AGO!

Went to the free exhibition of the AGO today. It was pretty interesting. Maybe I'll post a bit more tomorrow...

College Puzzle Challenge

Before I forget, this weekend was the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge. It was a lot of fun, like last year. I think our best score was fourth here at UofT.

Can you figure out our name?

There were a couple of puzzles with answers that just didn't make sense. Like this Drop Quote one. With a drop quote puzzle, you need to drop the letters to form words. But here you have to do funky add and subtract before you get a message out of it... Actually, it doesn't seem so hard written out. :P Another annoying one was Hospital Visit. I mean, finding random medical abbreviations from those descriptions is a little crazy. How are we supposed to figure out what "must take her medicine before eating" is in abbreviated form? Not only that, but the patient names in the answer aren't even the same as in the question.

Anyway, ended up twenty-first here, which isn't too bad. That's 133^rd overall. Like last year, we really dropped in the last hour or so, but what can you do. I guess I can be happy that we're the first team with the score of 170.

First Day of Work

Well, first day at Broadcom, that is. Not too big of a deal. Most things were the same. Except we were on a new network setup. Which means no access to the AMD company intranet, and more importantly, no access to Office Communicator. Whatever will I do when I need to talk to one of you?

I also wasted some of the day trying to figure out my email password. We got new Broadcom-y emails, for which we set the password a few weeks ago. Normally, this would be fine, but that day really sucked, sleep-wise, so I didn't remember what I set at all. Tried calling the IT desk, but it didn't seem to work. We thought it was just busy from everyone forgetting their passwords, but actually there was some long-distance code we needed to enter for it to dial.

Anyway, that's about all that happened on my second "first day". Of course, I did some real work, too. But I don't think that's as interesting.

Last Day at AMD!

Yep, that's right. Today was my last day of work at AMD. Now, don't go jumping to conclusions that I quit PEY or anything. Like I said before, the DTV division was sold to Broadcom. Well, here's to my first day at the new company tomorrow. It doesn't look like a whole lot will change just yet anyway. Sure, there's a new network, new email address, new badge, but it's still the same building, and I'll still go to the cafeteria for lunch.

A couple of weeks ago, we got our offer package. There sure were a lot of forms to fill out. It was just like starting a new job entirely. Fun thing though, they stickied the locations for the signatures. Just take a look at all these stickers!

On the other hand, now I have a whole bunch of "Sign Here" stickers. There were thirteen signatures necessary. I wonder what I'll do with them.

To round this post out, I've got one more photo from AMD. A little sign from outside the 1^st floor offices in 33CV. I guess I can't exactly go randomly wandering around there. If you didn't know, only 2^nd and 3^rd floors are for DTV. So I guess now we aren't supposed to go to the offices or the production area downstairs.

Small World

So, the Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students just sent me some mail. However, the name was certainly not for anyone in our house. My dad was about to send it back when I looked at it. And as it turns out, I did know the person to whom it was addressed. It had Kirill's name, and my address.

Out of all those thousands of part-time students (not just PEY's), that little glitch happened to pick someone I knew. Small world, eh?

Intermittent Bugs

I hate intermittent bugs.

You know, those ones that never always happen in a reproduceable manner. I had to test this bug that seems to happen 1 time in 20+ tries. Not to mention that I needed to do it from a cold boot, so it took 1-2 minutes per trial. Fortunately, I was able to automate it so I didn't need do anything except hit the power button every time it worked.

Twenty tries and I get nothing. So I send an email saying so, and that's just when the bug shows up. Then had to try a few different versions to figure out when it was introduced. But in the end it seemed nobody else could reproduce the bug (though someone could before).

Swapped development boards with someone and couldn't reproduce the bug after 50 tries... What a waste of a day...

Expensive Toys

So I'm sure you've seen that I have those 6 monitors and maybe a TV or two to play with at work. We all know how much those cost, a few hundred per monitor, maybe a thousand or two for a TV.

Anyway, a couple days ago, I got this card to set up in a computer. It's a modulator card that takes some video file input and has the ability to output in various modulation schemes, like 8VSB, DVB, QAM64, and a few others. I was told it was expensive, but I didn't think it was too much. It's pretty cool, because I can set up whatever type of input signal I want. So I happened to find the packing slip with the box.

The packing slip also had the bill: the card cost as much as 3 or 4 (regular) TV's!! Good thing it's safe in the box... ;)