The Year in Review ... Jobwise

I just had my yearly Performance Assessment Review.

The yearly Performance Assessment Review is an exercise in wishful thinking. It is supposed to assist employees in setting goals and evaluating their progress on achieving those goals. But when you are working in an industry that focuses on product rather than process (or people), what is the point?

Companies are not in business to promote the welfare of their employees. They are in business to provide an income stream for owners and investors. If a by-product of this effort is to improve the marketability of their employees, that's a bonus effect, not a targeted goal. The ideal situation (for a Company) would be one in which the employees remain as fixed costs and known entities, producing a specific, targeted level of Quality at a known price, forever.

Companies, for the most part, admit that there is some advantage in giving some attention to employee satisfaction. Contented employees perform their jobs well. Discontented employees cause problems. The trick is balancing the contentedness and discontentedness without spending a great deal of money.

The industry in which I find myself is at a particular disadvantage in this regard because it requires employees with special knowledge, i.e. embedded systems. Most 'programmers' being trained in Universities these days are not learning embedded systems, at least not in school, not unless they are also in an Electrical Engineering course. They are learning Windows or Unix or Web-based programming. These are not directly applicable to embedded systems and avionics, although we could certainly use people with that knowledge base. We'd prefer people with backgrounds in aeronautics, microprocessor design, and hardware, though, since those are the issues that arise in the day-to-day operations of the company.

Specialized employees require special treatment. The Company's answer to this requirement is to pretend that they actually give a rip about their employees' career goals. So they stage these Performance Assessments under the guise of 'Career Management', when in actuality they're looking to see who is producing and who is not, so they can 'trim the fat'.

But we're already at a disadvantage because of the way contracts work in this industry.

How Contracts Work in Aerospace

Theoretically, contracts for avionics systems are bid and selected based on technical merit, risk factors, and cost/schedule projections. In reality, they are based on cost/schedule projections and sales/marketing hype.

Here’s the way it works.

Some customer – the Air Force, for example – decides that it’s time for an airplane to be brought up-to-date. The avionics in the airplane are over twenty years old. The cockpit is still using old-fashioned mechanical dials and instruments. Yuck! But the commercial world has lots of wonderful new technology that could greatly simplify navigation and communication. So somebody in the Air Force with friends in Congress pushes a Modernization Plan. Congress funds a Study to review the aircraft, and says, My Goodness! How could we let our Brave Boys in Blue fly those ancient museum pieces? Let’s get them some new equipment! And we’ll assign X million dollars for the effort.

And, oh, by the way, there’s this company in my constituency that would be perfect for the contract...

So then they (the Air Force, or “Customer”) put a bunch of pilots in a room and asks, What needs to be changed on this plane? And the pilots start listing all the things they’d like to have, and they come up with a preliminary Wish List. Then the Customer sends out this Wish List to a set of Industry Consultants who decide what is and isn’t possible. Unfortunately, some of these Consultants are also Sales and Marketing folks, or “S&M”, as we like to call them.

The S&M folks have a tendency to ignore Reality in lieu of Sales Projections. In fact, they generally operate by taking the rough budget figure assigned by Congress (this is a draft number which reflects the estimate of how much Congress can afford rather than a locked-down number tied to a specific product) and saying, What can we come up with that will cost this much money?

The reason they do this is that the yearly budget allocations are based on history of past spending rather than on projected costs; so if you don’t spend all the allocation from the last budget, they’ll cut it for the next budget. After all, you didn’t really need all that money last year, so why should we give you more this year? They ignore the obvious things, like inflation, maintenance, unexpected loss, etc.

So they break down the X million dollars into a sequence of Scheduled Milestones, like Developing Requirements, Getting Bids, Developing Prototypes, Developing Real Hardware, Testing, Acceptance, etc. They spend a few months writing up papers describing what they want, and they put these out in the “Public Arena” so the major avionics contractors can take a look at them and come up with proposals. Then they review all the proposals to decide which contractor has the best one.

