Yay! I found a bug in the code I'm working on, which must mean that I have some idea of what's going on, right? Even better, it wasn't a bug that I introduced :). I'm starting to settle in here a bit more, I've got some photos on my desk now, this one and this one, but I'm still finding it a bit hard to make friends/get to know people... they're almost all older than me and have families and stuff to think about... plus they're engineers, so not necessarily all that outgoing ;). I've been working on getting to know my neighbors though, and that was going pretty well until I found out tomorrow that they're being moved! :( Luckily I don't think I'll be stuck sitting here alone for very long, since the reason people are being moved over to the other building is because we need more space in here. Maybe I'll be really lucky and another fresh-out will move in across from me, and someone friendly and mentor-ly kitty-corner... hey, it could happen!

New house! My family closed yesterday on our new house. The new address is:

1289 155th Ave.
Andover, MN 55304*

Hopefully we'll be able to keep our old phone number. It's a lot bigger than our old house, 5 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, an actual dining room - big point in its favor since we have dinner for 13+ at least once a year (maybe more often now that we'll actually have room), an office sort of room, a family room (we're going to put our home-theater type stuff in there), and another room (we don't know what to do with it yet, ok?). By this point everybody's probably falling asleep, so I won't go into any more details. Downside: it's in Andover, which, for those of you not from the Twin Cities, is waaay out in the boonies == extra 15min minimum added to my commute and practically no shopping or anything nearby - especially distressing now that we've gotten used to having a Cub foods and Caribou Coffee 2 blocks away.

*THIS is the right zip. I originally posted with the 3 & 4 interchanged, fixed 8/29/05

Hooray! I have work! I am in completely over my head! :-P I am finally on a project, with one other engineer and a tech - which means I actually have to get some stuff done (which is good of course, but a little scary too). So the beginning of last week went like this:

other engineer - "So, have you done any VHDL before?"
me - "nope"
other engineer - "Well, I guess this will be a good learning experience then. Here's the code for another project which we'll be borrowing, spend a little time getting familiar with it and then you'll be making some modifications."
me - "ok" (inside - yikes!)

So I've got a good 60+ pages of VHDL code here and I've spent the last TWO WEEKS figuring out what's going on, enough to write about 10 lines of code :-P But hey, I think those 10 lines will actually work, which is something right? Actually I'm pretty proud of myself for figuring out as much as I have. The other engineer I'm working with is pretty great, easy going and just takes my competence to figure things out for granted - but always willing to answer questions and explain in more depth when I ask. Really makes me feel more confident and makes all this more fun.

I'd love to explain all about the project, but I don't think I'm supposed to yet (not classified, just proprietary - plus I don't really know much past my little piece of the puzzle), suffice it to say that it explodes ;-) - I hope I get to go to some of the tests!

Tower of London

123_2347
Originally uploaded by robbiefaith00.

England pics are up! Most of them were taken by Robbie, so they're all on his flickr site - go check them out! :)