Learning Curve

My company is full of nerds. Some days I forget. Some days it hits me in the face the second I walk in the door. Today was that day. I walked into one of our programmer's cubes to find him taking a "brain break" to do a little online gaming... I don't know what the game was exactly, but you know the type I mean. He has a pony tail and was wearing leather pants. These two shouldn't paint a picture in your mind of someone that is cool. He is not. In this case, the pony tail and the leather pants just make him even nerdier.

Then I was responding to an email this morning and as I read over the email to make sure I'd touched on all the points they'd made, I sat back for a second and soaked it all in. After four months of working at this company, this email made perfect sense to me. Check out a snippet...

<< We're looking to use a RTOS on a TI AM/DM3730 based control system. Currently using the Mistral AM/DM37x EVM Development Board running Linux to test our application, but dedicated hardware is being developed. The finished product has very tight latency requirements for responding to external interrupts that are unlikely to be met with a stock Linux implementation. We would like to pursue a Linux-based solution for their finished product.

I would like to determine if your Real-Time Linux System would be suitable for this system. The primary task of the system will be to process external data at a 1kHz rate. Therefore, in less than 1ms it will need to do the following:
- Acknowledge an external GPIO pin interrupt
- Read in approx. 50-100bytes via SPI
- Process the data
- Transmit the results out of a UART
- Run background tasks to perform additional data processing

BSP Peripherals required:
- VFP (Double precision floating point and saving all VFP registers during context switching)
- DDR RAM
- NAND Flash
- SD Card
- SPI (12+Mbps)
- USART
- I2C
- GPIO and external interrupts
- DMA

Who's got two thumbs and knows way to much about random tech stuff? This guy!(girl)

Please Sir Can I Have S'More?

In case you hadn't heard... my mom makes the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. So naturally, growing up, all I ever wanted her to do was buy crappy store bought cookies like all the other kids' mom's/nannies did. (One time in fourth grade I actually had a meltdown at school when she surprised me by baking a batch of cookies to bring to me and my friends at lunch time. Through my hot salty tears I yelled "why can't you just give me Oreos like everyone else's mom/nanny!" Yeah, I sucked as a fourth grader apparently.) Anyways, I've since recovered from that bout of youthful insanity/desire to fit in and totally appreciate my mom's cookies. And pretty much everything else she makes.

Howeverrrrr. There was one type of cookie that I would have her buy at the store that I still think are fantastic. Have you tried Mallomars? They were my favorite. They didn't sell them in the summer because the thin chocolate dipped coating melts in the trucks because it's so hot. (My mom learned that for us after constantly coming home from the store to me empty handed in the summertime). Mallomars are the best. You should try them. I couldn't find the brand name ones at Safeway but the knock-off ones are pretty o.k. for now.

PS I hope my future kids aren't stupid like I was. If my daughter started crying and screaming at me for making homemade cookies for her and her friends... I think I would lock her out of the house and let her sleep on the lawn for a night or two. Sorry mom, you're a saint.

Thank Heaven for Little Girls

Trip to Utah this weekend in a nutshell...
Flew in to see this little cutie... Olivia Havana Caffee

Spent some time at the Thanksgiving Point Farm with this one too

I'm having withdrawls from these little girls. They're the best. I can't wait until they grow up and do this someday

(Their mom's high school team was in the playoffs for state this weekend. They lost but played great and I was so excited to watch I nearly lost my voice.)

PS check out my sister's awesome parenting skills in this video

Whoopsie Daisies

You know the scene in Notting Hill where Hugh Grant keeps trying to climb over a fence and every time he falls down, he says "Whoopsie Daisies" and then Julia Roberts makes fun of him and then he still does it again? This scene?

Sometimes that scene is all too familiar to me. Yesterday I was on the phone with my sister while at work, and must have said "okey doke" or "okey dokey" a half dozen times, and the second I hung up a co-worker popped their head into my cube to laugh and make fun of me for something only "little girls with blonde ringlets" and people from 50 years ago said. Help me? It's getting embarrassing.

Save Me, San Francisco

One of my oldest friends from BYU came to visit me this weekend! This was pretty much the soundtrack to our weekend (the video's kind of lame... sorry)

We spent some time getting in touch with my roots at a Pow Wow at Stanford

Exploring some of my favorite San Francisco spots

Watching the Giants and Brian "I have a disgusting lice filled beard" Wilson

Napping on the beach in Half Moon Bay

You should come visit me too :) I'm a real good tour guide, I think.

Cougars, Caddies, and Mancubs

I, along with two friends, have joined a women's golf league. Every Monday night we meet up with a number of Palo Alto women to play nine holes of golf, have a little friendly competition, and do some socializing. It's great.

Other than me and my friends, I'd dare to say the average age is 60. So now you can guess that the reference to Cougars in the title has nothing to do with my Alma Mater, and everything to do with the League's demographic. Golf League is the new Ladies Who Lunch, and I intend on become a key member of the group. It's my ticket in to society's upper crust.

After 9 holes we all meet up in the clubhouse to eat, drink, and enjoy the tunes of some aspiring musicians who double as Golf Pros. I like to refer to these as the Mancubs. 20-something boys playing Dave Matthews songs while these ladies indulge in a glass or two of wine and feast their Cougar eyes on young flesh, you can't make this stuff up.

Mondays just got a little bit better.

Colonel Mustard with the Wrench in the Library

Last week my life was like a game of "Operation", this week it was like a game of "Clue". Next week... Scrabble anyone? (No seriously, I'm obsessed with Scrabble... if you have an iPhone, let's be "Words with Friends, friends)

I hosted a little murder mystery dinner party Friday night to celebrate a friend's birthday! It was a lot of fun to plan and decorate and turned out great.

We had fun dressing up and it was hilarious how into it people got.