Countdown: 41 days until December 9

No, I didn't go back to school. But I have been at a training class all week learning to use the Agilent 93000 SOC tester. It's really a nice piece of equipment. The interface is nothing pretty but it's really fast. The debug tools are probably the most helpful tools I've seen on a tester. The waveform tool really helped me see what the device is outputting and when the tester is trying to compare. If only we had used this tester for our past products it would have saved a lot of debug time. But having used a Teradyne J973 for a bit, I must say that the 93k's shmoo tool isn't nearly as cool as the J973's. The 93k also has a weird way of setting up waveforms. The test program contains all possible waveforms for each pin or groups of pins and then the test vectors just indicate which pre-determined vector to use when. I suppose that might save some execution time over generating the waveforms on the fly, but it can be pretty limiting since you can only define 32 different waveforms for each pin. The I/Os can run at 1.25Gbps using some tricks with the waveforms so maybe the way they do it is useful after all. The training class was good though. It's nice to have a very knowledgeable instructor who not only goes over the course material but gives some practical advice and historical context on the equipment. The sucky part of the training was that it started between 7:30am and 8:30am every day and sometimes lasted until 6pm. Man, that was painful.

Recently, I've realized that education has one goal: seeing into the future. Everything we have been taught since pre-school is either directly or indirectly related to prescience. No one is expecting to become Paul Atreides or Miss Cleo, but those of us with better training are better able to predict how our actions will affect the future. (I take that back, I was hoping to become Paul Atreides but I lost the silly ring.) In early education, we learn to read, write, and do math. All of these basic skills are required building blocks to facilitate the study of arts and science which come later in school. Studying arts and sciences provides knowledge of how things work and knowing how things work allows us to know how our actions today will affect the future.

A simple example is in civil engineering. During the design phase for a highway overpass, a engineer must choose the formula for the concrete that will support the required load and survive the weather conditions of the locale without actually building an overpass. So before construction begins, the engineer makes a prediction: the chosen recipe of concrete will adequately support the predicted traffic load. Without sound knowledge of the properties of available concrete, the engineer could not make this prediction and the overpass would be constructed with some sort of trial-and-error method. By being able to make this (hopefully) accurate prediction, the engineer has turned the costly idea of constructing an overpass into a more practical idea.

What about the arts? Take a writer, for example. A writer needs to know which words to use to create a certain mood for the passage he or she is writing. The author needs to predict how a plot element at one point in the tale will affect the outcome of the story and then predict the reader's reaction to the events in the plot. From a practical standpoint, writers need to predict how well their pieces will be received by the intended audience so they can get paid and be able to feed their cats. Because all writers have cats to feed.

Athletes need to predict their performance in upcoming events. Doctors need to predict how their patients will react to certain treatments so they can effectively heal the sick. Presidents need to predict which mustached dictators have weapons of mass destruction so they can order the troops to premptively strike. Potheads need to predict which snacks will be the most effective in curing the munchies so that they can enjoy the whole smoking experience without making a trip to 7-11. Anyone who does anything is, in one way or another, peering into a crystal ball of knowledge and trying to catch a glimpse of the future. And the crystal ball can only be obtained through education. (Yes, even the pothead needs to be actively enrolled in the school of life to know that Ding Dongs only make you hungrier when you're high.)

(That last bit may or may not be true. I only wrote it because I wanted to say Ding Dongs. There, I said it again.)

The most successful people today (in all forms of "success") are the ones who have had the most effective training in predicting the future. (Or are just the luckiest, I can't tell the difference.) The epitome of any education system is perfect fortune telling. We're nowhere close to perfect. However, we're on the right path. We just need to keep on learning.

Here's a little piece of trivia: shmoo plots were named at Fairchild Semiconductor back in the day. A guy brought his kid to work one day. The kid saw a 2D sweep plot and called it a Shmoo because, well I guess it looked like one. Now the whole industry calls them shmoo plots. The icon for Teradyne's shmoo tool is a picture of a Li'l Abner shmoo. If you don't know what a shmoo plot is, get thee to a test house. Or Wikipedia. But I guess this has nothing to do with seeing into the future.