Typically, they select the contractor with the lowest bid on the system which is closest to what they think they want. Unfortunately, all they have so far is a bunch of Sales and Marketing spiel which was based on offhand remarks by engineers who were sitting around dreaming one day, thinking, if we had unlimited time and money, what kind of system could we put together?

[These are the same engineers who, in 1995, when asked how long it would take to design and build an embedded operating system version of Windows 3.1, said, "About two weeks." Really. I actually worked for a company that staked their future on this statement. Two years later, they were still not done. Eventually, the project was shelved without ever seeing the light of day.]

So S&M folks write up this nifty-keen proposal, based on hearsay from the engineers, and create a way-cool PowerPoint dog-and-pony show, and perhaps even a preliminary prototype sample system that has blinky-blinky lights and some cool PC simulations to show the “pilot’s view” with CRT instrumentation instead of those clunky old hardware instruments, and the Customer swoons and claps and signs the first Big Check, and the project is off and running.

The Development Process

Now comes the Development Process. This is where we parse the project up into its requisite "Phases", like Requirements Phase, Design Phase, Implementation Phase, Test Phase, and Delivery Phase.

In this beginning, the pilots who came up with the first Wish List are key to the Requirements Phase. Their palms start sweating and their tongues start hanging out when they see the fancy CRT instrumentation and the flight simulations and the clutter reduction and the wonderful, seamless cockpit management system that will (obviously) solve all their problems and make mission planning a snap. But ... once they’ve signed on the dotted line, that’s the last you’ll hear from them until the Test Phase. Because they’ve already written their Wish List, and as far as they’re concerned, that’s the Requirements. Make it do what we want it to do. And don’t bother us with all the little details.

So you take their Wish List and have a few meetings to convert it into something resembling Requirements. And for a while everyone is happy. Once Requirements are documented, preliminary design begins. The Company's engineers start figuring out how to do the things they've been asked to do. It's just a matter of time before they get it all done. Just time. Right?

The Hidden Agenda

Well, not quite. You see, there's this thing called The Hidden Agenda. The Company, you see, has a Vision, and this Vision does not involve creating a host of little customized systems for each of their Customers. That is plainly not efficient use of the technology. No, they want to leverage the technology to create a System that will solve everyone's problems, something that they can spend a lot of money on at one time - hopefully someone else's money - and then make duplicates of it to sell to everyone else, with extremely high profit margins.

So the whole time the Customer was chattering about What They Want, the Company was politely nodding their collective heads, all the while wondering how to shape this project to be as generic as possible. They are thinking about other Customers' needs, and how it might be possible to make this new project work for everyone.

This, in and of itself, is actually a good thing, because having a single platform solution for multiple Customers is very efficient, reducing costs for each subsequent development effort. But - and this is a big but - they did not bid the project to be generic. The Customer would never have signed on for a project of that magnitude, because the Law of Software Development states that The More Generic the Software, the More Complex It Must Be. And that is a Law that cannot be subverted.

Why is this? you might ask. Simply put, it is more difficult to write a software function that can handle multiple circumstances rather than one that is designed to handle a specific circumstance.

For example, imagine you are writing software for a stop light. The simplest stop light is one which operates via a synchronized delay, turning green for a specific number of seconds, then amber, then red. Each color has a specified number of seconds of "on" time, and the color sequence is specific: green, then amber, then red.

Testing the software is simple. It can be done by observation with a stopwatch. It either follows the timed sequence, or it doesn't. Pass/Fail. Yes/No.

But what if you want to design it so that it handles different traffic flow patterns at different times of the day? Now you have to have a real-time clock controlling different time patterns. Now you have to verify that the real-time clock value is valid. Now you have to test it under varying traffic situations, at different times.

Generic functions are complex, and complex software development is very risky, both to costs and schedules.

And Customers don't like Risk.

So sometimes the Company isn't completely honest in revealing the Risk. Because that might reveal their Hidden Agenda to the Customer.

