I had taken beautiful movie of Lobo settling into bed, but alas, SBC Yahoo! does not let me post it.

I've been summoned for jury duty! Something to finally blog about. People, grab your cutlery and tuck in that napkin, because I am going to be adjudicating.

The most coherent arguments I've heard in favor of staying the course in Iraq have been from Bill Kristol. He describes the aftermath of a pullout as follows:

"Since Iraqi troops won't be as capable as American ones, the situation will deteriorate. Then the insurgency could become a full-fledged guerrilla war, inviting a civil war--and we would be faced with a choice between complete and ignominious withdrawal or a recommitment of troops."

Ignominous, "Marked by shame or disgrace"

This scenario should at least be on the minds of the people in Crawford. The first image that leaps to mind is officially endorsed massacres of minority groups in Iraq.
Years and years of sunnis and shiites with RPG launchers skittering about on our television sets. Murders we won't see and won't feel.

I do support a pull-out. What Kristol assumes is that the "ignominious" outcome has not already been reached. His idea of shame is just as valid as Cindy Sheehan's. Our government has acted shamefully, from the top (Bush) to the bottom (Abu Ghraib). And currently, the same idiots who convinced us to go into Iraq (Kristol) are using the same doom-scenario technique to prod us en masse towards escalation. No.

Nobody understood what makes Iraq tick THEN, and I'll be damned if I go along with more pundits telling me they think they understand Iraq NOW. There is no serious analysis going on. I suppose what must be next for Anti-War supporters is to formulate a credible withdrawal plan. Doing the homework of explaining how a horrible civil war might NOT happen, or at least explaining why we are still OK allowing Iraq to go to hell...but wait it has gone to hell.

Erin Collier, the Austin Chronicle's marketing director, was my guest today on Writing on the Air. She brought six or seven different jars/tubs of salsa for me to try, and a bag of chips. We agreed that she'd come on only this week, after I had posted a blurb in the Chron announcing I'd be playing readings from Billy Collins and Denise Levertov. So the show was a weird mix of Erin and I making silly comments about hot sauce and then playing austere, serious poetry. Billy Collins, not too austere, but Levertov's "Life at War" dealing with "burned human flesh in Vietnam" was austere. It seemed to work. Ironically, Erin was one my most lively, funny guests, and she isn't a writer, which means I either need to find better guests or do a different type of show. Maybe the "feed Graham show."

Latest news. I have graduated. My freelancing clients have me documenting the second version of their rich site summary (RSS) reader, quicknews. Which Julie is familiar with, having written an excellent first book on the subject.

Via RSS I learned that Wil Wheaton, ensign crusher from star trek next generation, has made a name for himself as a blogger and technical writer.
He has a book "Just a Geek" which is supposedly a touching tale of what it means to be human. Many stars. Whodathought.

I watched Bill Maher standup for 90 minutes on HBO last night "I'm Swiss" and agreed with practically everything he shouted. For example, he points out that putting the ten commandments in front of a courthouse is dumb because 8 of them aren't actual laws. Don't covet thy neighbor's wife, for instance, is not a law. He criticized Bush for everything, including the stinging observation that he benefitted from the "safe" national guard of the 60s only to make it an extremely dangerous military branch to join in the 00s.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think I have anything to SAY anymore. Wil Wheaton's take on technology is more interesting than mine (having served on the Enterprise) and Bill Maher is 100x more prolific.

The reason summer box office receipts are down? It's the 15 minutes of fucking commercials they make you watch. (my impersation of Bill Maher with my own observation) See, he's better at it.

Bill Maher has also been the only person I ever heard directly make fun of Christianity. He is like a bulldozer charging a barbed wire fence. Richard Wright's book "Black Boy" describes communist speakers carrying on like Bill Maher. The narrator stands in the street in 1930s chicago and some guy with a bullhorn yells out to a crowd, "Where the hell is this Jesus, strike me down now. I'm WAITING." I like this side of America.

