It did in some ways — mostly just because it was a workday. I ended up getting 4 hours of sleep. I consumed 5 cups of coffee, and two pepsi’s. I got stuff done this afternoon, which was rather surprising. Just had the headphones on and edited the hardware specs that were in my queue for the last two weeks. I just woke up from a rather short nap. I think I was better off just staying up for that time, now I’m rather grawgy and just want to sleep. Dinner might be a good idea. Sleep sounds better.

It’s a lot of stress on the body. I hope I don’t get sick because of this event. oye.

Side effects: left eyelid is twitching inwards (outwards?) now. Wonderful.

-T

Work has been stressful, as I’m sure many of you can relate. I spent the better part of May, June, July and August cooped up in the hardware engineering lab or the EMC chamber until the wee hours of the morning. There were a few off-site adventures to NW EMC to checkout FCC compatibility of my project, and at times find out that we’re not so compliant which led to a lot of debugging. As it were, it was a constant rinse and repeat cycle of working from 8-5 verifying my project, and debugging issues. I’d go cycling for an hour or two to get my head on straight, then return to the office from 8-midnight or later. I’m sure that can’t be good for anyone. Some days I would be so tired that my mind was completely numb, and I’d just walk around in a daze.

Cycling, for the most part, kept me sane. I’d ride 20-30 miles after work just to get my mind off of things. It was really nice to just sit and propel yourself on a country road for miles at a time. I started the season back on March 12, 2009, and officially ended it just last week on Sept 23rd, 2009 with a total of 2321 miles over the last 6 months. My bike, a 2006 Specialized Tarmac Comp has seen well over 4000 miles since i bought it in the spring of 2007. I wore out the original set of brakes and the original set of wheels after 3000 miles. The chain was changed back around 2000 miles and it’s only been through one “accident” during the 2007 STP. Not too bad.

Other stuff
Somehow I found some opportunities to fall in love with a new movie — well, new to me anyway. In early August, I was over at a friend’s place and and watched “Serenity“. Yes, it was originally filmed in 2005. The acting was great and the concept of a colonized universe because the “Earth was used up” seemed appealing to me. Apparently my brother, David, tried to show me this movie back in 2006 after it came out on DVD, but I had no reason to watch it. Boy, was I mistaken. I come to find out that the movie was based on the 2002 TV show “Firefly.” I looked it up on Hulu the same weekend and gave the first and second episode a shot. Boy, it was good and I wondered why I never heard of it before — perhaps it was because it was stuck in the library studying my ass off at the time.

I watched almost the entire season in the first weekend and thought I’d better see how many seasons this show ran. I was saddened to find out that the series only ran for one season before being canceled by Fox. D’oh! I bought the Blu-Ray versions of both titles and watched them both at least twice over now. I think it just gets better each time really. As a side note, I found the character of Kaylee Fry (played by Jewel Staite) really sweet and loving. She’s the ships mechanic, who is sweet and “bubbly” and yet be very stern and straight with someone when she is upset. I think Jewel is hot, so that may have something to do with it as well The whole Firefly / Serenity series consumed about 2 weeks of the late night hours which is great – something to watch before I doze off to sleep for the night.

Somewhere in here, I bought a new home theater system. I thought, man, it might be time to get sound that is better than just the two speakers from my TV. I’m glad I made that choice since the “movie experience” in the house went from “OK” to “DAMN! I didn’t know that bullet went from the front left corner of the room to the rear right!” (Of course, you may have guessed the first thing that popped into the DVD player was The Matrix and the all mighty lobby shoot out scene

ANYWAY… After finding out that Firefly only aired for a season, i started looking at the Filmography of the principle characters and found a couple of other good shows as a result. Nathan Fillion (who played Captain Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds) was in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog (starring Neil Patrick Harris — yes, Doogie Howser); Adam Baldwin (who played Jayne) is in Chuck as John Casey (knew this one already since I already watch Chuck!); Summer Glau (the Terminator on the Sarah Connor Chronicles, duh!) and Jewel Staite who was casted as a recurring guest star in Season 4 of Stargate: Atlantis and promoted to a regular status in Season 5 as Dr. Jennifer Keller.

