Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Imagine a World...

Imagine how different our world would be if the person that the majority of Americans had wanted to be president the 2000 election had become our president...



I started thinking about this again after I read an article about another recount in Florida where Dick Gephardt beat Kerry 2-1! Bush won in Florida by 537 votes.



The next scary thing to think about is the fact that with some electronic voting machines (one of which I voted on yesterday) there is no capability for a recount because there is NO PAPER TRAIL! This is a very scary situation in which hackers could very easily decide an election and nobody will ever know what happened. I made a stink about this at the polling station (probably not the right venue) and then went home and wrote to the Secretary and to the paper asking them to fix this problem. And they say Window$ has security holes!



I would ask anyone that votes on eletronic voting machines to write their Secreatary of State to demand that there votes be verifiable.

Tuesday, March 2, 2004

Now Time For Some FUN!

Well it seems as if the primary is all but wrapped up. Now its time for some fun! Its time to get president Bush out of Washington. To quote a bumper sticker I saw the other day:



"Save the environment: Plant a bush back in Texas!"



I received notification of a chance to help do just that and I signed up to volunteer with moveon.org. I would encourage others to do the same. I know that many of you do not have as much free time as I do but I would ask you to give what you can. You can volunteer at the following link http://www.moveon.org/pac/pledge/?id=-3126228-MqNDrCFbBTfbnXPySvNynA . Please help get the US back to the people or at the very least away from Bush.



Here is an interesting link I site I found today.

Monday, March 1, 2004

Needed: oscilloscope

I am in desperate need of an oscilloscope. I have done as much debugging as I can with my DMM and I am stuck in my tracks until I can get an oscilloscope to debug my problems. My part not willing to go into ISP (In System Programming) mode so I cannot program it. I have checked all the connections and the oscillator and everything seems fine so I think that it must be either the 12V programming power supply (of which I have tried three different ones now) has to much ripple, not enough instantaneous turn on current or the reset pulse is flaky. Any one of these at the very minimum requires an analog scope and ideally would have a digital storage scope to debug. I have access to one old analog scope at the Austin Robot Club on Thursdays for about a half hour but if I am going to make any progress I need to find a way to get more time on a scope. If anyone can help please let me know where I can get some time on a scope or a place where they sell used scopes for a decent price I would appreciate it.

Qualcomm Interview

The interview went really well. It was much more technical than I thought it was going to be. I had thought that I was just going to be talking to someone from HR but it turned out to be one of the managers! The project they are hiring for is adding additional functionality to there 3G wireless chips. They want to add video and some other things and need to do more verification if they add in all the features they want. That's were I come in. They do not want to fly my in for an interview until I have heard back from IBM. DOH! No bargaining there I guess. Anyway they seemed pretty interested and they had three positions open. The market is DEFINITELY getting better!