Category: Personal

I don’t talk much about work here for several reasons but I’m going to do so for a little bit. Friday was my last day at my now former job. I worked at a semiconductor fab near where I live which closed. There are a lot of reasons for the closure and most people who worked there have different mental pictures of the events and conditions that lead to the decision to close. I don’t really want to get into that but, much like most things, there is no single thing responsible. I ended up being one of the last people there since I became the manager of the IT group in the last year when my friend who had had that job as one of his many duties left to take a pretty fantastic position at Sun Power (solar company). So, we shut down the fab, cleaned up the equipment and then my group organized and dealt with the computers, servers and network hardware. I think we did a good job and I hope the few remaining people don’t have too much extra to do that I wasn’t able to get done.

This was my first job out of college and for a few years I was not very happy with it. I couldn’t say why now. I had less work and responsibility than I ended up with at the end and I was fortunate to not only get a job quickly after graduating but to then survive the several rounds of layoffs caused by the post dot-com bubble correction. I liked the vast majority of the people I worked with and towards the end I came to feel that had we not closed I could have worked there for the rest of my life. Still, eight years is a pretty good run at a job these days so while I’m sad I am also proud of the work that we did and of my contribution.

I’m going to spend the next week and a half going through some of my old textbooks (I used to know some math once upon a time sigh) and work on an application to a company some of my friends work at and seem to like. Then I’m going to go on a ski trip with some other friends which should be fun. It’s been 15 years since I’ve been skiing and I’m going to try the snowboarding this time so it’ll be an adventure. That reminds me, I need to buy the lessons and lift tickets today. Anyway, it’s not a great time to be looking for a job but I have some savings which means I have some time and, as has been pointed out by many people, how often do you have a lot of time off where you can do whatever you want. In fact several of them suggested I go to Japan like I’ve been wanting to for a while but that’s a little more than I’m willing to spend without an actual income.

I suppose that’s it. I’d like to think that having more free time will cause me to post more but I doubt it. Wish me luck.

Happy new year internets. I hope your 2008 was a good one. I have a lot of random little things to talk about so this is going to ramble a bit. My final weigh-in for 2008 was 182.6 lbs (EWMA 184.4 with λ=0.35). I started keeping track of my weight April 7th which is when I started exercising for serious and I’ve lost a little more than 30 lbs. That and quitting WoW have made this a pretty decent year for my physical well being.

The rowing machine has a little computer that tells you how fast you’re going, how many calories you’re burning, how many watts you’re outputting and so on. It keeps track of each row and can even share this stuff via USB in comma delimited files. When you take the little smart card out when you’re finished, it also tells you how many total meters are on that card. Around the beginning of December I realized I was closing in on 1,000,000m and that it was possible for me make it by the end of the year. I was getting there until the holidays came around and then my normal schedule went all pear shaped on me and I was stuck at 980,000m yesterday. I ended up leaving work a little early and as a result I had a few hours to kill before I needed to be at Bill’s for New Year’s dinner so I decided to go for it. I had to stop and rest a few times but I did 20km yesterday and the card said 1000058m when I was done. Go me.

One of the many nice things I was given for Christmas is a bench for my entry way. I’ve been wanting one for a while and I had put it in my big to-do list as a woodworking project but I’m happy to not have to saw and finish that. It’s sturdy and has two storage shelves underneath which is a nice feature. I’m going to go see if I can find a cushion for it at Pier 1 or Ikea or something. The space on top is 13.5″ X 38.5″ though and I don’t think that’s a standard size. I’ll have to see what’s available.

I used some of my left over Wii points from when I got FFCC: My Life as a King to pick up World of Goo. It’s a fantastic puzzle game / physical construction simulator where you build bridges and towers and various other odd things out of little goo balls to allow other goo balls to get to a pipe at the end of the level. There are obstacles and special pieces and environmental things. It’s a lot of fun. The last three levels are fairly tough but I finished them today. The music is surprisingly good and the story (such as there is one) is funny. I also noticed while I was in the Wii store that they have made Secret of Mana available for download. Secret of Mana was my favorite game for the Super Nintendo and it’s still one of my all time favorites. In many ways Kingdom Hearts is the spiritual successor to Secret of Mana though it has an inferior menu system. SoM has these awesome, rotating pie menus that just work really well.

I think I mentioned that the Arduino came in a couple of weeks ago. I finally managed to find some time to sit down and play with it a bit. I got the built in LED on digital pin 13 to blink and I got one of my white LEDs on the bread board to fade on and off using one of the analog output PWM pins. Good stuff. I also spent an afternoon with nothing to do a work making the schematic for the 20 channel lighting controller. It’s really busy though so I want to try again. Maybe use some buses in there? I dunno. I also think it might be good practice to allow card edge connectors and four channel cards up to 32 channels just in case 20 lights isn’t enough and also so that the design itself is more generally useful. I don’t think it would be that much more work. Each card would have the connector on the bottom, the logical NOR chip, four power supply circuits and the plugs for the LED cable on the side. I know that’s not much of description but I can see it in my head.