Oh, here is a 2.4 MB video of my senior project in action. I do not want to go into detail as this was not a very good project, other than perhaps the fact that we got it to do anything. The clicking sound is me turning the frequency knob on a signal generator. The device uses a coarse scheme for picking out the frequency as I raise it from 0-20000 hz.

Ugh. What a past few days. My night of three beers turned into a morning of acute stomach virus. Probably something I ate. I had no time to spare on the senior project so I worked through it. This morning Ryan and I demoed a successful sound-interactive light tile (see pic). I was honored to be a part of the experience, but getting home, seeing my picture, and still feeling unwell, I feel sort of ragged.

Sitting around here with Lobo, the abiding snooze-hound. Turner Classics is on. When they announce "a day of Shelly Winters" I get thrills dreaming about August 14th when I can sit on my ass and enjoy "a day of anyone who ever sat in front of a camera but who cares, i have earned my degree and am drinking a screwdriver." Actually, I'm drinking now. I came home to find Matt and Andrew Dickens drinking scotch, so I drank beer to fit in, now I'm here in the living room with the dog and my third bottle of beer.

Some weird James Cagney movie, blood on the sun, where american crackerjack journalists duck and weave around japanese imperialists.

A few nights ago I watched Lost in Translation for the first time. The characters still sit with me, after four days. That was Scarlett's role, she was that character. Vain as this may sound, the movie reminded me of my 1997 tour of Japan with the JIMT program, when I was put up in expensive hotels and was dying for human contact.

This rocks. I got an A in telecommunications networks, my last lecture/exam course, and a B in Laplace Transforms (the 6 week course I agonized over taking at the start of the summer). I have no idea what's next, but I'm wrapping up in style.

However, I have only 6 days in which to make my senior project presentable for the ECE open house. It's currently a C3P0 good heavens pile of crap. Trying to get a PIC microcontroller to communicate via USB is interesting. This morning I was able to transmit two integers from the PIC to the console. Hey, I can just stop now, that's a pretty snazzy senior exhibit.

i want a boston terrier. it's the only motivation i have to move out of matt's house.

this kid is brilliant.

notice how he answers both parts of the favorite word question with only one word.

i don't know, i hope he stays in canada.

nothing's easy

i just found out that a graduation requirement enacted in Fall 2004 requires me to take a technical elective in upper level math, astronomy, biology, or chemistry. i am faced with two options, A) take a third course this summer in fourier analysis that meets at 7AM, 5 days a week. or B) wait to take such a course in the fall and postpone graduation by five months.

the first option would result in a hellish 11 weeks, beginning immediately. i have never attempted more than 7 credit hours in a summer; this scheme would load me with 10 and jeopardize the success of my senior lab. the second option would require me to find a part-time job or internship in the fall, which is probably more difficult than just finding a full-time job.

going with the first option would show that I value my time, that i'm eager to graduate and go to work ASAP.

The second option would allow me to take interesting upper division courses in the fall such as the network engineering lab and the computer architecture course taught by yale patt. i'll never get another chance to take courses such as this. i could also choose an upper division math course i want rather than the only one that is available.

the first option seems more ambitious and bold, get the diploma and turn the page. since I'm 33, this seems smart. this is what i think 80 percent of people in my position would do.

the second option seems more cautious but also more optimistic, READ the page before turning it, and trust that you will make yourself into a stronger job candidate with the extra time.

i think i'm going to push ahead with plan A, take 10 credit hours this summer and begin a real job search now. this means i could relocate, get out of matt's hair, and feel like i'm not backing off. i'll check out the fourier class tomorrow morning. if it looks bad i can reconsider.





so

first denial then acceptance

the only issue i have with star wars III is that it was a Frito-Lay retail display at HEB four weeks before it opened as a movie. sith settles like a 100 million dollar layer of nacho cheese on every other serial/saga/shootemup that came before it. we are creating so much stuff for our children to watch that eventually they will never be able to reach bottom. yet, we will hand them a polluted environment, inadequate health care, budget defecits, and an estranged third world.

