12.14.06
My friends are geeks and they’re cool
Today I fixed my computer. Well, I say I, but I really meant Jacob, Ian, and Greg. I did bring it in, at least, and I did ask for help. I mean, come on, I did something!
My laptop’s power supply has been loose for a while. It started out that I just had to wiggle it until it hit a sweet spot and it would stay there for days if I didn’t move it. And then, it got progressively worse. Sometimes I’d have to hold it for a period of time before it would stick, but it would at least still stick. Well, lately, it hasn’t even been doing that. The last few times I used it, I had to be pushing it in and then wiggling it, and I had to do that constantly just to have it register power. Because of that, I haven’t been using my computer as much as I used to. Days would go by without me turning it on because it was just so frustrating to use.
TB suggested putting a toothpick in, and has constantly been on my case about getting a new computer. But, I didn’t want a new computer because aside from the power supply, mine’s still perfectly fine. And I couldn’t decide whether I wanted a PC or a Mac. Oh, yeah, and I don’t have the money for either.
So… last night, over dinner, not exactly sure why we started talking about computers, but I mentioned this thing about my computer. Jacob told me to bring it in and he and Ian would try to fix it. So I did, even though I didn’t really think anything could be done to it.
This afternoon, he brought it back up to me and said that he couldn’t get it to work, even with all the wiggling and stuff. So, I wouldn’t have been able to use it anymore. When I told him that it did actually used to work, he decided to take it apart again and to figure it out with Ian.
Sometime in the afternoon, after I had done what I needed to do for work, I came down to see what they were up to. At that point they were still trying to figure out what to do and what was wrong, etc. I was of absolutely no help at all, of course, although I was amazed at seeing my laptop all disassembled and in pieces. And then, they started about changing the power connector. I was still really skeptical about the whole thing, but I did get something they could use.
Off in the lab, Jacob asked Greg for help unsoldering the power connectors to switch them, when it just so happened that there was a demo of a desoldering gun in the other lab. So that’s where we went. Once the pieces were out, they found out that the board wasn’t in as good a shape as it should be, so that they couldn’t just simply solder the new power connector in. Greg had to do something special to it - connect two things together using bus wire or something like that. I’m not exactly sure what it was or what it was for. But once that was done, Jacob just then soldered the power connectors on the board and on the plug. Now there’s fancy blue heat shrink around the plug, fitted using a heat gun and everything! Oh, and he had to file it down to get it to fit back into the case too.
So… bottom line is, my computer’s fixed! I am so psyched! Yahoo!
Thank you, thank you, thank you! You guys are the best! It made for a fun day at work too.
PS: I also have my own personalized Google page now! Sweet!
11.10.06
The wave
We had a re-organization at work yesterday that has left me pretty shaken. I’m still here - which is a good thing - but some are not. Some are friends, some are not, and some I did not even know. But I am sad to see them go. Even the one who made my life miserable the whole time I worked with him. Still, how unfortunate.
Business is a fudge.
I’m glad I am but a lowly engineer who does not make enough money to warrant being canned because that will not make the company any significant savings.
When, at the end of an unusually hard day, I cannot just go home and say, “Oh well, it’s just work”, that is not a good place to be.
10.20.05
Lunch report
A few of us from work went out for lunch yesterday to try out this stand selling Bratwurst and also to buy pumpkins for carving. Well, the BratMobile (nice, Larry), was nowhere to be found, and neither were the pumpkins.
We ended up going to Armadillos, the Southwestern Rodent place (nice one again, Larry). It was okay, better than Margaritas at least, but it’s no El Pelone. Man, I miss that place.
Anyway, I don’t know why I even started with that. I guess I wanted to note that our two guests (James and Paul) from the UK make for very interesting company, and I also wanted to give a shout out to Larry, who’s discovered my blog. Sweet. Hey Larry!
Before heading back to work, we stopped by one of the local coffee shops. While in line, there was this sweet old gentleman, who did one of those take-off-the-hat hellos. And then, he stopped, and said, “I have 2 questions for you”.
Gentleman: Do you live in my apartment complex?
Me: No
Gentleman: Down by center-blah-blah (I don’t remember where his apartment complex is)
Me: Uhm… no
Gentleman: Well, you can still answer my 2nd question. Do you speak Cantonese?
Me: Nope
Gentleman: Mandarin?
Me: Nope
Gentleman: Where are you from?
Me: The Philippines
Gentleman: Oh! (He’s getting all excited now)
Gentleman: Magandang umaga (Good morning)
Gentleman: Salamat (Thank you)
Gentleman: Mabuhay (~greeting like Aloha)
Gentleman: Maganda ka (You’re beautiful)
Oh, did he made my day. I’ll be visiting that coffee shop more often now. 
05.15.05
Watch out world (wide web)!
My face should be up on our website soon! I’ve had 2 photoshoots already and the pictures turned out pretty good. The first one took 45 minutes, the next one took about 40. In both times, we all had to be uncomfortably close together. The first scene was set up as a product demonstration/training with 3 people involved. Our faces were literally 5 inches from each other. Good thing we had some mints. Seriously.
I was so nervous and uncomfortable, I was cracking jokes left and right and I was giggling for 20 minutes. One of my friends was worried because I wasn’t stopping and the director lady was looking at me when she said it was time to get serious. But they got some good shots, so they called me back for another one.