I tried cutting 1″ base triangles out of 80mil acrylic sheet and it’s much more of a hassle than I had hoped. I don’t think the glass cutting will be any easier so now I need to explore my outsourcing options. Meyda Tiffany, who made the light that started this whole mess, thinks that they can make a 5″ diameter star which is one of the sizes I want. I’m also thinking about going to visit the nice folks at Anchor Ventana glass that made the glass top for the end table I made. I hope that for a large enough order (say 1200 pieces) I could convince them to use their fancy CNC glass mill to cut and bevel the pieces exactly the way I want and then I could assemble them.

I’m sure there’s more but that’s all I can think of for now. I’ll probably edit this later and put in some pictures but I’m going to run over and see if the Ikea is still open. Have a good 2009.

edit: I forgot to mention the garden. I’m planting a garden this year. The first step is to kill the grass. This is apparently done with either a big tub of poison or with newspaper and mulch. I’m starting with the happy, green, organic method and will probably end up with the poison. Here’s a small picture of the start. I need a bunch more newspaper and mulch. If anyone has newspaper you just let me know and I’ll take care of it for you.

It’s officially Christmas at the house. The living room is all rearranged and the tree is up. Looks pretty good too. My family came up to visit so I had a lot of help putting it up which is always nice. It’s a bit of a chore to do by yourself but it’s fun as a group. I need to make it out to the trail of lights this year. Preferably when it gets cold.

My last post has generated three comments. Two of them were filtered by the spam filter and those seem to have been attracted by the fact that I mentioned BatchPCB. Apparently there is a multitude of PCB manufacturers in .cn and they comb the internet looking for anyone talking about this stuff.

The third comment was a link to a scroll of resurrection for the WoWs with a temporary email address attached. I’m curious if this is actually one of the two people I know who a) know about this place and b) still play the video game or if it’s someone looking to collect the free month of play you get for pushing someone off the wagon. I edited the link to remove the key string and approved it. How amusing. I guess that leaves just the moment of weakness. I drove the TR6 to Rudy’s for breakfast and then spent three hours measuring and sawing plywood in the garage today. The ol’ willpower is feeling strong today. Perhaps another time.

My prints have returned from the framers. I’m happy with how they came out. Now I need to decide where to put them.

Since it’s usually blastin’ hot here even well into November I’m not accustomed to having to dress warmly. However, since I’ll be visiting the frozen northlands I thought I’d see what the weather is usually like at the end of October. Fortunately for me we have the United States Historical Climatology Network where you can get daily temperature and precipitation data for lots of places including Central Park in convenient comma delimited format. Yays!

The first thing we learn is that looking back more than 100 years it has only snowed within a day of October 31st one time and that was in 1925 and it was very little. So good for me, it doesn’t snow that early. Since it doesn’t really get cold enough to snow how about rain? Really cold rain sucks way more than snow. Looking at those same three days it has rained 79 times out of 316 recorded days, which is conveniently exactly 1/4 of the time. However the average amount of rain is 1/10th of an inch which is barely rain at all. It has rained a half inch or more 27 times and an inch or more 10 times. Rain appears unlikely enough that a jacket that is reasonably water resistant would be sufficient and if it happens to be one of those unlikely days where it actually rains I can buy an umbrella. I would call the precipitation data a gamma distribution but JMP doesn’t like the fact that mostly the measurements are 0″ though I thought that was the point of the whole thing. I guess I need to dig out my probability text book.

Speaking of jackets let’s talk temperature. It gets cold in New York. They actually have seasons other than summer up there. The normality test fails for the temperature data but that’s not hugely important though I am going to treat it as though it was later. The average average daily temperature for October 30th, 31st and November 1st is 53.1°F with std. dev. being 7.1°F. The average maximum temperature is 60°F, std. dev. 7.9°F and the average minimum temperature is 45.7°F, std. dev. 7.1°F. That’s something we can work with. The minimum and maximum temperatures I’m not that worried about, I’m going to be in the city during the day, not at 3AM and I’m going to be inside mostly except for a few hours walking and on the train platform. Only 5% of the time will a data point fall outside of two standard deviations from the mean. That says to me that for the time I’m going to be there I have a reasonable expectation of the temperature being 53.1°F ± 2 * 7.1°F or between 67°F and 39°F. That’s chilly but certainly not parka weather and I don’t think I’ll bring a heavy coat. I’ve been told that I should layer my clothing and that I will need a “fleece layer” and a “wind layer”. I think this means that I’m going shopping. Also, yay!