i don't know about you, but into my 30s my whole existence has begun to feel like a movie. impressive, unattainable things shoot back and forth across the screen but i am compelled, compulsed, to just reach for the next kernel of popcorn. in my case, next piece of odwalla bar.

always in the back of my mind when viewing a summer blockbuster is the sense of seeing a precious resource go up in flames. we witness how wealth, put in the hands of a privileged few, results in packaged messages that can only be heard when sitting silently and obediently in a theater. there is no natural law that requires millions of people to submit to the artistic vision of one man. all men are created equal, and with enough practice we could convert our cineplexes into public assembly halls, and entertain each other with music, lectures, strip tease, perhaps leaving ONE theatre open for film.

then again, my discontent over what is only a free market process is stupid. confining. i will continue going to the movies, enjoying the movies, and rather than allow some doubt to tickle the back of my conscience, i will just say "this is what it is."

I am writing to say that George Lucas deserves canonization, beyond the usual Oscars fanfare for “lifetime achievment.” We should build a large bronze monument in his image. After all, he sustained a vision for 28 years. He created his own standards and put his evolution as a filmmaker out there for all to see. He made no apologies or conciliation to critics.

When I was six years old, sitting between my Mom and Dad in a crowded movie theatre in Queens, the sight of an enormous blue imperial cruiser coming into view, carrying Darth Vader and his ominous respirations, made my palms sweat and instantly began shaping my concepts of right and wrong, darkness and light. Christmas 1977 I got a red T-shirt with the reflective silver adhesive letters, “Star Wars.” I’d talk to grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, about Star Wars. I would play Star Wars (one note at a time) on piano. I also knew that I did not have the full story regarding Star Wars. My father, already an Alec Guiness fan, remarked that he thought Obi Wan was the most interesting character, that the force actually did exist, that the beginning of Star Wars was not really the beginning, etc. (This was a man who took philosophy courses at Columbia and had a rough childhood, who was practically a kid himself in 1977.) As a result I imagined what the Jedis were like; in daydreams I would ponder why and how Darth Vader was once “good.” It amazes me that 28 years later I would find my curiosity on these matters still intact, that George Lucas could plant seeds of wonder in children, allow those seeds to sit for decades, and then complete his story only after the children had become adults. Unlike any filmmaker I can think of, he extended his epic vision over an epic length of time, providing a new mythology that an entire generation could share.

Some critics are currently trashing his work. They whine that the characters seem wooden, or make fun of Hayden Christianson’s performance, blithely ignoring the fact that if George Lucas gave up on making films or decided to just skip doing episode III, it would have thrown millions of people such as me into an abyss. George Lucas ignored the naysayers, determined to finish what he started. As a result he brought us full circle back to our childhoods. He gives a sense of wisdom, a sense of gratitude for having been born when we were and having waited 28 years for an answer.

The scene with Padme’s funeral procession shows a silent, mournful JarJar Binks (an object of many critics' ridicule) and several exotically facepainted, headdress-wearing Naboo characters. Putting JarJar into the movie at any other moment would have drawn guffaws from the audience. Lucas puts him there in a cunning way, as if to say "try laughing now." They walk in a beautifully gloomy evening light, more sophisticated in terms of set design and lighting than anything attempted in episodes IV, V, and VI. Lucas effectively scolds his critics here, showing that his “phantom menace” characters had value, or at least that his attention to costume and atmosphere grew substantially via these characters. Compared to Leia’s hair buns the Naboo facepaint and headdress is exquisite. Perhaps, Lucas suggests, you were all too insensitive to appreciate the new things I tried.

