- Up early; to work (in the living room).
- Training continues. Have to unlearn most of my habits from my previous job and relearn them for this one. Lots of packaging-related stuff to absorb. Concepts behind build system are the same, but details are completely different.
- Off to guitar lesson. Mostly review, which is nice since I was out of town for last week’s. Some ensemble playing which is particularly challenging for beginners.
Tag: guitar
3 May 2011
- Up early but it didn’t matter since my bus had a flat. Eventually made it to work.
- Got all of my projects either wrapped up or in a good state to pass on. Justin seemed excited about taking over maintenance of the audio driver.
- Lunch at India Palace. Delighted to find gulab jamuns set out for dessert.
- Home then off to guitar lesson. Learned some 12-bar blues riffs. Let the instructor know that I’ll be out of town next week.
26 April 2011
- Up early; off to work.
- Began my farewell tour of favorite Downtown lunch spots with DiBella’s. It’s a recent entry but quickly rose to become the best sandwich place in the Golden Triangle.
- Started looking at travel arrangements for UDS. New manager said he’d put me in touch with Canonical’s travel people.
- Started helping with support issues since I’m not taking on any new projects. Andy gave me a nasty support ticket about a possible memory leak in the USB gadget driver for one of our boards. I shouldn’t have said anything
- Home then off to guitar lesson. Learned some interesting finger picking styles and variations on Travis picking.
19 April 2011
- 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.
12 April 2011
- Up early; off to work.
- 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.
11 April 2011
- Up early; to work
- 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.
15 March 2011
- Up slightly late, but Emily was kind enough to give me a ride to my bus stop. To work.
- Found out that all the work I did adding GPIO MUXing to my audio driver had no effect. Slightly miffed and now stumped to boot.
- Meanwhile packaging tasks are piling up. Need to just take a day or two and bang those out.
- Went to the final guitar lesson of this set. Played some 12-bar blues and learned about hammer-ons and pull-offs. I’ll probably continue with the next set of lessons.
- Put off fixing the plumbing in the bathroom for tomorrow as we are both pretty tired. Watched some Big Bang Theory instead.
7 March 2011
- Up rather early, but had to fetch the laundry I had forgotten to get from the dryer last night. Missed my usual bus.
- Heat not working at the office. Not good when it’s 25°F outside.
- Looking more and more like I’ll have to do some GPIO fiddling to get my driver issue settled. I was hoping to avoid it but such is life.
- Home. Emily made a delicious meal of tilapia and snap peas for dinner. Helluva cook, she is.
- Practiced the guitar for an hour or so. Using the steel-stringed, yet crappy guitar. Hopefully that will build up my calluses faster than the really nice nylon-stringed instrument. Still deciding if I want to continue to the next level of lessons.
- Played some StarCraft II with Jaos and Jeremiah. I’m getting pretty rusty at that game, but I suppose if I’m out of practice at something I’m OK with that thing being a video game.
1 March 2011
- Woke up a little late, feeling queasy. Decided to go to work anyway. Barely caught my bus.
- Sent an email to driver customer in an attempt to sync up our environments and find why solution that works for me doesn’t for him.
- Nausea continued throughout the morning. Decided to go home at lunch.
- Laid on couch watching MST3K and Arrested Development (yes, finally) drifting in and out of consciousness. Tried to eat dry Corn Chex, but my stomach was having none of that.
- Had to skip guitar lesson. Poo.
- Finally took my temperature and found out I have a slight fever. This does not bode well. Emily’s plague week started in similar fashion.
28 February 2011
Knowing full well that writing is one of my many shortcomings while at the same time one of the skills a great programmer should posses I’ve decided to start a little exercise to make myself write at least a little every day. The inspiration for this exercise comes from Michael Meeks and his daily bullet-point summaries.
- Awakened around 5:00 AM by a loud, booming thunderstorm. While I am a big fan of thunderstorms I would appreciate it if from now on Mother Nature was more respectful of my sleep schedule.
- Bus stop wait was lovely. Humid but warm. Arrived at work, broke my fast with a stale bagel and some coffee. Plowed through email.
- Received info from a customer about a possible cause of a bug in the driver I wrote for them. This was immensely helpful in (finally) fixing this bug. Sent a patch.
- Lunch at Chinatown Inn. Delicious and speedy as always.
- Began packaging work for another customer. This looks simple, which means it probably isn’t.
- Received word that the patch mentioned earlier did not work as well on the customer’s board as mine (supposedly they are identical). This is one for tomorrow.
- Home then to the gym.
- Home again, sore, and practiced for my guitar lesson tomorrow. Still haven’t gotten over the whole “do homework only the night before it’s due” thing. At this point I feel it’s a hopeless cause.