So, I’m sitting in the Houston airport right now with a flight that doesn’t leave for a few hours and looking at weather is likely to be delayed. And, given that I have time on my hands, I’m thinking that some people out there might be interested in what I’ve been up to lately. By lately, I mean in the last week and by some, I mean my mother.
I worked about 60 hours last week – bringing up boards, testing, modifying, diagnosing, experimenting… Sunday afternoon about 5 minutes before the flight out I had one primary and one secondary working like they should. Josh and I made a last minute dash to the airport for a 5:35 flight out.
We spent about 10 hours Monday at the customer’s place with further testing of our wireless stuff, some modification and testing of ideas with their mockup and a good bit of discussion on how we were going to proceed from there. All-in-all it was a bit discouraging because our parts weren’t working – at least not well and we spent a lot of time fixing burned out boards. We were also short on parts, so fixing boards meant pulling good parts off good, untouched boards to replace the burned out parts on the built up boards. You’d think after a week and a half working with this stuff we could keep from roasting them, but no… at least I generally knew how to fix them quickly.
Monday night was the first time I have been in Austin overnight with some time to go exploring. We went downtown to find some food (and for me to take pictures of the Frost Bank building). While we were eating Josh discovered via Blackberry that Wreckless Kelly was playing that night @ 10:00. We hiked the half mile or so and walked in just as they were warming up. They did a 40 minute set (there were 5 bands that night). We stayed for them and the group that followed. Both were good and it was really cool to actually experience a bit of Austin
Tuesday we tried a few more modifications and got things working pretty well. Most of Tuesday was working with their system, and much less frustration with ours. Still another 10 hour day, although we did meet up with Josh’s wife’s cousins for lunch.
Tuesday night Rob (one of the cousins) joined us in going to Main Event, which is a bowling alley, pool hall, laser tag venue, mini golf course, bar, arcade.
Today was a half day… basically finishing up, deciding what we’re going to do next and packaging our components in to their mock-up.
And, that brings us to present… waiting to hear for sure that my flight out is delayed.
