rides pretty nicely now with new chain and brake pads.
Emily made a great stir-fry dinner then we took a long bike ride around town. We stopped by the rotting corpse of the Eastside Borders where Emily spotted more than her fair share of zombie- and monster-related books (including Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters!). Picked those up at a steep discount, then ran over to Oh Yeah! ice cream for a quick dessert.
Audio driver work seems to be coming to a head. After several phone conversations with the vendor all signs are pointing to a hardware problem. Possibly noise on a control line. More tests needed to verify.
Bus ride home took forever for reasons unknown. Lots of traffic through Greenfield so a good guess would be some sort of badness in the Squirrel Hill Tunnel or further along the Parkway East.
Guitar lessons continued. Mostly a review of previous techniques but with more challenging chords. Need to find more time to practice.
Audio driver work took an interesting turn. Discovered that some of the clock settings on the board are out of spec. Vendor doesn’t believe this to be the cause of the performance problem but recommends correcting quickly since hardware in this configuration can behave unpredictably.
Got a call that my bike was ready to go at the shop. Unfortunately the rain kept me from picking it up. Might not get it before Wednesday now.
Home to a lovely ravioli dinner which Emily prepared.
On what I’m sure is a completely unrelated note, a stomach ache prevented me from going to the gym.
Practiced for my guitar class. Still getting the hang of some chord transitions but it is getting easier.
Up kinda late; ran some errands that were totally not shopping for birthday presents for my wife 🙂
Spent the afternoon at Rock Bottom with the Beer Meetup. Greg showed up and we watched the Pens’ meaningless final game as we drank and socialized.
Stopped at Lowe’s on the way home to pick up some topsoil and grass seed. I predict some light gardening is in my future.
Headed out to Howlers in Bloomfield to see our friend Megan play with The Turpentiners. Pretty entertaining show overall. Andy stopped by and proudly represented Lawrenceville by drinking Pabst. I could not bring myself to do so.
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.
