Rob the Fiddler

Im in Tulsa now for a quick little roadtrip. I had hoped to take a few of these while I had the break.

This weekend is the Claremore Bluegrass and Chili festival. I’ve heard of this a few times over the years. This year the headliners are Tony Rice, Russell Moore and IIIrd time out, Rhonda Vincent and the Rage, Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver as well as Dan Tyminski (the singing voice of George Clooney in “Brother Where Art Thou”).

Unfortunately, Tony Rice…the guy I wanted to see the most, had to cancel due to Hurricane Gustav. (?? I’m not sure why…but whatever). His backup band, Mountain Heart, is usually a headliner anyway so they just played a longer set. The sound was excellent.

I didn’t find much jamming last night…but it was a Thursday. Bluegrass festivals in Texas/OK are much
different than the ones I’m used to in California. Out in California, the shows start Friday night and continue on until Sunday finishing with a gospel set and a few more winding down acts in the afternoon while folks procrastinate between packing up or having a few last beers.

Out here, the shows start on Thursday and are done Saturday night. I guess folks need to get back to church.
Bluegrass festivals are largely alcohol free as opposed to the “Texas Music” festivals like Larry Joes. Note that even the beer soaked festivals don’t have shows on Sundays. The two groups don’t seem to mix much.

Tonight should be pretty good. I hope to find a little more jamming…I’m kinda selective about thegroups I play bluegrass with. I like them to be better than me.

Tulsa is kinda neat. Its definitely an oil town. There are two refineries smack dab in the city center. Doesn’t seem to make gas any cheaper.

There are tons of neat motels on route 66 that herald a day when all you needed was a 15 foot blue whale in front of your motel to get customers to stop and stay. Thats WAAAY better than free wi-fi. Lots of neat old signs.

Downtown has a ton of older buildings. Very Art Deco.

I drove around a bit. There are plenty of independent coffee shops and art stores.

I read about one part called the Brookside district. Its supposed to be hip and trendy. Coming from Dallas that reads “New Urbanism“…blech. In reality, it looked like an older neighborhood like Lower Greenville in the 1980’s. Hope it stays like that and doesn’t end up like 2008 Lower Greenville.

There are a lot of pottery shops too. Guess with all these artists, the coffee shop I’m at got a deal on custom coffee cups.

I had hoped to drop by the Mercury Lounge too to say hello. The Sues had a gig booked there a year ago that was cancelled by the booking agent. Unfortunately, it was one of those situations where the disgruntled booking agent cancelled the acts and didnt tell the club. We are still on the website as a featured band…but have never played there.  The least I could do is step foot in it for a minute or two.

So Ive been playing around a bit with the PICAXE Micro controller. Its a pretty impressive little chip.

Basically, its a PIC chip with a bootstrap program on it. You can’t use just any PIC, you order the chip from the makers of PICAXE.  On the plus side, you have a “kernel” on the chip that makes programming it a breeze.  Just a serial connection from your serial port on the computer is needed.  Because of this, you can build a programmer with just a few parts.  Additionally, the BASIC is really simple.

The downside is that the kernel overhead is kinda high.  Even though a 8 pin PIC runs at 4Mhz, that translates to about 10,000 BASIC commands a second.

To get started I just bought this.  Its entry level. The cord is pretty much all you need. Once you have that, you can build a programming interface into any project you make with a resistor and a 1/8 inch stereo plug.

Because it is so darned easy, I figured it would be useful in my general exploration of noise making circuits.

My projects so far are here.

So far, it appears that its not so good for making audio.  There is a sound command, it can be used intelligently, but for the most part, its better suited for controlling things.  There are no timed interrupts and for the most part, its all synchronous. If you run a one second basic command to play a note…the processor is tied up for a second.

Still, I have hope I can find useful applications for this chip.  CMOS provides good building blocks, but you can simply things with code easily. Unfortunately,  CMOS is fast and the PICAXE is not.

Next Ill look at the PICAXE as a DCLFO. I found a good start at using PICAXE chips and shift registers here.

Seems like could make a decent LFO (with waveforms) based on shift registers.