The Customer’s intent was to save oodles of money by utilizing a “commercial off-the-shelf” (COTS) system, which normally means a system which is already proven, available, with a known success record. But there is no COTS system yet - the Contractor wants to create the system with the Customer’s money. Do you see the obvious conflict here? You can’t save money – in fact, you never save money – by being the first customer for a new product. You get to endure all the Growing Pains. You get to find all the bugs. You get to spend all the up-front money. You get to be the Guinea Pig.

The Triangle Law

There is a rule in the Software Industry called The Triangle Law. It states that there are three variables that constitute a project: Cost, Quality, and Schedule. You can control one or two of them, but not all three. That is, you can specify a cost and aim for a Quality, but once those values are set, your schedule is determined and cannot be adjusted without affecting the other two. If you afterward try to adjust the schedule – say, to cut back on the hours assigned to complete the project – you will affect Quality negatively. If you try to increase Quality, you will push up the Costs or move out the Schedule. It is a three-way balancing act. There are no exceptions.

If you are the first customer for a product, there is no way to estimate Costs or Schedule or even Quality. There are too many unkowns. How will you know how much it will cost to build something if you’ve never built one before? How can you project a schedule when you don’t know how long it will take to test a product you’ve never built before? How can you determine the Quality of a product when you aren’t really sure what it’s going to do when you start testing it?

There is a sublevel to that Triangle Law which is specific to Avionics projects, or any project which mixes hardware and software. That is, both hardware and software are subject to their own Triangle Laws for development (Cost x Quality x Schedule), and these effects are reciprocal. It works like this: You can estimate a software schedule if you are developing software on a known hardware platform (that is, one that has been previously developed and tested). You can estimate a hardware schedule if you are going to run already-working software on a new hardware platform. But you cannot estimate a schedule for software or a hardware development if you are developing new software and new hardware at the same time. There are too many variables. If you run into a hardware problem, fixing it will impact the software – which means you have to stop software development in order to evaluate the impact to the software of any changes you’ve made to the hardware. And if you decide that you can’t fix the hardware due to costs or technical reasons, then you have to come up with a fix in software. And that’s the worst kind of fix, because it’s really a kludge to work around a hardware limitation which was not apparent during the initial design phase.

Either way, you’ve impacted the Schedule. And the Cost. And the Quality.

The Actuality

So. The hardware is designed. Some preliminary software is designed to work on it. It doesn’t work quite like we’d expected. There are a few hardware design changes required in order to get the software to work correctly. The hardware is redesigned (or “patched”). The software is changed. It almost works. A few software patches are thrown in to make things work a little better.

The Customer wants something in their lab, something they can start testing. They have their own schedules to meet. A preliminary set of hardware and software is delivered. It doesn’t work quite like they’d thought – because they failed to mention some critical design requirements to the Contractor. Meetings are held. Voices are raised. Designs are reviewed in more detail. More changes. New hardware. New software. New schedules.

It’s impossible to make anything useful out of this kind of project. No matter what you do, you’re tied to a millstone. You can't catch up. You can never deliver anything of Quality, because there simply isn't time. You establish a reputation for being late, or being shoddy, or both. And how do you overcome the stigma of the millstone project when that Annual Review comes around?

Oh, sure, everyone knows how hard you work, and they know that you are doing your best to put out Quality product, but none of that really helps when the Big Picture is a project heading south. Because you are too distracted by putting out fires and keeping up with impossible schedules to give a flying flip about career advancement and skill set enhancement and process improvement and all the other buzzwords that come up during a Performance Assessment. Because it is all based on the goals you set last year when you thought things were under control and you would be able to spend some time thinking about those pie-in-the-sky things.

My Review in Review

I had three main goals last year:

1. Support Internal and External Customers with Documentation and Training.
2. Train the new guys (2) in my group so they could be useful.
3. Update the Training Curriculum to keep it up-to-date with the changes in the Software, which included converting the Training Materials from classroom-based to web-based.

