Gibberish

Gibberish sounds funny when you say it with a hard 'G'. Hell, it sounds funny when you say it normally. An Irish Gerbil? Hehe, say Gerbil with a hard 'G' :)

I should really be working, but the blog has been beckoning me. Complaining about my neglectfulness, scratching at the door of my thoughts.

On the 1st of June I officially started my PhD. Even though I had kinda been thinking about what I would do when I start, that wasn't nearly as satisfying as writing on the first few pages of my fancy 2B8 log book. I have yet to write my name on the front cover yet, I thought I'd leave that to Claire to do something nice and creative.

After my trip to Hamilton last week, and having talked about things with the rest of the ranger crew I've got lots to do. I even get to do some hardware design! Being the embedded programming guy it's a bit of a novelty. It's interesting and fun, but at the same time scary to route signals that travel over 200 MHz. Well, maybe not scary for everyone, but I know enough about high-speed digital hardware design to know that if your PCB (printed circuit board) layout is crap everything could explode. Some real professionals might read this and think "200 MHz, pff..." I say "Nee!" unto them.

I get to see my Claire again in a week and a bit. Yay! I'm flying up to Hamilton on a Tuesday and then I'll drive home with her on the Saturday. Hopefully if I've put my little PCB (only 5cm x 5cm) together by then I can test it on the actual hardware. Pretty essential I'd say.

Back to work for me. I might get back into some coding.