Countdown: 49 days until December 9

According to the site statistics on this site, there were five hits in the past month were from a search for the phrase "teh market" and two hits for the phrase "teh market el camino". Now why the heck is someone looking for Teh Market on the intarweb? Fortunately, this site serves as a valuable resource to the cyber-teh-market-hunters of the world.

Last night I finished watching another Kurosawa movie, Ikiru. The title means "to live" or "living" or something in Japanese but the movie was about a man who was diagnosed with stomach cancer and would die in a matter of months. When Wanatabe Kanji, working a thankless job as the head of the Public Affairs department at city hall, came face to face with death, he did what anyone would do: live. The film follows his transformation in the final days of his life.

It's been a while since a movie spoke to me like this one. Maybe it's because I'm too cheap to go see movies anymore. Well, Wanatabe-san was really cheap too. So when he finds out his life is on its last legs, he goes out and spends a bunch of money that he's saved up over the years. But as he's spending money on himself, he finds what he's doing strangely unsatisfying. As it turns out, spending money on others was more rewarding than blowing wads of cash on himself. In the beginning, he is on one end of the spending habits spectrum (the miserly end) and then he swings over to the complete opposite end (I'll call it the money-grows-on-trees end because I don't know what the opposite of miserly is). But what part of the spectrum does he settle down in? It couldn't be the middle because that would make him fiscally responsible or something. I'd say he ends up on a different spectrum. Or maybe the two-ended spectrum we're so accustomed to classifying everything on (liberal vs. conservative, good vs. bad, happy vs. sad) isn't really two-ended but rather it's multi-faceted. Maybe we just make everything black and white because it's easier to deal with. Our feeble minds will probably explode if there is more than one alternative to consider. In any case, looking at matters as only having two possible answers won't lead to best solution. But this isn't why the film spoke to me.

Watanabe-san was a very quiet individual. He didn't speak much and when he did, his words stumbled over each other betraying the gracefulness of his thoughts. He never knew how to express his feelings and thus nobody ever really knew him. This was most apparent (and painful to watch) in his interaction with his grown son. He is never able to have a close relationship with his only son. We can see, based on his actions, that he cares for his son deeply, but he can't ever seem to show it and his son doesn't seem to notice. It's really sad to see such strong emotions leaking away into oblivion. His introverted nature meant that no one really understood him. The second half of the movie contained flashbacks from the view of people around him. Nobody ever knew what he was thinking and why he was doing the things he was doing. As a result, the higher-ups at the city hall where he worked were quick to take credit for his actions and Watanabe-san wasn't given any sort of reward for his efforts. This shows that if you don't speak up for yourself, you will never be rewarded for your hard work. However, Watanabe-san didn't seem to mind that he was never given credit for what he did. No matter what the politicians were saying to the press, the people whose lives he affected knew what he did and were thankful and that was enough. This fact alone teaches numerous lessons that we trivialize into snappy sayings such as, "Actions speak louder than words" and "Money isn't everything". But that also isn't why the movie spoke to me.

Life is brief. We're on this planet for too little time to be wasting it doing something pointless. When you find yourself stuck in a rut, do whatever you can get out of the rut or stay and make that rut the best rut anyone has ever seen. Because whoever's stuck in that rut with you will appreciate it. And that's what the movie said to me.

Sorry, I wanted to write something more eloquent, but I don't have it in me.

Countdown: 52 days until December 9

I have done nothing in the past week. It's getting to be a pattern. Well I did watch Cal's crushing defeat on TV on Saturday and Lord Hidetora's crushing defeat on DVD on Sunday (from Kurosawa's Ran) but that's about it. I just thought everyone would like to know that.

On another note, it's been a week since I last had anything with caffeine in it. At first it hurt. I kept getting horrible headaches and I was completely drained of energy. Now, it still hurts, I still get headaches, and I still have no energy. This just proves that caffeine is good for me.