For the second time, it was just me and Dan and our faces were even closer together and we had to look at each other! They were even thinking of having me sit on his lap, but they found a box I could sit on on top of a chair. Geez.
Funny thing is, it doesn’t look that close in the pictures and it looks so candid and natural. I can’t wait to see the final photos.
It was fun and I got two free meals out of it, so it was worth it. Woo! Food!
05.12.05
Marlborough trail. This trail is SMOKIN’!!!
I hiked up Mount Monadnock today! It was my first hike EVER and we happened to pick the toughest trail to the summit of Mt. Monadnock. It was more of rock climbing than hiking. It was a steep incline with mostly going over rocks. It took about an hour and a half to get to the top, stayed there for 30, and started down. Going down was tough. There was a lot of butt sliding, trying to wear down my gool ol’ cheapo Old Navy’s.
At least now I understand the whole, the-view-is-worth-it thing. Maybe it was all the huffing and puffing, or all the adrenalin, but it was pretty amazing up there. Two of my friends said they might’ve seen Boston or Worcester, they weren’t sure.
Up the summit, we met and chatted with the only two dudes who hiked up on such a windy day. I had some of their beef jerky and they had some of our chocolate chip cookies.
Pictures will be up soon.
05.10.05
Outdoors
Didn’t have enough people to play ultimate today. But it was too nice of a day and GS was so anxious to get out he was giving me a hard time for cancelling the game. So we went out to practice our throws and catches. Now, aside from the Backhand, I can do the Thumber, and the Overhand Wrist Flip. I tried catching it from behind a couple of times but couldn’t do it. At least I was able to do one-handed catches a few times. I’ve been doing the pancake catch since we started ultimate and that doesn’t work when most of everyone you play with is taller than you and can jump.
When I couldn’t run anymore, he got his volleyball and we practiced bouncing. I didn’t do too bad, contrary to what I was expecting. At one point we were passing it for maybe 6-8 times back and forth. That’s way better than I’ve ever done. But then again, GS can run really fast, so saying I did better than I used to isn’t saying much. We played until I surrendered. My lungs were coming out of my mouth trying to get more air. But it was a good exercise. It saves me from having to go on the treadmill later. Tomorrow there’s dancing, and on Thursday, Mount Monadnock. Yessssss!!!!!
04.26.05
:():
Frisbee today. KB joined us. First time we had another girl playing. It was fun.
Walking over, I learned that KB’s boyfriend’s sister died last week. She was 18. Her spleen burst for unknown reasons. She was brought into the hospital around noon and died in the afternoon.
I remember Ethel. Has it been four years already?
Shame on me for feeling sorry for myself yesterday.
04.20.05
It’s hot in here
A quote from a study by Hedge on the relationship between temperature and productivity:
“At 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the workers were keyboarding 100 percent of the time with a 10 percent error rate, but at 68 degrees, their keying rate went down to 54 percent of the time with a 25 percent error rate,”
The temperature in Keene is 77F. It is 83F in my cubicle.
01.26.05
Technical Frustrations
Man, I’ve been stuck with problems that in the beginning look so straightforward, but as I “solve” them, turn out to be debugging monsters. Okay, let me explain:
1. I was supposed to fix the termination sequence in our program. Upon investigation, it turned out that it wasn’t even going through the termination sequence at all! So, all along, it had always had memory leaks AND orphaned threads. But then again, that application isn’t really critical anyway, since it’s just the equivalent app used mostly by our sales and tech personnel. Anyway, after I fixed that, I noticed that termination was actually intermittent - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Then I had a memory leak log and an NTDLL.DLL Access Violation.
The thing is, when it does do that, the program actually terminates, so it gives the Access Violation when, after the program quits, the memory the program used is sent back to the heap. How do you debug that and where do you start looking for the error?
My debug procedures are as follows:
0. Search the net. A lot of people have actually come across the same problem. The solution? Nothing’s really clear. Everybody just says you’ve somehow corrupted the heap. Where exactly? Nobody has any suggestions on how to start looking for that. Some people have it easy, though. It’s just a matter of making sure you have your linker set up properly. Here is the info on that.
1. Disable functionality -> didn’t get too far with this. Too many errors came up, access and instantiations are buried way too deep, and everything is nested and knitted together.
2. Set up my symbols server so that the call stack makes sense. This helped me out, tricky to set it up though, because it didn’t work by just following the instructions.
3. Read Debugging Applications for .Net and Windows by Robbins, a good book, but I couldn’t enable my DCRT library due to some conflict. I was going to keep working on that but decided to just use Numega BoundsChecker and see if that does it.
4. Study and configure BoundsChecker and recompile to enable FinalCheck. So I was getting out of range pointer errors left and right deep in the microsoft libraries. Usually for CMAP, CLIST, etc.
I found a memory leak, fixed that, but didn’t fix the problem. Huh.
Anyway, we’ve decided to drop this since the error is only apparent in the Debug build. So, if the user can’t see it, it’s not a huge priority right now.
Right now, I’m fixing something that hasn’t worked for over a year, but nobody noticed until now. It feels like the Big Dig right now. Once they found the small leaks, they uncovered even bigger problems.
