Up and off to the bus. Barely missed it. Damn the new schedule. Hopped on a 61.
Sent what I desperately hope is a final drop of the audio driver code to the customer.
Started investigating why our cross-build of QT doesn’t include the qmlviewer tool. We are a version or two behind upstream so it may have to be built separately.
Headed to my guitar class after work. We changed things up this time by sitting in a circle and playing “City of New Orleans” without looking at the music. I mostly had the chords down but when we added Travis picking to the mix things started getting interesting. Must find more time to practice.
Audio driver work winding down. Performed some final code cleanup. Will package the driver up with a nice bow and ship it out tomorrow.
Home; Invited my parents to Easter dinner (should have done that a bit earlier perhaps, as Emily’s family was already planning on coming). Should be a fun event: we’re already washing the fancy dishes.
Watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall from Netflix. Really enjoyable in that unique Judd Apatow kind of way.
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.
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.