Of those three goals, only one was accomplished with any great success: training the new guys. Unfortunately, it was accomplished so well that the new guys were assigned more duties which eventually precluded their being of any use in the Training and Support group, which put it back entirely into my hands.

The Support task continues because the project continues; it is difficult to judge the quality of the job at this point, given that the software hasn't stabilized to the point of being reasonably supported yet.

The Curriculum has been sidelined by more "important" issues.

So the Performance Assessment was a bit of a let-down. I looked at my goals and realized that, in reality, there wasn't any solid evidence of accomplishment, other than the fact that the Customer hadn't complained about my level of Support (in fact, they had been somewhat complimentary).

In reality, my goal over the past year has been to keep feeding and housing my family. And other than the fact that the pay is good and the people are nice and the toys are fun, there’s really nothing career-enhancing about this job. It’s just a job.

But I suppose it beats sweeping floors for a living.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

My mother was born on this day in 1937.

Out of curiosity, I got a list of other people who were born in that same year. I was surprised at some of them.

Madeleine Albright. Sergio Aragones. Max Baer, Jr. Ned Beatty. Warren Beatty. Don Bluth. Dyan Cannon. George Carlin. Billy Carter. Johnnie Cochran. Peter Cook. Bill Cosby. Yvonne Craig. Robert Crippen. Sandy Dennis. Bobby Driscoll. Kitty Dukakis. Bob Eubanks. Don Everly. Freddy Fender. Tom Flores. Jane Fonda. Morgan Freeman. Merle Haggard. Dustin Hoffman. Anthony Hopkins. Saddam Hussein. Waylon Jennings. Sally Kellerman. Marty Krofft. Linda Lavin. Gary Lockwood. Trina Lopez. James MacArthur. Garrett Morris. Jack Nicholson. Margaret O’Brien. Richard Petty. Suzanne Pleshette. Colin Powell. Thomas Pynchon. Vanessa Redgrave. Jerry Reed. Kenny Rogers. Charles Schwab. Ridley Scott. Fred Silverman. Tommy Smothers. Boris Spassky. Barbara Steele. Paul Stookey. Tom Stoppard. Loretta Swit. Marlo Thomas. Hunter S. Thompson. Frankie Valli. Joseph Wambaugh. Billy Dee Williams. Nancy Wilson. Jo Anne Worley. Roger Zelazny. Mort Zuckerman.

Lots of famous people. Lots of successful people. Lots of messed-up people. Lots of people who, given the opportunity, might trade in the life that they had for a life like the one my mother has had, one that has been devoted to helping other people rather than helping themselves. There is a lot to be said for not having your mug splashed on the pages of every newspaper in the country, or being trailed by reporters everywhere you go, or having every word out of your mouth analyzed and cross-examined and dissected, or being held up to the light of History to be judged and found wanting.

There is a lot to be said for having the intelligence and compassion and ability not only to work a full-time job, but to help raise a family as well, to put a husband through school, to help him see his dreams come true, to stand beside him every step of the way, to acknowledge one’s own shortcomings and forgive those of others, to work hard at a job that can be joyful and sad and happy and tragic, to experience the highs and lows of birth and death, sometimes within the same day, to come home to diapers and sickness and clutter and frustration and teenagers and bills and endless lists of things to do, and still manage to keep a smile on one’s face.

That’s my Mom.

Favorite memory of my Mom: standing in the kitchen of our house back in Richmond, washing dishes and talking, talking, talking. It’s always a joy to talk to Mom because we can talk about anything. She likes to talk and she likes to listen; she isn’t critical or judgemental and doesn’t take you too seriously when she knows you’re just venting. She’s easygoing and laid back and knows how to laugh.

She’s also a gadget person, which probably explains why she’s been able to keep up with technology (email, etc.). She likes cool gadgets and interesting tools that just might make life a little easier, a little more fun. It was always a blast to see what kinds of things she would find in the FingerHut catalog.

Well, Mom, you’ll be happy to know that you’ve passed that characteristic down to at least one of your grandchildren. James is a total gadget freak, too, which is why we’re keeping the FingerHut catalog far, far away from him! And next time he wants to try out some nifty gadgets, we’re sending him down to your house to play with your stuff!