I watched Stargate: SG1 on and off for the last few years on SCI-FI and was familiar with the whole “Stargate” concept so I thought I’d give Stargate Atlantis a try — started with Season 5. I watched it and definitely loved the characters in the show as well as a continuation of what the SG:1 series had already established. But again, I was saddened to find out that the show did not get renewed for a sixth season. (Man, i thought, that’s two shows that I’ve watched and that’s two shows that I find out that has been canceled?!?). So if you know me, then you’ll also know that I really like Science Fiction — yes, even Star Trek; I’m sure there is a Trekkie side in you as well — so I went a head and bought seasons 4 and 5 of Stargate: Atlantis on DVD (there is no Blu-Ray version, unfortunately ). While I waited for those to arrive, I started watching the Pilot episode of Stargate Atlantis and for the next month I watched Seasons 1, 2, and 3 from, uh, shall we say, an “online, and out of country, source.” The video quality suffered a bit, but the story line was rather engaging. I then followed suite with Season 4, and re-watched Season 5 for continuity and clarification and got all of the inside-jokes in the screen play. Watching SG:A revived my love for Sci-Fi, I went a head and bought Seasons 1-3 as well.

Stargate: Atlantis (SG:A) is the second part of the Stargate series (preceded by Stargate:SG1). With the cancellation of the show, the SyFy network premiered Stargate: Universe (SG:U) to explore the 9th chevron of the Stargate (9th symbol address to “dial” between two stargate devices and establish a connecting wormhole). Some back history can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_(device). It should be noted that much of the “Stargate” travel is heavily based on theoretical astrophysics, particularly that of black holes and wormholes — so not entirely “far fetched” considering that there are real people, today, that spend their lives doing theoretical astrophysics. But of course, “far fetched” is used broadly in this context Naturally i watched the pilot episodes and find it intriguing at this time. The only actor/actress that i know from that series is Ming-Na (who played Dr. Jing-Mei Chen on ER).

Oh yeah, so after watching the last season and episode of SG:A (for the second time!) i started to search for other shows that the main characters are a part of. First, there’s the obvious (because I told you above, unless you just skipped a few paragraphs) — Jewel Staite from Firefly who played as Dr. Jennifer Keller, Chief Medical Officer of the Atlantis base. David Hewlett (who plays as a self-described genius and astrophysicist Dr. Rodney McKay) wrote a British comedy themed movie called A Dog’s Breakfast — which starred himself, Kate Hewlett (real life and movie sister), Paul McGillion, and Rachel Luttrell – which i found quite odd and hilarious since some of those are the primary cast members and recurring guest stars on SG:A. I bought A Dog’s Breakfast just yesterday along with SG:A Seasons 1-3, so lets watch it at a movie night sometime in the near future.

There’s currently rumored to be a direct to DVD Stargate Atlantis movie, but the release date hasn’t been announced. I hope that one makes it through.

In closing:
If you’ve have made it this far, I applaud you.

When i started to write this several hours ago, I re-watched the Firefly episode “Out of Gas.” – If you don’t get into the whole Firefly series or the Serenity movie, do yourself a favor and at least give this episode a try. It shows a lot of the character development and the back history of the main characters that were on the ship. In my estimation, which may or may not be worth anything to you, it is definitely a “MUST SEE”

Thanks for sticking with it.
-T

Yes, random entry. But it’s my blog, not yours. heh

What’s coming up:
Well, for starters, it’s going to be a nice relaxing 3 week winter break! I’m hoping to start things off by seeing “Kong” tonight with Josh, Katie and Troy (and whoever else is going). I’m moving my stuff down to Corvallis during the afternoon on Saturday (17th). Jill will return to Portland on saturday too, so i’m sure i’ll hang out with the gang that night.

