Thursday, October 9, 2008

late late

Thursday was a different day.

I went to the doctor for my sore arm. I have bicep tendonitis. Filled prescription for an anti-inflamatory steroid. Filled it at CVS. Now we are on file at all CVS drug store. It hurt a lot this afternoon. I slept a bit.

Lunch with Joe. He brought his SmartPen that he bought at Java One this year. It is absolutely magic! I simply must have one - but I can't afford it - not really. But it is so cool!

What I really need is a Wacom Cintique pen display (cheapest one is $1000). I may be able to get that in place of my tablet PC that was stolen from my house when the needy people broke into our house on 9/11. Luckily, the tablet PC and the MacBook were covered by insurance. Before I do, though - I will commit to a specific application that I will FINISH.

Took pain killers at 2 PM and again just before bed.

The LexMark I2C issue is going as I expected but hoped it would not. The AE group was not able to get their alternate sample code to work either. The escalated the issue to Japan. But it might be too late for that. Luckily, LexMark may have an issue with their schematic that buys us a little time. But most of the FAEs will be at DevCon next week, and I'll be in Ottawa. Will I bring my ESE laptop with me in case I have to work on it? Hey - I'm on vacation (sort of)!

I have the hiccups ("hick-coughs"). 

Wikipedia "LLVM" (Low Level Virtual Machine). Ah... Apple is trying to compete with Java. Well, not so much compete as copy some of the great ideas incorporated into Java. No wonder they dropped full-class support for Java in XCode 3.0.

I am going to start using XCode again - now that I have a MacBook again. ANd I might even write an app for the iPod Touch.

I'm tired ^^ must get sleep ^^ must be in good shape tomorrow to take a swipe at bit-banging the I2C interface. (proof of concept)

Signing off Friday 2:31 AM,

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

early early morning, Wednesday.
My right arm hurts so badly I can only type with it resting on the edge of the Mac. Ouch. I took a vicodin at about 4:40. I hope it kicks in soon.
5:10 and I think I'm starting to feel groggy.
I have to lie down.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

TWO

I hate the cAPS lOCK key.  At least it has a little green LED on it. Macs are wonderfully design computers, aren't they? I wonder if Apple will ever design a computer without a CAPS LOCK key. We have the technology.

This is my second blog post, also from Panera. Half a sandwich and a bowl of soup. Mmmmm. I feel satisfied now. Back to work.

Just one day has gone by and my right arm is hurting like hell. Above the elbow, around the bicep. It started hurting when I woke up this morning. Maybe I slept on it in a weird way. It especially hurts when I try to move my forearm up or to the right against any resistance (even just its own weight).

Monday, October 6, 2008

It was a hard weekend. The whole weekend. But I enjoyed it. Writing code for little pieces of silicon can never be boring.

But things didn't go so well. The I2C protocol is simple enough - and in fact quite elegant - but the support IP on the microcontroller I was dealing with (one that is cheap enough to do what needed to be done) is more obscure than the protocol itself.

I got a lot done on it, but I did not get it working. The receive interrupt just will not fire, despite setting everything up correctly and injecting an I2C stream from another microcontroller.

So now I have asked for help and am hoping someone else can see what I did wrong, if in fact I did anything wrong. I hope I didn't - but then - I hope I did.