Previously I had decided that I wanted to go to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. I spent a few days on various travel web sites trying to put together a modest little vacation to The City. I figured stay in a hotel in midtown, fly in Thursday night, MoMA on Friday, the Met on Saturday, fly out on Sunday. It turns out that if you want a hotel room in Manhattan for the weekend you’d better have some spare organs laying around. Heartbroken and defeated I gave up. Today I decided that the chance to see those pieces in one place within my reach would probably not come around again for a very long time and that I should really make the effort. If I could fly in Thursday, stay the night, see the museum Friday and get a late flight out it could cut the cost. I still couldn’t do it for little enough cash to make the extra trouble worth it. Then this evening Mom suggested that I think about flying into and staying in Philadelphia and taking the train in. Turns out that I can get two nights in Philly, the round trip air fare and a round trip to NYC on the train for the cost of one night in a 3.5 star hotel in midtown Manhattan. Go figure. So, I’m going to visit the museum on Halloween. I’m very excited.

I guess. My 30th birthday was Friday. My lovely friends treated me to dinner at Musashino and then drinks at de Ville which was fun. Thank you friends. I also drove down to the San Antonio neck of the woods to visit my family. We had a picnic at the Guadalupe River State Park which is one of the old stand by, day out locations from when I was a kid. It’s largely unchanged and it was uncrowded which is apparently due to the school year having started. It was good to see everyone there too and the weather was great. The icon watch I mentioned previously was bestowed upon me as a gift by my sister. Thank you Eileen. I also got a card describing the world as it was in 1978 (and some candy) from Evelyn. From Caroline, Aunt Helen’s set of dominoes my sister and I played with at her house which are still in surprisingly good condition. A nice shirt from Dad and a water-sprinkler tractor from Mom and Bill to round out the material goods. Of course, I also got a lot of nice cards and Mom wrote all over hers as usual.

The other gift I got from Mom was a membership to the also previously mentioned Museum of Modern Art in New York. This means that I now have a year in which to get back up there. I’d really like to go there now though affording the time, tickets, etc. will be tight with the fab closure project coming to a head. The exhibit that opens today is “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.” It follows Van Gogh’s life from 1880 when he began his career as an artist to Arles, France in 1888 and the progression of his painting of sunset and twilight scenes and interior night scenes and finally his paintings of the starry night sky. The exhibit includes both The Starry Night over the Rhône and The Starry Night both of which are beautiful and significant in art history. I’ve been told I should just take a day or two off at the end of the week in a few weeks and fly up there to visit the exhibit and the rest of the museum. I may do that. It would certainly be worth it. I could leave on Thursday, get there in the evening, have dinner and sleep early, get up early, spend the day at MoMA and then maybe Saturday at the Met and then come back Sunday morning. Three nights wouldn’t break the bank and if I bought tickets now I could probably still get an ok deal. Regardless of my potential travel plans this year, next spring or summer I’m going to try to take a longer trip up there with Mom and we’ll have more time to go to the museums. Update: Too expensive. I will stay here and cry about it instead.

My gift to myself was having two of the prints I bought at Flatstock in the spring framed. Michael’s sent me a 60% off framing coupon in the mail this week and that’s too good a deal to pass up. Framing is fantastically expensive so really what 60% off means is not cheap framing but rather that you can get what you actually want done for an acceptable price. The framing department at the Michael’s at 1325 and I-35 is good and quick and I’ve been happy with the work they did for me earlier this year. They should be done before the impending dinner party on October 4th though the target display location is my bedroom so if I want to show them off I’ll have to actually clean the entire house, not just the living room.

Now is a dangerous time of year. The East Austin Studio Tour is coming November 22nd and 23rd and then the Blue Genie Art Bazaar starts Deceber 3rd. The shows are still fun even if you aren’t loading up on pretty things though so I will just have to go and have a little self control. I’ve been on vacation for a week and I’ve been making progress on my projects. The weight loss is going well despite the birthday feasting. The air is getting cooler. We’re coming into my favorite time of year. So, I may be old now but I’m pretty optimistic about the near future.

Here’s a neat pixelated looking watch I was pointed to in the Museum of Modern Art’s web store. It’s a shame I don’t wear a watch because that would be a fun one to throw in every once in a while and it’s pretty inexpensive. I’m not really capable of wearing a watch regularly. I fiddle with them constantly and if I sit down anywhere I take them off. I’ve left watches (and rings and my office ID badge, etc.) pretty much everywhere. It’s too bad too because, though the phone serves as a time piece more effectively, watches are essentially art you can wear. The extremely complex ones with a tourbillon and exotic materials are great and sometimes cool modern technology finds its way into them as well. For example, the below is a watch produced by Seiko which has a display that runs around the whole watch that uses electronic ink to write out the time. Sadly it doesn’t appear that they actually put the thing out for sale. I’ve seen comments to the effect that it would be sold for about $2000 but the only places I see them mentioned are in copies of the press releases from 2007 and the various blogs which report on that stuff.