Peace. Outside.

Countdown: 60 days until December 9

Yesterday Dave, Allen, Sri and I went to Pizza Chicago (there's an apostrophe in there somewhere but it got lost in the goat cheese). Someone mentioned that we go there every three months but they always give us a coupon that expires in two months. Well, last night's coupon will expire on December 9. We need to go back before then to save $2 on a large or medium pizza. Somebody remember that!

I bit my lower lip this morning. It hurts.

CNN is full of interesting tidbits these days. Here's another article about The Nice Guy Syndrome at work. Some people at work consider me a nice guy. I can see why I fall into the "nice guy" category. I tend to say yes to any request that comes my way and I work through lunch and some other symptoms of NGS that the article refers to. However, that doesn't really make me "nice". I'm not "nice" in the "kind, gentle and caring" sense. In fact, I'm constantly plotting grisly demises to all the people who come by to give me work to do. Peering into my mind (kinda like that J(ennifer) Lo(pez) movie, The Cell) while I'm plotting would be like watching Gigli but with more amphibious beings. If I ever evolve a backbone, my co-workers should be very afraid. So I don't consider myself a "nice guy". The terms "pushover," "worker bee," "whipping boy," and "bitch" are more appropriate. I think "worker bee" is my label of choice because someone's liable to get stung in the nose. That someone's nose will swell up to the size of a space ball. Of course, stinging someone will rip the stinger out of my posterior and kill me. As I fall to the cold, hard ground, I will smile because I finally managed to work my ass off.

Geez, this week is shaping up to be a dull week.

I saw this on Mark's Xanga: How to pick up girls. It's about a book about picking up chicks written by a guy who picks up chicks like a maid picks up my dirty laundry off the floor. The article notes some of the guy's strategery for picking up women, some of which seem absolutely brilliant. The guy, Neil Strauss, has the art of picking up women down to a science. He also has names and abbreviations for all sorts of jargon in the womanizing industry. His book seems like almost like a self-help book in the way that it provides names for little things that an AFC (average frustrated chump) wouldn't notice. (I guess it actually is a self-help book if you consider picking up women helpful to yourself.) I liked Strauss's quote regarding "unscrupulous men" at the end of the article: "Women are born with a thing called intuition and it's their best defense against these guys." What do men have as a defense against evil, unscrupulous women? Because they're out there.

Ooo, Prison Break was pretty cool last night. Now I really wish I had watched earlier episodes -- especially the episodes with the warden. And the episodes with the dude's family. And the episodes with other stuff in it. I thought it seemed like Shawshank redemption in that there were a bunch of kind, ol' prisoners (and one punkass + his goons) guarded mean ol' prison guards. Then at the end, it seemed like 24. What happened to the days where the good guys make it out in once piece? Oh, and what happened to the days where they go without a frigging three week break in the middle of the season? Or a three month break? Mad am I.

Kitchen Confidential was cool too. It seems like Scrubs in a restaurant. But that's OK, because I like Scrubs and restaurants.

Gundam Seed Destiny is now over. The ending, well, sucked. The final episode was badass but the ending sucked. Everything in it said, "Hey! There's going to be another one after this!" But what was cool was that someone got pwned because Ultimate Coordinator Kira talked some trash. This confirms what you learn in Monkey Island: fights are won, not by physical prowess, but by insults. To celebrate the badass episode, I finished making my Aegis so now I have three small Gundam models. Next, I want an Archangel model. That would be badass.

So that's what I do watch. What don't I watch? Anything on NBC. They have a radio commercial where it sounds like three radio show hosts talking about what TV shows to watch when they go home. But they're not radio show hosts. They gush about the crappy-ass shows too much. Plus they try to fool you into thinking that it's a real radio program. Because of that commercial, I'm putting NBC over there by Taco Bell. I won't eat at Taco Bell anymore because of some of their stupid commercials (and for the regurgitative properties of the food). Now I won't watch NBC because of their stupid commercial and the regurgitative properties of their shows.

Cheese is yummy.