when Ritsuko times out

So today I lugged my 5CAD 19″ LG 995FT Plus to the UBC Computer Co-op room. Damn thing cost me my posture and cool exterior while I was lugging it. Every fifty cm I would put the damn thing down and rest for two minutes. There just wasn’t a correct posture for lugging that thing around, so I rubbed the skin clean off my arms.

That is, until I met Rod. Meet Rod, people. He exercises 3 times a week.

Normally I couldn’t care less about other people I met on the street. But this guy is different. He’s a Ph.D student, despite being around 30-40 years old. Plus, he doesn’t have much to learn, seeing as this was the guy who made the memory controller for the AMD 29050 chips in the Boeing 777.

You damn right you heard that right. I couldn’t believe my ears – so being an engineer does mean you get to meet some pretty cool people after all. He also did have some trouble carrying the monitor… so we both lugged it and walked fairly briskly towards Macleod Building. Along the way he told me about how he worked in Honeywell and the cards in the Boeing 777 which could be slid in and out of some kind of box the size of a refrigerator. Oh, and for those of you who still don’t know what I’m talking about, the AMD K5 decoded x86 instructions into AMD 29k instructions. DAMN. We discussed the Harvard Architecture for the remainder of our trip.

And if that wasn’t enough, the president of the Computer Co-op club, Paul Teehan, was apparently Rod’s colleague in some project in UBC. And after Rod left and I dragged the monitor on its base into the room, we talked about Paul’s project. Paul was looking into serializing the interconnects in FPGAs to reduce die area for his Master’s Thesis. He says he needs extra logic to do that, thus adding latency and most likely jeopardizing clockspeed. So it’s probably not worth it, he’s thinking. Perhaps if he can find some way to make the logic unnecessary it might just make it worthwhile.

I’m reconsidering becoming an electrical engineer already.