Happy Birthday, Mom!

A Word about Birthdays

I turned forty-three yesterday, and it was very confusing because forty-three is such an odd number.

It's not a watershed birthday; it's not a hallmark birthday; it's not a turning point or anything. It's sort of an ordinary birthday (if any birthday can be said to be ordinary).

Birthdays haven't meant much to me since my early twenties, insofar as a day to celebrate anything. We all get "born". It's not that big a deal to have been born, at least as far as differentiating one person from another. It sometimes serves as a reminder that we should be thankful for the people in our lives, I suppose. It gives others a reason to shower love and honor and gifts on our heads. It's fun to have an excuse for a party, to share good times with good friends. But as far as being significant or meaningful...

My family knows just how to celebrate my birthday. Low-key. Maybe some cupcakes with a little candle. Maybe a small gift or two. Drawings and cards from the kids. Cards from the family. Just a little bit of fun in an otherwise ordinary day.

I stayed home for my birthday so that it could be spent with the family, with my lovely wife and irrepressible children. We went through our usual routine of homeschool (third day running!) and snack-time and game-playing and lunchtime and nap time and going down to the pool to hang out and splash around, then a nice dinner and movie (from the Pink Panther collection) and a reading from Harry Potter and reading emails and surfing the net - and then it was all over.

It was a very nice day.

The best days are those spent with my family. If I were to die tomorrow, it would all have been worth it because my children give me hugs every morning when they get up, and my wife kisses me every morning as she's heading for the coffee pot, and even when things don't go the way we would like and kids are fussy and parents are cranky and we don't like each other very much, we always remind each other that we love each other, because we are family.

And even though most days I have to run off to work just when things are starting to get interesting, and I miss the majority of the day, there is nothing in the world to which I aspire more than to walk through the door at the end of the workday and hug my children again, and give a kiss to my lovely wife one more time, and be with them for a few more hours.

And even if I never accomplish anything else the rest of my life, even if all the dreams in my head never come true, it will all have been worth it because I have a family, and we love each other, and we take care of each other, and we worry about each other, and we pray for each other, and we help each other to be better than we could ever be alone.

Perhaps that's the best thing about having a birthday, is just to remind me that I've had another wonderful year to spend with my family, to give me a day to reminisce over all the memories we've shared over the last three hundred and sixty-five days, and to give thanks to God for the opportunity to be here with them.

Thank you, Lord, for my loving family.

The Best Surprise

The Home School Experiment went over surprisingly well on the First Day.

Perhaps it was due to the fact that we had prepped them so far in advance, but they did not sniffle and fuss and fume over it. In fact, they seemed rather eager to get to work. They ate breakfast, got dressed, cleaned up their rooms (!), went downstairs, and got right to it.

The first assignment was easy: read for fifteen minutes, writing down all the words that are unfamiliar. Since each of the children had selected a challenging book (Mary was reading the first Harry Potter book), they had substantial lists in a short amount of time.

Next, look up each word in the dictionary to find the definition, and write it down. This was a little more difficult, especially since we didn't have enough dictionaries for each child to have one. Which meant sharing. Which meant waiting. Which meant an opportunity to get bored. Which meant an opportunity to get in trouble.

Note 1: Make sure each child has a dictionary. Preferably identical copies.

Next, Break Time for stretching exercises. Especially the hands, since we're going to be doing a bit of writing next.

Game 1: Children are broken up into two groups. Each group gets a pair of indoor balls (i.e. soft). Each group practices tossing balls back and forth (playing "Catch") to help stretch finger muscles and limber up the arms.

Next, SIT DOWN and write each unfamiliar word ten times in your best handwriting. Father will walk around and inspect your work, and if he feels you aren't writing "up to snuff", he'll make you do it again. This will be repeated until Father feels you are actually doing your best work.

Note 2: It helps to have the children first "draw" the letters slowly, as if they are doing artwork, and then gradually increase in speed.