Anything beyond that is kinda up in the air… but my goal is to go snowboarding as much as I can before winter term starts up!

The weekend is here! I have 5 more work days left until my internship ends. i finished a new software release this morning, and I’ve been trying to find some odds and ends to do so that I won’t just be sitting idlely twiddling my thumbs. My current ‘project’ is to import the RedHat kernel tags (via `make tags`) into a MySQL database, and also append the src code file that is associated with the tag. This should generate a fairly large database that will be “disk intensive”… as the underlying purpose of doing this is some performance testing on an ATCA iSCSI blade.

Tomorrow (Saturday): LAN party between 12noon (Sat) to 12noon (Sun) at RadiSys. Should be interesting =p

So, there is about two more months left in my internship with RadiSys. New products are going to be brought up during this time, and it should be a quite exciting process to see and be a part of! fin.

Oh… i heard back from my previous manager at Mentor Graphics. They want to see if I’m still available and if I want to pursue a career in the Catapult C group. That’s a cool feeling. I would possibly apply for the job, but I’m already taken!

HA! It’s been one long crazy work week. I plan to sleep early/do nothing Friday night and hopefully go do something worthwhile to make up for this this weekend!

We carted over a working system in a RadiSys ATCA Promentum chasis to DC-3. Friday is demo day for one of our customers. This week has been a full ATCA training orientation gig for our customers, and well, tomorrow is the day my group presents. That should be awesome…

We have the Promentum chasis loaded with:
(3) CPMs (CPU blades)
(2) SCMs (Shelf Managers that take care of the central network, and power management)
(3) ATCA-7010’s (the network packet processing module that I’m working on).
(2) ATCA-7010 RTMs (Rear transition modules with 10 x 1GbE fiber optic connections)
(4) Blanks to help with the airflow.

The ATCA-7010’s are hooked up to a SmartBits unit, which is generating IPv4/IPv6 internet traffic. We will demo the 7010’s ability to do IPv4/v6 traffic forwarding, as well as some chaining ability of the module. Other demos will include the Diagnostics Monitor (our test suite that i’ve been working on), and showing some features of RedBoot and the TCAM NSE unit (it’s a network search engine onboard the ATCA-7010).

So today started off something like this:

5:45am – wake up.
6:00am – showered up, read my e-mail. Seagate Rebates e-mailed me stating there was no purchase date on my receipt. Got that fixed. Rebate to be mailed soon.
6:30am – walked into the office. Headed towards the cafeteria, got two cups of coffee and walked down to the SIT lab. Booted up my blades and tested the new software drops that the Boca, FL team sent me over night.

11:00am – started to wonder where the time went. Found the Rev 2 boards that we have. Tested those, reflashed the boards with the latetst Boot Manager, diagnostics and MV-Linux.

1:00pm – more testing. More conversations between myself, my manager and the people in Boca. Many software drops later, many bugs worked out in a short period of time.

5:00pm – We think we have the system ready to move. Found a bug.
5:30pm – Built solution for bug, tested system one more time. Works OK. Shut everything down, put on carts… rolled to DC-3 training room… The room is a mess.

6:00pm – found some food left in the training room. Grabbed three boxes for the three of us. Free dinner. Started connecting everything back up. Rearranging the room.

6:15pm – Can’t login to a NT 4.0 box with stupid Novell Netware installed on it. Called tech support. x1777 and you get some help from a guy who sounds like he’s in india… but really just two buildings over.

7:00pm – Powered on chasis and the entire system configuration. System can’t see ethernet devices, no DHCP, no nada… troubleshoot linux. Searched Google for answer. hehehe.

8:10pm – Forgot to get an extension VGA cable, WBSvr (the IXA SDK Workbench Server app for our Network Processor), and 1GbE ethernet loopbacks.

8:15pm – Got into my car. LEFT.

It’s 9pm right now. I need to start on my homework… though I think I’m just going to watch TV. So… screw ENG104.