QUIERO IR AL MUNDO FELIZ . . . Tu lo prometiste!

ES LA CANCIÓN . . .

Test system blew up on Wednesday. I'm the assigned fixer-upper. So, it has a card cage containing roughly 320 instruments, roughly 8 per board, for a total of roughly 40 boards. Whatever disaster occurred, immediately made four instruments, on four different boards, fail.

I could order new ones, but these systems are notorious for ambiguous results -- a failure might not actually be a failure, just a problem with electrical contact. And since the boards are roughly $3000 each, there's money riding on that particular gamble.

I started doing in-depth diagnostics and troubleshooting.

Within about two hours I'd managed to find major failures on 8 more boards. The lady who manages our accounts and writes the checks had eyes like saucers at the thought of $60K in stuff to purchase, like, immediately. Because we only have two of these testers, and we have two projects that are on the verge of release, waiting on completion of the test programs we're putting together on these testers, so they *have* to be fixed.

Which is another variable: we calculate the cost of a tester not running to be about $500/hour, so if it takes me four hours to diagnose a board, it would've been cheaper (with shipping time and my time included) to just replace it.

But only if it was actually the board that was broken, because they're all talking to each other, and each calibrates itself relying on another board as the calibration unit, so under certain circumstances, one bad board in the wrong location can propagate bad measurements throughout the entire system. It's a series of equations with more variables than equations, but the result, however you estimate it, involves a lot of zeroes prefaced with a dollar sign.

The interesting part was that I now know enough that I can swap boards and measurement instruments in a systematic way so I can push errors down to the end of the ladder, in a manner of speaking: through a sort of binary search I can force the machine to divulge where the errors actually reside.

It turns out they're Heisenberg errors. Every time I managed to figure up a test condition that would unequivocally determine on which board the error resided, the error in question disappeared: both boards passed.

But binary-searching through 12 failing boards using the remaining boards takes a *long* time, and this afternoon, at about 4:30, I finally managed to track down a single stuck relay on one board that was, actually, bad. Everything else was either connectivity errors or errors propagated from that one bad relay.

I whacked it with a wrench, and it started working again.

(Not trustworthy at all: the relay needs replacing and as detailed before, they won't let me do that so we get to shell out $3K for them to replace the relay on which I stuck a little red arrow that says "this one dammit" so they don't just send the board off to someone else in its semifunctional state.)

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In other other news, it occurred to me today, while reading something someone had posted about Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow, that if a sports-star atheist spent a lot of time on the field and in front of television cameras yelling about how God didn't exist, he'd be reviled, lectured on being offensive, and told that outside of sports his opinions were meaningless. I know the situations aren't parallel, but I'm less clear on why they're not parallel.

(I note as an edit that I'm not critical of people for expressing their beliefs publicly, in the slightest. I encourage it. However, a Scientologist doing so is considered eccentric, a Muslim doing so a threat, and an atheist doing so a pushy jerk: I'm thinking about our reception, rather than the act itself.)

Ayer cabias en mi corazón y te escondiste en un rincón del otro lado ..... hey dime a donde vas y si sabes tu destino?

A host of flying robots play Monty Norman's "James Bond Theme".

I wonder if that's going to be in the next movie...

(Spotted via Twitter, but originator lost alas due to some glitchiness on my part)

I howl in pain... at a lost love. Will the moon rise for this lonely soul....on Valentine's Day?

Tiempo de paz!

I don't know, I just had a desire to rant about something and this something has been in a tiny corner of my tiny mind for a while. I'm sure at some point or another, anyone can say that language barriers are a bitch. They suck. I think mostly they create disadvantages, but I guess there are some advantages too. It's a double edged sword, though, since a person can't speak, read and write on every possible language on Earth (which apparently a quick google search says there are about 7,000 languages in the world) so anyone is bound to come across something that they want to understand but can't because they don't speak that language. Advantages can be that there might be more literature written in one language than another, for example. Some languages are barely spoken except for a few hundred or thousand people, so there won't be many books translated to their language. Those people may have to learn another more widely spoken language as well, and that's ok.

So where is the problem then? The problem that I sometimes find myself thinking about is when people use language as some sort of a status. They think that if they speak a certain language it somehow makes them better than people who don't. Of course, that ties into nationalism and racism, which are both bad though I have come across some people who tried to argue that nationalism is ok and I just don't know if I should have wasted my time trying to explain to them why it's not. I'm not so smart anyways.

"Language snobs" I see a lot online, since the World Wide Web is world wide and people say and do things online that they would never do to anyone in the non-virtual world. There are many people who translate things from one language to another and are cool about it. They don't act all important or like everyone who reads their stuff is now somehow indebted to them. And that's nice. But of course there are those that don't and it's annoying. Usually, I don't read their stuff if they want to act that way, since they are in no way, shape important. I can live without their shit, they didn't even write the original shit so it's not theirs in the first place, and there will always be others who are nice about translating that shit. That's the thing about a language: there are many people who speak it. Create your own language and our own stuff and translate it. Then maybe you'll be a little more important. Right now, those people act childish, and maybe that's who they are - a bunch of kids - and I'm being a meanie.

Anyways, yup, that's my rant: I think people who think that speaking another language makes them better than those who don't need to reassess their heads. Besides it being discriminatory (even if you don't agree that it's racist or nationalistic, it's just discriminating based on something that someone might not be able to do since a person can't do everything) , it also shows their own lack of confidence in themselves that they have to hold on to anything that can make them feel that they are better than someone else. They grab on to languages, things that most human beings over the age of two are capable of using (even if a little). Really it's just sad, kind of maybe not that important, and probably not even worth four paragraphs. But oh well.

Maybe someone will read this and think about it a little. Maybe someone who thinks they can act like shit because of this might think about their attitude a little. Maybe not.

¿Que es la navidad?

Es la ternura del pasado,
el valor del presente
y la esperanza del futuro.

Es el deseo más sincero
de que cada taza se rebose
con bendiciones ricas y eternas,
y de que cada camino nos lleve a la paz.

que estas navidades sean tiempos de amor y reflexion ,
muchas bendiciones un besooo inmesoo muackkk!!!!!

I'm in desperate need of a break from... well, everything and everyone. I don't like how I feel or who I am right now. I've lost confidence, faith, hope, compassion and joy. I don't love ME right now so it's no wonder I'm having a hard time showing love to anyone else. I need a solo vacation - an escape. I need to get my head screwed on straight and examine my heart. I need to figure out what it is that is making me so miserable lately, draw it out and deal with it.

I'm thankful for all the amazing people in my life who are teaching me how to love, how to be loved, and how to function as a kind and decent person in the world. I'm still learning, but I feel fortunate to have such beautiful souls around me.

Also, for family - family being the people who love you, no matter what.

Happy Thanksgiving.