Note 3: Writing a set of identical letters in a vertical column - the first letter of a word - and then adding the second letter in a second vertical column, and repeating this until all ten copies of a word have been written, is a violation of Good Form. Words must be written out in their entirety before moving on to the next line! Mary, this means YOU! No cheating!

Following inspection and approval, all children are ushered outside for a bit of physical activity, consisting of soccer drills.

Drill 1: Children are instructed in the proper methods of kicking the ball using a toe kick, a side kick, a lateral side kick, and a reverse kick.

Drill 2: Children are instructed in the proper method for manuevering the ball downfield and back with short kicks.

Drill 3: Children are instructed to pass the ball back and forth to each other with short kicks.

Drill 4: Children combine drills 2 and 3 to manuever the ball downfield and back with a partner.

After exercise is complete, students return to the classroom to work on a short math drill worksheet, each appropriate to the age of the student.

When Math is complete, a short poetry reading is performed, where each student is allowed to select a Silly Poem and read it out loud to the class.

Afterward, it's time for Snacks! And we're done!

==
Tomorrow, we'll get some History in...

Thursday the Poster Saw Red

It's very difficult to get excited about work these days; just an endless, ongoing, monotonous episode of answering questions and writing documents and trying to catch up on all the technical issues that come up in a complex aircraft environment.

And there's the distraction of home school.

School is officially over for the kids today. It's only a half-day, and they aren't going to be doing anything in particular, but for some reason, it still counts.

Don't get me started on the number of days the teachers have taken for "in-service" days. It's a wonder the kids have learned anything at all this year.

Frankly, we're a bit disappointed at their progress. And we're going to do something about it. We're going to try a little Experiment.

We're going to start home schooling.

Not full-bore. Not yet. Just a couple hours each day during the summer, to find out where the kids are at, to help them along a little bit further. To keep them challenged. To get them where we think they ought to be.

Our fear is that the kids are getting bored. James is certainly getting bored. His grades took a bit of a dip this last quarter, and it wasn't in areas where he has had trouble in the past. His handwriting has gotten sloppy. He has been rushing through his assignments, being careless, just wanting to get it done so he can go somewhere and do something else, anything else.

Adam needs to move further along in math. He is ready for pre-Algebra concepts, but they have not been ready for him at school.

Deborah and Mary need to keep practicing their writing. Their reading skills far exceed expectations, but they still need some basic (unfortunately repetitous) work on spelling and grammer and handwriting. And I’d like them – especially Deborah – to work on reading out loud.

Then there’s History and Geography and Home Economics and House Maintenance and Sportsmanship and Athletics. There are so many things they need to learn!

And there are field trips we’d like to take, including Greenfield Village and Chicago and Richmond and all points in-between.

Unfortunately, there’s this problem of work. I still have to work, you know. That whole paycheck thing. And I’m torn. I’d much rather be home helping the kids learn, but there is the matter of paying bills.

And I hate to leave it all in Cheryl’s lap. Sure, she’s a professional teacher, but that’s still a bit much to be asking her to whip up lessons for four kids in four different age groups in all those different areas, and keep on top of them while doing all the other things she has to do during the summer.

So, like I said, we’re trying an experiment. I’m going to stay home a little longer in the mornings and get the homeschool thing going, since I’m the morning parent around here, and then when Cheryl’s had her coffee and the caffeine has taken effect, she can take over while I run to work.

I’m going to start them off with their reading and writing assignments, do some basic dictionary drills and handwriting exercises, then have them take a break to do some physical workouts (soccer, volleyball, ball-tossing, etc.). Then Cheryl will go through the History and Geography and Math topics, ‘cause she’s really good at Math and History.

So we’ll start off with a couple hours in the mornings and see how it goes. Whether it works or not, it’ll be interesting!

The Nothingness of Wednesdays

Wednesdays always remind me of Winnie-the-Pooh.

If you remember the Blustery Day, it was "Winds-Day". And the wind was, indeed, blowing.

