Today was princessdammitt 's surprise birthday party. damiondead rented a caboose on a steam train for a whole group of us, after which there was a picnic. Somehow he managed to keep the whole thing secret from her, which apparently is an impressive feat as Damion is not known as the king of surprises. Everyone was dressed up in victorian/steampunk attire, much the amusement of the other passengers and the railroad staff.

This past week, I finally conquered the P4080. This is the multicore network accelerator doohickey that I've been pounding on at work for the past couple of months. Originally all the work was being on using a simulator as real silicon wasn't available yet, but we finally got a couple of actual boards about 10 days ago. Naturally, the same code that worked on the simulator didn't work on the real hardware. It took a few days of poking around to figure out why, but it's finally done. There are a few minor issues left to smooth out, but all the really hard stuff is behind me. This is probably the most complicated device I've had to program so far in my career, and I'm kind of surprised I ever managed to make it work. (The reference manual is over 3000 pages long, and it isn't even the final version.)

The saga of the guy with the radio next door continues. After a couple of days of quiet, it started up again. Although it was coming from the same room, I'm not certain that it's the same guy: I went over there on Friday after I got home from work (and heard the radio blaring again) to ask one more time if he would keep it down. The guy I saw didn't look like the same one I'd seen previously (the haircut was different). His neighbor from across the hall tried to tell me he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and his arms shook a lot and his speech seemed a little slurred. I told him how he had the radio on all night the previous night, and he tried to tell me to just let him know when it was too loud and he'd turn it down. (This of course does me no good; I can't go over there every time, especially if it's in the middle of the night, and if I yell out my window it'll just wake other people up.)

So I finally decided to go for the nuclear option. I ordered one of these:

http://shop.christmasincruces.com/product.sc?productId=2&categoryId=2

It's a very low power transmitter (25 milliwatts), but given his close proximity, I think it ought to be strong enough to overwhelm whatever station he's listening to. And if not, I can probably build a amplifier to boost the signal a couple of watts. If I wanted to be really evil, I could hook a microphone to it and do the whole "Kent, this is god speaking" routine, but that probably wouldn't help his schizophrenia much.

I've been toying with this idea for a while. I'd prefer not to do it, lack of sleep turns me into an ever bigger stress monkey than I am normally, and that's just not good for business. Anyway, the thing should be here in a couple of days. We'll see how it goes.