2 fer 1 sale
2004-09-15, 1:17 p.m.

Day 23 - At least the board works

Today is one of those days. I'd like to grab a handful of cigarettes, head off to the smoke room with a stack of code and just sit there till I have all the mark-ups complete. All I'm trying to do is replace a flaky fifo component with some dual port synch ram (that made sense to who?? thought so). Seems simple. But tracking down all the signal name changes, in the component instantiations, in the port statements, inside the individual modules - chasing all of them down was a great excuse for a smoke or three. But I can't do that now.

What I need to do is just clear off my work table, bust out my bag of grapes, get my source code laid out in front of me and start going over it, line by line, module by module. Probably ought to skip the coffee, seeing as it's almost 3pm and coffee now will keep me from sleeping well tonight. Maybe de-caf? Anything to shift my train of thought. The walk to the coffee maker might help. Even if there's no coffee, I could clean my cup for tomorrow. The walk will help. Nice easy walk - not a mad dash. Hope it works. Of course, where am I getting a smoke from? I think most of my old smoking buds have gone home for the day

Yeesh - like talking a jumper down from a bridge. Aaahhhh crap. Meeting coming up in like 10 minutes. Really hoses the whole train of thought thing.

Wonder how pissed the wiff got when I told her about the department golf tournament this morning? Tournament is Friday - 3 days away. Betcha I get the cold icy stare tonight - and an earful about who's spending money on what. But I have >$96 I haven't spent on smoking that I haven't used on anything else yet (well, except for $10 a week for bowling, but that's only 2 packs to cover that)

23 days down, yet another perplexing problem to work through.

Day 24 - 2 fer 1 day

Looks like I never got around to posting that last one. Learned 2 things: 1 - boring ass meetings do nothing to soothe a nicotine crave, 2 - relaxing with a glass of wine does. Of course, you gotta wait till you get home, but what ever works is fine with me.

So - managed to get through day 23, and have better than half of day 24 done with. Next challenge: that golf tournament. Golfing presents plenty of opportunities for snagging a smoke. Plus, I'm golfing with one of my smoking buddies. He's aware that I've quit, so I think he'll be a little careful, but still, I can't expect him to go out of his way to avoid things. I mean, heck, we're in a scramble, so we'll be spending the entire afternoon within 20 feet of each other.

Time to get back to the zoo. Got all my source code edited from yesterday - time to run some simulations and see if my buddy at Altera knows his shit. If so, great, there's other advances to make. If not, great, I still have things to fix AND other advances to make. Sounds like a work, work situation.

Brought some grapes in to eat during the sim runs too, plus I have a computer hidden in the labs that can run the sims 3x faster than my old beast. Monitor sucks, as in it's not my nice 21" jobber, but at least the cpu is fast.

24 days down - hey that's more days than cigarettes in a pack!!

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