I predict that Lucas’ next film will be less about fighting and more about fantasy. He is going to deliver a true modern incarnation of Fantasia, something that absorbs a new generation in heavenly forms, high resolution color, perhaps a little mathematical precision. Hopefully he’ll also discover the next Harrison Ford (female or male) and recapture the daring feel of the first Star Wars.

studying for a final tomorrow, and for some reason i'm dwelling on the U.S. collective psyche. the poor little girls killed in zion, il. and Fox is making their usual circus out of it. i had a choice between the murders on fox and congressional happenings on CNN. I chose fox. i think the reason is that i am hoping for some sort of calamity. when 911 happened, it had the effect of leveling the social hierarchy. the way the event "pulled the country together" also gave everyone a reprieve from whatever ruts they may have dug themselves into. you could drop whatever you were doing and just watch television, and you were no worse than the next guy. some part of me, which i think many americans share, wants more legitimate calamities to occur (in remote cities of course) such that there is always a convenient escape from having to struggle and compete. did i mention this is finals week.

sitting here in lab, waiting for a program called design vision to finish generating timing and area reports for my synchronous serial port (SSP). the tool takes about 5 minutes to run. so i'm done with part A. the goal of part B is to interface the SSP with a real-world commercial processor interface, called an ARM. doubt i'll have time to finish this.

i have had a pleasant evening at school. the final 345L assignment calls for soldering components to a PCB board. i've been procrastinating on doing it, fearing a molten disaster, but after making a few ugly globs, i got it. you put the wire near the base of the pin, apply the soldering tip, and there is a puff of smoke and a nearly instantaneous transfer of the solder to the pin. it's easy, no superhuman touch is needed.

also, i figured out a bug in my verilog design. have been seeing red bars for a week, and these red bars are gone. i can go home, have a beer, and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

finally, finally, i finished the schematic of my ALU. impatience and panic started setting in today. i had earlier tested the comparator block successfully in isolation, the part that detects greater than, less than, equal, etc. around noon today i attempted to put it into the larger design. i was so fed up with the project that i lost any interest in the details, and for awhile i was speeding along connecting the comparator wires, feeling very smart. then at the last stage where i wanted to see all of the correct patterns coming out, it gave bad results and I became upset. in fact, i went over my disk quota at school causing weird errors just as i most needed to be thinking about the design.

i had gone out drinking in honor of matt's birthday last night. matt went home and then will, andy, and i went to the whiskey bar to meet will's friend who is a world renowned animal psychologist. but that went nowhere and the result today was that i was upset moreso than usual with being behind on projects. a mental rather than physical hangover. really hitting a wall. i came back here just as julie showed up with her friends annie and megna from canada. they seemed to detect my mood and proceeded to lavish my roomate matt with warmth for his having met them (annie and megna, in vancouver) for dinner. i was waiting for some kind of stinging coup de grace from the situation, something that would really make me regret everything about myself, but they just said bye and that was that. i ate an apple, a very tart and firm jonagold, muttered vulgarities for awhile, and then went back to the lab. i probed the interconnections of my design looking for the stupid error, the shorted wire, the misnamed pin. actually, i had forgotten a fundamental step which was to make sure that the arithmetic part of the ALU performed subtraction whenever being told to compare. really not that subtle a problem. but in the agony of being behind and having more tests bearing down i just wanted there to be some easy mistake to fix. i had willed myself into a state of denial where i was "finished" and simply needed to debug to be done. since i was not finished, i wasted hours searching for bugs that weren't there. as my bitchy ex boss from general bandwidth used to say, the absence of something is difficult to detect.

another sleighride of the mind is to celebrate prematurely. to want to be "the person" finishing an assignment rather than actually finishing the assignment. all this might seem incredibly obvious. but i am all too human. whenever i finish something or take a test i have a flood of thoughts. good engineers and scientists, like richard feyneman, for instance, would never pause to congratulate, chastise, or overanalyze themselves. their minds were quick and their routes of thought went straight to the essence of a problem. on to the next thing, the next truly big thing.

