Stuffin’ Ourselves with McMuffins

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Last night:
Kim and I had plans to go out to dinner. After a long weekend of bellydance vending, it was time for a celebration. When the time came, neither of us really had the energy or motivation. Instead, we walked down to Wild Oats, got some supplies, and cooked up some yummy, fatty, greasy, decadent Egg McMuffin type creations. These were made with organic brown eggs, fresh Canadian bacon from the butcher, fresh avocados, white and yellow cheddar cheese, butter, and (only on Kim’s) mayonnaise. They were simply divine and, at the time, better than any fancy dinner anywhere.

Today:
I “got” to take part in a meeting that ended up working something like this:
10 GOSUB KICK_PUPPY
20 IF ELAPSED_MINUTES < 60 THEN GOTO 10

We had a meeting with one of our microprocessor providers in which the stated goal was: “We need something 2x to 3x faster than what we have now, which is your fastest chip. Please come and show off your future lineup of chips or provide appnotes for how to build up a multiprocessor rig that Linux is happy with.” Instead of canceling the meeting, they came to say they had neither. What they got in return was the CEO and chief engineer providing a laundry list of what sucks about their chip. The representative responded with a variety of things that were irrelevant: you can get a 5% increase by overclocking (which is far from the 2x to 3x we need), you can use DMA on the peripheral bus (we already are), and their future roadmap includes chips with LCD controllers at the sacrifice of the network controller (our network boxes have no screens and…uhhh…sorta require ethernet) or GPS decoders (…in case you wanted to know precisely where your network is at all times???)

So, yeah. It was about an hour of “you suck” followed by “but we have this shiny thing that is really cool and completely irrelevant to what you are doing.” Blather, rinse, repeat.

Posted in: Food Work

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