Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

Whew…

I’ve been well and truly busy over the last several weeks.  There are two activities that have pretty much consumed 100% of my time:

1. Work - I’m responsible for the firmware of a product whose first phase was to be delivered in mid-March.  We met part of that deadline, but the last part needs to be completed and shipped.  It’s been 12-18 hour days, 7 days a week for the last several weeks.

2. ARF - I was working pretty feverishly on it prior to the WASHFest (see the home page).  I’m waiting on final pricing from my distributor, needing to complete documentation and and needing to finish the business entity aspects before I can start shipping.  I’m really anxious to get it into the “real” world.  It’s been a long haul and it’s time.

I can’t promise that I’ll be posting here often in the near term, but you should see more activity at the ARF site.  Take a gander at my home page to link there for the latest activity…

Later.

I was young. Not terribly experienced in the world. And pretty gullible, truth told.

When I was in my 20’s, I spent a few years as a field Engineer for Rockwell International. I traveled the country diagnosing and repairing, configuring and commissioning, and generally getting natural-gas chromatography gear working. I was preparing for my first trip to California to help get a site in the desert functioning, and was being advised on various aspects of life in the sand from some co-workers. Of the advice that I received from my well-meaning colleagues, the suggestion to watch out for scorpions most struck a nerve with me. For some reason, the idea of being stung by one of those little buggers just didn’t sit well. I obsessed a bit on it and finally resolved that the chances were small and I just wasn’t going to think about it.

I arrived at the hotel without incident and when I stepped out of the car, the first thing that I noticed was that my shoes sunk into the very-soft pavement of the parking lot. It was hot…really hot. I looked around at the site on which the hotel sat and was immediately impressed by the sight of a lot of sand and very little else surrounding it…with the possible exception of tumble-weeds. No kidding, real honest-to-gosh tumbleweeds. For some reason, I thought you only saw those on re-runs of spaghetti Westerns on TV. But I digress…

Anyhow, I suppose in the back of my mind I was still obsessing about Scorpions, though I didn’t know it at that moment.

I had a late dinner due to the fact that we arrived at the hotel late, and since that took up the bulk of the evening, I decided to turn in. I wear gym shorts to bed and due to the heat (even with air-conditioning), I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Sometime in the early morning, I felt a sharp pain in my thigh…quite enough to wake me. Immediately, I thought that I had been stung by one of those objects of my fears and I swatted at the site of the pain. I felt a hard-ish object and heard a click as whatever it was hit the wall next to the bed. By that time, my heart was doing a samba and I leapt off the side of the bed opposite where I had heard the thing hit. I turned on the bedside lamp and began crawling around the bottom of the bed on my hands and knees. I’m not sure what I figured I would do if I found a Scorpion, but there I was, “Joe Commando”, tracking the sand-devil. Silly. I couldn’t immediately see anything, but there was a small upholstered chair in the corner and I decided that I must have hit somewhere near there.

As I crawled slowly toward it and around the side of the chair, I sighted my enemy:

…my pocket comb…

It seems that before I went to bed, I had transferred my comb from my pants pocket to my gym shorts. I can’t say why but I distinctly remembered doing it, after the fact. Anyhow, I suspect that as I was sleeping and rolling about in bed, the comb came out of my pocket. Thereafter, when I rolled over, it must have dug into my leg. Thus, my “scorpion comb” was what “bit” me! I was able to laugh at myself for a while before I went back to bed. I slept great the rest of the night.

What a potent combination: Youth and imagination.

…more often.

We’ve been having work done on our house. It started on Friday and is continuing today. I’ve been eating like a pig. The stuff’s right there and so…I eat it.

So, if it ever comes down to me working full-time from home there will have to be serious changes made in how I go about things and my self-control will have to get a boost…