i created my first latex document. when matt alden lectured about latex i thought it sounded like the greatest thing since sliced bread. when i was a technical writer my boss told me that a lack of version control (ability to track who changed what file, how, and when) was why i could never gain her feel acceptance or appreciation as a human being. well, i'm exaggerating, but our little ephemeral group of tech writers were never allowed to feel whole because of this.

so here is LaTEx, a document SYSTEM that lets you typeset documents right in unix. with latex you have total version control. you can set up makefiles, check your books into CVS, the works.

well, follow the link and look at the results. it's my first latex document, but it's a fucking pain in the ass to use.

but so are 16 bit funnel shifters for that matter. i spent the whole day building one.

i'm actually posting this because i think the picture in my latex document is funny. you can really just skip to that and i'll be happy.

my 379k lab partner, who was almost brought to tears a few weeks ago, rallied and produced a working wireless communications link. what this means is that bits leave the computer, enter the air, and return via another antenna (only a few feet away) in the exact same arrangement. i held one of the antennas. the flowchart bryan created to accomplish this looks like the map of a small city. once the bits flew and returned none of his former agony mattered. all of the pain and doubt just vanished as he realized that he grasped something truly difficult. differentiating him as an electrical engineer, and giving him knowledge he might be able to apply for decades. such is the drug.

i've created my own map of a small city, but in a different class, VLSI design. my arithmetic logic unit (ALU) adds, subtracts, increments, or decrements two sixteen bit numbers in 1090 nanoseconds. the core of the ALU, called a kogge stone network, contains several layers of lookahead logic. if at one stage you need to carry a one, it wires this information ahead in parallel rather then slowly ripple the information one carry at a time. for example if your 2nd grade teacher gave you a difficult addition problem like 9997 + 8879 where the numbers were all big and generated carries, the kogge stone network would be like an extra set of hands, doing all of the carries nearly simultaneously rather than one at a time. this is something about 200 ECE graduates learn how to build every year. bryan with his flying bits is in the company of more like 4 or 5 people. i'm beginning to see people punch their tickets out. in fairness to myself, bryan is a graduate student. But I have a tremendous amount of work in front of me and a very short time to do it in. i don't think I'm going to grad school, and for the last few weeks I've been just hanging on.

prof. rappoport gave a brilliant lecture today on the subject of correlation filters and gaussian noise. he showed that with calculus and some basic knowledge of probability theory you can quantify how powerful the distortion is on a filtered channel. it gives noise a bandwidth of a half hertz he said, and indeed you could see on the whiteboard that the effect of a filter on the infinite chaos of random thermal noise is like taking a baby slice of cake out.

alex, my 345L lab partner, perfected his stepper motor program today. my contribution to the lab was to wire all of the hardware together. i used something called an L293 quadruple driver which was a professional kind of touch recommmended by the TA with only 20 minutes to go in lab last week. nobody bothered to try it except me. the thing about this course is that you have to fight for the TAs attention, and when you do get it there are always a few other students hovering around, wanting to take him away. in today's episode two such guys wanted to know how they could calculate the rotational rate of their motor. the lab instructions said that these things turned at 18 degrees per step. we ran our device and counted 20 steps. "count the time duration of 20 steps as the period" we told them. they didn't seem satisfied with this, perhaps because it was OUR device. i multiplied 20 * 18 on my calculator and showed them that the result was 360 degrees. for once i was issuing a smackdown.

i woke up thinking about all of the hours I spent as a child doing things which helped prepare me for my midlife transition to electrical engineering. i used to be an expert when it came to delta drawing, i had vast libraries of artwork, from bleeding snowflakes to armadas of spaceships that wiggled in space and "exploded" (red fill).

i could get to 99 on safari. as an aside, reader, explore the miniarcade site if you've ever owned a handheld game. check out puck'n monster.

i had a library of casio synth compositions, lego designs. cannot deny that was not mozart in any of it.