Bushed
2006-04-13, 3:08 p.m.

Day 599 Bushed

Stayed up and read a bit last night. Couldn�t get to a good stopping off point in the story, so I ended up staying up a little later than I wanted. Consequently, my ass is dragging a bit today. Well, it�s dragging now, but didn�t seem to have any trouble on the elliptical trainer this morning.

Maybe that�s a benefit of getting to the gym early � your body doesn�t quite know what it�s getting into, your brain isn�t quite fully engaged either, so you just kinda run on auto pilot. I have this long established mini goal for the elliptical work � in 30 minutes, cover 5+ miles and burn 500+ calories. Actually did 5.09 miles and 522 calories in 30 minutes this morning. Time to set a new mini goal. I�m thinking along the lines of 5.5 miles and 550+ calories � still in 30 minutes. Another option would be to start earlier (riiiight) and go for 45 minutes, with the goal of hitting 7.5 miles and 750 calories. Not sure how a 45 minute session would go. First I have to get to the gym early enough to even try it.

Had a bit of a scare at work this week. Rumors flying around like crazy. Ranged from our division had been sold, through massive layoffs, down to minor layoffs but wouldn�t affect us. Turns out #3 was correct. My group as a whole is not affected much at all. We�ll lose some of our contract workers and some other folks that are on loan from other departments. One or two minor projects are being delayed or outright cancelled. But we�re all invited to come back and work for the next year or so. Till the next batch or wild rumors builds up a good head of steam.

Speaking of work, I�ve just realized that I�m on a couple of projects that are very soon going to be butting heads. We�re designing a new circuit board that will be replacing 3 existing boards in our products. To help with parts volumes, we�re aiming this new board at out entire line of current products as well as 2 or 3 new ones currently in the development pipe. For sanity�s sake, we�ve decided to focus on the new products for now, and sweat retro fitting the new board into existing systems later (not always a wise decision, but with the schedule compression we�re under we had no choice).

What I do is write firmware code. Firmware is run in devices that are not quite computers, but are more very large programmable logic arrays. Kinda half way between software and hardware. These Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA�s) are excellent for controlling things that need to be done with exquisite timing precision, time after time after time. Anyhow, I�ve been doing timing diagrams for what I thought was the primary project, only to find out just this morning that I need to write some completely different stuff for a feasibility model that we want to have up & running in 4 weeks. Right now we have a collection of parts on a bench, a couple of circuit boards we might be able to use, a bunch of big ideas and not enough time.

Ergo I might be a wee bit scarce over the next month or so. Prolly stop in to update the mileage accumulation, update the weight loss info (should go good, no time to eat) and maybe moan & groan about trips to colleges, the latest �what about Bob� saga or how many gallons of whiskey Cindy is going through because her Dad (his condition really) has her all stressed out (that�s a big part of her current binge I think) (I just wanted to add another parentheses, ok?) I�m predicting 6 day work weeks, 60+ hours a week for the next 4 weeks. Unless I manage to get the code 100% right first shot out of the box and there�s no need for debug. If that happens, I should be looking for a raise. Hah.

Just got out of a 2 hour meeting to plan our work load for the next several weeks. Not as grim as I thought, but we�ll still be plenty busy. Better get to hacking up (heh, I thought �horking� up) some code.

Updated stats:

Weight start: 206.5 on 1/1/06 (265.0 on 1/15/05)
Current weight 197.75 on 4/8/06 (Peeked this am. Not leaking any info. 2 more days to lose)
Target: 180 by 7/1/06 (looking harder & harder to hit)
Next �official� weigh in: 4/15/06

The Keep on Truckin goal: (idea stolen shamelessly from Marn�s Big Adventure)
Miles at speed 4/11/06: 274.86
Miles with cooldown: 303.01
Target for 2006: 1000 miles

Might have to add a little something for the 5K training too.

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