The Mandelbear's Musings

After breakfast, coffee, and taking the kids to school and work, the first order of business was going up into the attic to pull a run of Cat5 from the phone demarc to the server closet in the office, to get ready for the tech's arrival on Friday. Dragged up a piece of plywood to lay over some of the bare ceiling joists, and found an 8-foot length of 1x12 that filled in the gap, so it all went pretty smoothly.

Next item on the agenda was driving up to Ikea to return the damaged desk that I bought on Sunday, not to mention recycling a van-load of cardboard from the preceeding week's assembly projects. Also picked up a couple of basket-drawer frames for the chaoswolf (to replace the ones she put together wrong), and a folding chair for general use.

By the time I got back, my DSL modem had arrived from Sonic. Then a quick lunch, followed by afternoon at the Embedded Systems Conference in the San Jose convention center. This involved spending all afternoon on my feet, but without either the exercise or the pleasure of a good walk. I've been going since the first one; this one was a little smaller than last year, and much less crowded. Intel had a large booth, but I'm not sure why -- they're mostly out of the embedded market these days. Eight-core servers don't count. OTOH, the 8-core server demo had a couple of these cool Thinkpad keyboards. I like the fact that it has three mouse buttons.

ESC was basically the usual suspects; nothing really exciting. The top swag was a bright orange messenger bag from TQ, a clip for holding sunglasses, a pen, and paper from Montavista, and a pen-shaped 4-bit screwdriver from VIA