Today it is just a little bit windy, a little bit cooler than normal, with cloudy skies. The kids are almost out of school -- just one more day! And for us adults in the workforce, it's Hump Day. As in, if you can get through Wednesday with your sanity in place, you've gotten over The Hump.

I'm not sure that my sanity is in place anymore -- it's been missing for ages -- but I'm glad that the week is just about half over, and soon it will be Friday and I won't have to sit at work while dreaming of being at home playing with my computer gear; I'll actually be able to be at home playing with my computer gear. In fact, I can hear it calling me right now: "Come play with me! Come play with me!"

But it'll have to wait. There are more pressing issues to attend.

Last night, while sorting through things in the office, I pulled out my old box of motherboards.

It saddens me out a bit to think of all those old motherboards sitting in that little box, doing nothing. At one time, they were the latest and greatest piece of powerful PC processing, and now they're so much toxin-laden residue. Can't even toss them away, because it would cost more than the boards are worth.

Looking through them, gazing fondly at the chips scattered across them, I tried to remember each one's story, when it had been used, what it had been used for, when it had finally bit the dust. Curious, and because some of them didn't have any documentation, I went searching on the web to discover something about their history. First I found this chart on the web that outlines when the Intel processors came out:

1978 - 8086
1979 - 8088
1981 - 80186
1982 - 80286
1985 - 80386
1989 - 80486
1993 - Pentium
1995 - Pentium Pro
1996 - Pentium II
1997 - Pentium MMX
1998 - Celeron (stripped-down Pentium IIs)
1999 - Pentium III
2000 - Pentium IV

Then I looked over the boards and made a list of them, along with their estimated manufacture dates.

1990: AMD 386 DX/DXL-33
1990: Intel 80486
1993: Intel 80486DX-33
1993: Intel 80486 (Dell)
1993: Intel Pentium 90
1993: AMD 486 DX2-80
1995: AMD 5x86-P75
1998: AMD K6-2
1999: AMD K6-2/450
1999: AMD K6-2/475

Hmmm. Looks like I'm more of an AMD geek than an Intel geek. Probably due to the fact that the Intel chips run a bit on the expensive side. And I've always been for the underdog.

Note that I didn't actually purchase these motherboards in the years indicated. Most of the motherboards in the box were purchased "used", because I've been very hesitant to go out and buy brand-new stuff (due to the $$ involved). In fact, if I remember correctly, the first of these was purchased a few years after we got married, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 1995 or 1996. And some of them were given to me by other geeky friends in lieu of money owed for various things. Always better to swap hard-ware than hard-cash!

Some of these boards have gone bad. Some might still work. But these days, what's the point? I'd have to go back and find all the documentation and set them up in cases or test rigs and then try them out, and if they almost work but not quite, I'd have to try and figure out what's wrong with them, and although that might be fun to kill some time on a Saturday evening, usually there's too much going on around here for that kind of thing -- too many other more important projects.

So I'm still thinking of framing them and hanging them up in the office, so at some point I can look back on them and dream of the golden past, when processors were slow and my mind was fast, instead of the other way around.

Where have you been, Danny Boy?

I've been tired all day, as if the trip to Long Beach last week had been really tough. And it wasn't. And I got back Saturday. So why am I so tired?

Could be the pollen. There's been lots of pollinating plants around lately, and in order to avoid annoying my cube neighbors, I've been toking up on the usual antihistamines. Otherwise they are bothered by the constant "clearing of the sinuses".

Or it could be the old problem of trying to figure out what I really want to be doing at this stage of my life. Sitting in a cube writing technical documents, while amusing for a time, is not really a career path for someone who geeks out on hardware. I'd rather be in the lab creating robots.

But the bills must be paid, so here I am. Or, rather, there I am. During the day. Typing, answering silly phone calls and emails from customers, running into the lab occasionally to test something out (to make sure that the documentation is accurate), bothering other people while they're trying to get work done.

And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking about circuits I'd like to build.