Follow me. Using an 8 bit shift register and a resolution of 16 samples a second, an LFO with a max of 4 hz  would require 10000/ ( ( 8 bits * 16 values per waveform * 4 hz))  = 19 basic instructions per  interrupt.

Thats doable for an LFO considering most of the time, all we are doing is pulsing a bit. It will be grainy, but doable. For the most part, each interrupt would be a pulsing a bit.  Reading a READADC would be once in a blue moon. Anyway…in the next week Ill figure out if I can do it or not.

Applications? Well…who knows.

Later Ill get into the PWM capabilities of the PICAXE.  This can be filtered to get an analog value

Ive done an interview already. I had planned to take a month off, but this was a pretty interesting sounding job and the interview window was closing quick on the offered job so I jumped. The HR person told me it was a technical interview so be prepared.

Still I didn’t see any reason to not brush up on a few things. I have a pathological fear of being under prepared for these kind of things. When I googled “Technical interview questions” I found a wealth of du jour offbeat questions. The forums were filled with people asking “what do interviewers ask?” from candidates. Sadly, they were also filled with questions from potential interviewers asking what sort of questions should they be asking.

The most reasonable questions were the ones that test basic knowledge. I agree with those. If you have SQL on your resume, be prepared to write out a few simple statements. If you have JAVA, be prepared to write a simple class. Patterns and UML…better be able to write a diagram and at least know how to code a singleton on the whiteboard. I prepared for that stuff. It took time but it all was review or at most reviewing what the latest jargon was describing the stuff I already know.

Since I know everything I put on my resume I felt pretty confident.
(although…I might take PHP off because it is apparently a bit more involved that the stuff Ive done so far).

My technical interview went really well. I felt I nailed it, but they had somebody they liked better. I guess my vacation will go as planned.

An ex-coworker told me of an interview he did that had 7+ interviewers including the CTO . Then they asked him to come in the next day so that the CEO could do more stuff. (including those stupid riddles that self absorbed executives like to ask so they feel like they are smarter than the “talent”).

Finally after about 6 hours into the interview process he said “Make an offer”. It was for half his old salarly and one week vacation. He laughed and left.

One thing I did notice about my Swing knowledge was that even though I have been using it for almost a decade, there is a ton of stuff to learn. Java makes it so easy to pick up what you need. The APIs are all on line. You tell me what you want and I can research and code it. But after the interview and looking at all those questions it seemed like I needed to be a bit more proactive.

off to NERDBOOKS!

If you have not been to nerdbooks…you gotta go. (If your into technical books I mean) Its an internet bookstore in Richardson. They really are just an internet store, but you can visit the warehouse and browse the shelves. You have to follow a few rules.

1. You gotta like Dogs! There are 3 huge dogs that have the run of the place. They are more important than walkins. If you dont like dogs…tough…use the internet. Walk-ins are a privilage. The dogs have the rights!

2. No Small children. See 1.

3. You still have to order online. They have terminals inside. Weird huh? You enter your credit card and hand the guy the books. He looks em over and hands them back to you.

4. There are a ton of books and a crazy ordering system that you will not understand. If you cant
find a book, and you often will not…ask for it. Dont even try.

5. Its ALWAYS Chirstmas. Or..well…they just dont see any reason to take down the Christmas tree.

Its a really neat place. The books are cheaper than Borders and they have free soda. The dogs are actually very well behaved. I try and get my books there whenever possible.

As part of the layoff package, we get a job placement service. I suppose its more of a career management program. Its very comprehensive. They have a resume writing class, interview classes and all kinds of tools to help you find a new job or transition to a whole new career. I can even get a new phone number with a professional answering service that says “office of Mr. Stave” to make it look like Im not really out of a job.

The downside is that its in Addison. Man that town just sucks the life outta me the moment I get west of Preston.

On Wednesday I went to the introduction meeting. I was in a room with 20 other folks that were recently laid off. The scary thing was that I felt like I was on the B ark of the Golgafrincham.

For those of you who have not read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Golgafrincham is a planet that found a solution to middle management.

“Its people decided it was time to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population, and so concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in a great catastrophe. (It was apparently under threat from a “mutant star goat”). The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitizers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and “led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone”.

