February 21, 2012
New Office
Okay. Enough of the three day weekend. Enough of the week in the silicon bring up lab. Today it was time to get back to debug as usual back in Boxborough. I dropped off the girls at their schools and head down towards the office. I listened to a little more of Patrick Madrid's Open Line podcast while I was in the "flakey cellular coverage zone" and caught up on news with my dad the rest of the commute in.
Today is noteworthy for a handful of reasons. First, our graphics team moved into new space last Friday while I was away in San Diego. In my office was a pair of big orange boxes with my packed stuff. I got the two computers (the desktop and the laptop) all setup again and unpacked the rest of the books, office supplies, knick knacks, etc. One thing I must remember to do is to order a new femtocell for this wing of the building. There is no Sprint signal in the building from external towers.
The second thing I'll be monitoring is the status of how things are going at the annual Mobile World Congess (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain. 
While silicon bring ups are normally pretty intense, the pressure these past couple weeks has been on getting decent demonstrations ready for MWC. Even though I have not yet read any releases of our newest stuff, the recently shipped parts are getting really good reviews. What we dealt with in the lab raises those stakes even higher.
One last thing I was excited about is that I won an eBay bid for Father Robert Barron's 'Catholicism' DVD series. I've been wanting to see it for a while but was not inclined to spend ~$100 for the box set of DVDs. I opted to wait a few months and give eBay a try. I managed to get a set for ~$40, much more in our budget. The trailer for the series follows below:
YouTube Video Trailer
People who've known me long enough know that I spent ~7-8 years working for a company in Nashua that underwent four names in that period before finally being forced to close. I tended to work with the same group of guys across those mergers, acquisitions, and sell offs. Same work but different signatures on the paystubs. Once the doors closed, I went to ATI and many others went their separate ways. In the It's a Small World meme, today I connected with two of my former co-workers that I hadn't heard from in some time. My old boss contacted me by email to say hello and ask me a Perl question. Later as I was leaving for the day, another friend who'd moved to AMD upstairs caught me and I gave him a little tour of our new space.
I saw three cute pieces of humor related to tomorrow being Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. The first is the cartoon seen at right. Click it to see the origins. The second is a meme I saw on Twitter about Ash Wednesday being the ideal day for single Catholics looking towards marriage. Originally posted by Matt Swain, it says, “Tomorrow is Catholic Singles Awareness Day: Ashes+No Ring=Fair Game. Happy hunting!” The last is from my friend Jeff Miller who has perfected the art of Catholic snarkasm. He posted “Having a hard time determining what to give up for Lent. So much perfected already and I nailed humility last year.” Yup, it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way. Good night all! Have a blessed Lent!
“He was teaching his disciples and telling them,
‘The Son of Man is to be handed over to men
and they will kill him,
and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.’ ” — Mark 9