Just 25 More Weeks

I get an uncontrollable smile every time I think about flying back to Alaska. Just twenty-five more weeks. Sounds close, until I reframe it as nearly half a year, which actually makes me feel better since I still need the training time.

Follow-Up with the Fruit Company

A more technical interview with the fruit company: TCP versus UDP, congestion control, hash tables. The TCP questions were fortuitously timed, since my latest project has me implementing a TCP-like protocol over UDP. I even got to name-drop Karn's algorithm.

Lead by Example

On that famous "spread the wealth around" quote: I figure Obama should lead by example and give away all of his possessions to reduce himself to the lowest common denominator, whether he wins tomorrow or not. If he really believes it, the election shouldn't matter.

Cemeteries

My mind wandered during a sermon on the burial of Christ, and I started thinking about cemeteries. They just sit there forever, and the count of the buried never goes down. Eventually we'll run out of land, because the whole planet will be covered in graves.

Program will Continue

Hunting for example code to fix my UIPickerView drawing bug, I instead found a forum signature worth keeping: if (!exit(-1)) fprintf(stderr, "exit call failed. Program will continue\n");

My Favorite "Fruit Company"

My favorite "fruit company" emailed me about a job that was the stuff of dreams years ago. The HR phone screen reminded me how out of practice I am: ideal job, ideal release cycle, rate your familiarity on a scale of 1-to-10. At least there were no ink blot tests. Yet.

Scarves

One of the women in the office wore a scarf today. Indoors. All day. If your clothes can't keep you warm without insulating the arteries in your neck, see a doctor. If you're doing it for fashion, also see a doctor. That is all.

Icelandair

A new subway ad for Icelandair touts the short flight and cheap fare, with a background of what looks like a desolate beach of smoldering lava rock. If I wanted to attract visitors to my country, I don't think I'd lead with a sweeping depiction of destruction.

SIGEV_THREAD

My async IO proof-of-concept met me with EINVAL: Invalid argument, and the docs were no help. Later I downloaded xnu, started grep'ing, and found the comment in kern_aio.c that said it all: no SIGEV_THREAD support. Bummer. Blocking IO it is, then.

I'm back....

The Grand Canyon "Death March" was a success. And I am back. At work. Again. A decreasingly enthusiastic set of sentences. Pictures later; I actually need to work now.