Everybody in the room were account managers, regional sales managers or played some kind of middle management role in either the tech or loan industry. (Except me of course…and a software tester)

What the Hell Is Wrong With You People? I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!

Ironically, there was a guy there from Nortel who apparently ran the project that was intended to offshore all of our jobs to China.  His position became too expensive too.

Still, I dont have a problem with that. Grunt programming is just that. If a global market place means that the bar is raised for my skills…well then thats what I need to do. Even without a job, I still have it better than most of the worlds population. When I was in Beijing, I saw what those folks were struggling to achieve. They were so happy just to have a job that they were more than qualified for. Good for them!

If it ultimately brings a bit closer my and my girlfriends dream of a robotic monkey that can bring us tea when we wake up…well…hey…its all worth it. I can always grow tomatoes and give violin lessons.

Well its finally happened…I got laid off from Nortel. Luckily, its not a surprise. In fact, we have known it was going to happen since last year. Most of this year has been spent transitioning everything to China. I got a trip out of it to Beijing as well. That was cool.

The severance package was pretty generous. Its not really anything I can disclose, but since I’m single, and my only debt is a mortgage payment…if I really had to I could go for a year without a job fairly comfortably. (I might need to set the AC to 86 though in the summer).

I suppose technically…as of now I’m a professional musician.

The only thing I’m uneasy about it what its like in other jobs. I have heard from several Ex-Nortel folks that we have had it pretty good here. All the groups I have been have been extremely well managed. I don’t mind working the occasional 12 hour day. In fact…my idea week seems to be a 12 hour Monday where I get a LOT of stuff done. Still, all my projects have been WELL managed with plenty of time to make my milestones. I probably average a 45 hour week only because I tend to put in that extra 10% into anything I do. It worries me to hear about companies where software engineers put in 50-60 hours a week. I cant work for a manager that over-promises.

Ive been there for 13 years. It was my first job outta college. Ive seen the excesses of the dot com era. I still have options that are in the money at $400 a share (NT is below 6 now).

Still, things were getting a bit stale. There was not much room for growth. The project I was on was REALLY cool and was an opportunity to work with all kinds of great JAVA technologies and methodologies. Something foreign in a big company. I think hitting the wild workplace will help me become a better developer. I would love an Extreme or Agile environment. The waterfall method is crushing. Thats not to say it doesnt have a place. For MTX it was well suited. As a designer I could identify EVERY line of code and why it was changed for the past 20 years. Useful? For the DMS it was critical to know this. A one line fix could cause a 10 year old bug to resurface. I took pride in my code and inspections as an architect.

So..enough about that.

In other news…sadly Mojo took off for a walkabout. In July, my dear Mojo walked out the kitty door and has yet to come back. I hear stories about cats bailing for 6 months at a time. I hope thats the case. Im still hoping he will come back and find myself chasing down every black cat stray I see in a 5 mile radius. Mojo was a great cat!!!

Still, life goes on and it turns out that Barry Kooda has more kittens than he can handle. Barry has the rather dubious hobby of “urban exploration”. Generally it requires a camera and a crowbar as you explore the underbelly of the city and poke around in places where nobody cares to be nor wants to be. In the process, apparently you find lots of kittens.

I took one in. It was orginally a he but we are pretty sure she is a she. Pictures to follow.
She is so cute. I guess I do have one dependant but I have yet to hear her say “Get a JOB…baby needs her KMR!”

Had a good time at the Bar of Soap for the first DFW Synth DIY meetup.

Lots of folks showed up and there were plenty of rigs set up for folks to see and here.

Pictures are here and here.

We had An arp 2600, Doepfer A-100, and several custom built modulars and a few things that can just be described as “other”.

Paul from synthtech was also there with his new modules on hand like the MOTM-520 Cloud Generator MOTM-730 Voltage-Controlled Pulse Divider.

Mostly we met each other and learned a bit. Its a good start to get a community together to do things like trade knowledge, tools, and time to learn more about this stuff.

if your interested
email us at the myspace

http://www.myspace.com/dfwsynthdiy