/dev/random

  • I’m still wait­ing for my Oxford pic­tures to arrive by mail.
  • I spent Sun­day after­noon on the water in Boston Har­bor, help­ing Alex install his mast. I like the feel­ing of com­ing home after stand­ing on a boat all day: the sen­sa­tion that the floor ought to rock about beneath your feet.
  • The odome­ter on my road bike finally rolled over 1,000 miles this morn­ing. That means I’ve put fewer than 700 miles on it since last autumn. This is a clear vio­la­tion of the no-lameness policy.
  • I have a prob­lem at the office. To solve it, I’m writ­ing a pro­gram to cal­cu­late netlists from the RS-274X Ger­ber files of an 8-layer board. Pars­ing Ger­ber files is exactly like play­ing with the LOGO tur­tle on an Apple IIgs in the fourth grade. Except you use an arcane machine-readable syn­tax and plen­ti­ful reg­u­lar expres­sions. And there’s no floppy drive. Unfor­tu­nately, I’m not much of a com­puter sci­en­tist, and I’m really hung up on devis­ing an algo­rithm for quickly and reli­ably map­ping con­nec­tiv­ity between layers.
  • I have another prob­lem at the office. To solve it, I need to bor­row a spec­trom­e­ter and a blow­torch. But for what­ever rea­son we don’t have the for­mer at Cruftlabs.
  • I have yet another prob­lem. My bicy­cle U-lock broke this morn­ing. Some­how I was able to remove the key with the cylin­der stuck 1/8 turn from “locked.” Of course the key won’t go back in now. I can prob­a­bly fix this with an Ace pick. Yet another thing to borrow.
  • The weather has been quite lovely in the morn­ings lately.
  • The fastest land ani­mal is the Cheetah.
  • One aspect of con­sumer elec­tron­ics design I hadn’t thought of: When a ven­dor finds out that a sin­gle part on your design might result in the sale of, say, 100,000 tran­sis­tors, they are extremely super nice to you. They show up in suits to give you stuff. They call on the phone to see how you’re doing and whether there’s any­thing they can do for you today. Hav­ing begged for the priv­i­lege of free sam­ples in the past, it’s kind of fun to be show­ered with them.
  • Ketchup trav­els out of the bot­tle at a speed of 25 miles per day. (Thanks Sheeva)
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July 27, 2005 July 27, 2005 archives by Scott [permanent link]