noodgedotorg

Happy Thanksgiving

It's been an amazing year for me, and I have so much to be thankful for. Here's a quick list, surely with many ommissions (ungrateful bastard that I am):

Graduated from UWwith my EE!
Got engaged to my lovely — Katherine Candice May Krueger!
Hired at Intel as a CPU design engineer!
Going to be Xander's coolest uncle!
Obama was elected President!
Bush is almost gone!
Made some great friends at work!
Played Rock Band for the first time and found out I love to play fake guitar even more than air guitar!
Have the greatest support group of family and friends!

What are other people grateful for?

Blog Abandonment

I cannot dispute that posts have been few and far between. There could be several contributing factors, but the real reason is that I've been pretty busy with work, and I just haven't felt like posting. Asking people to sign up for Facebook, Twitter, and whatever new thing catches my fancy just to keep up with me isn't reasonable. I can't expect everyone else to change their habits just to make my life simpler. We'll see what happens with noodge.org. I just paid for another six months of hosting, so the site will be up at least that long, but unless I can come up with a better plan for this space, I'll probably pull down the site after that. . .

Election Day!

Most everyone I know has voted already (Oregon and parts of Washington are vote by mail only), but to everyone out there who hasn't, today's the last chance to vote for Obama. Normally, I'd encourage everyone to vote, but I don't want this election to be even close. Idahoans who haven't registered can still do so at the polls, so those folks really have no excuse. Preferably, by the time I get home from work, the East Coast and Midwest will have decided the race. If not, I want the West Coast to have a very blue hue. I don't want a repeat of 2000 where I went to bed at 3AM, swearing at the results.

In the dungeon

Recently at work, I was placed on a team with a very specific assignment and a tight deadline. Whenever a team is in that position, especially when there are many new members on that team, Intel puts them in "dungeon mode" which means everyone gathers in a single room to work out their problems. This mode facilitates quick communication, and it becomes obvious when a problem is common. In addition to this busy and friendly environment, free snacks are provided to keep the energy and focus levels high.

The price for all this help and food is a large amount of work and never seeing sunshine. I generally get to the dungeon around 08:30 and leave between 18:00 and 18:30, so I see a little sun on the way to and from work, but it's pretty much dark when I'm in the house.

On another note, does anyone else find themselves checking polls more than once a day to make sure that Obama's still in the lead? RealClearPolitics is my favorite because they break down the race by state, and they show trends for the last several months. Also, they don't do their own polling, but rely on a weighted average of polls, based on prior accuracy. This sounds like an ad, but I really feel like they're a good resource if you're curious about the presidential and other elections.

The other thing I do on that site is read the opinion pieces. I do my best to make sure I'm reading articles written by both left- and right-leaning authors. Some of the writing on both sides infuriates me, but right-leaning authors seem to anger me more than those on the left. Both sides seem to think that Armageddon will take place if their presidential favorite isn't elected. I voted for Obama (the ballot's in the mail), but if it weren't for Palin, I wouldn't have been overly upset about a McCain victory. Even though she got voters talking, I think Palin was an extremely bad choice for McCain. Given that McCain is 72 years old and a cancer survivor, his VP choice is far more relevant than Obama's. To choose someone as unfit for the job of President as she obviously is shows a lack of judgment on McCain's part, but if the polls can be trusted, I don't have to worry about that. This might be the first time since I could vote that I've backed a winning candidate for President. Compare this with what I said about this time last election — She Took the Oldsmobile Out Past Condor Avenue. I should note that I didn't vote in that election, even though I said I was going to. I was at Sheena's 21 birthday in Las Vegas. Kerry took Washington and Grays Harbor County anyway, so I don't feel as bad.

Washing the car

I had an unexpected sensation as I was washing the car in the driveway today. I realized that I was washing my car in my driveway. I never paid attention to the fact that my work provides our home and vehicle. It was a good moment.

Tied in with that moment is the fact that we are having a gorgeous weekend. The sun is shining and it's about 15°C (60°F) outside. I was gonna guess a bit warmer, but Google says otherwise.

Candy and I had a long talk last night about how things are going. We both aired a lot of grievances, and we both felt a lot better afterward. To say that things had been tense in the house would be understating it somewhat, but I think we're at a much better understanding now.

Pre-marital existentialism

Candy and I have spent the majority of the day in the same room, and I'd guess that we've said maybe fifty words to each other. She sits at her computer; I sit at mine. She's planning wedding stuff, looking at photographers and caterers. She's on myspace, chatting with friends and relatives. I'm trying to find something productive or enjoyable to do with my day off, and I'm failing.

I sleep too much when I'm around Candy. At first I thought sleepiness was the side-effect of living my dream, but it seems like sleeping is just the best way of passing time for two people who seem to have run out of things to talk about.

We spent a couple hours on Saturday taking out the door jamb of our bedroom because Candy broke it down when I refused to get out of bed after a nap. We tried to replace one of the legs, but there were too many staples and nails holding everything together to save it. So sometime this week we're going to try and find a replacement. As much fun as this construction project has been, it's costing me money I don't really have to spare.

The good news is that Candy is starting to settle into her new job. She's still jumping through hoops setup by Oregon lawmakers, but the progress is steady and encouraging. I guess her boss is pressuring her quite a bit to get all her certifications as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we're at an ebb in our liquidity (a microcosm of the world economy, I suppose), and the registration fees are forcing us to dip into our savings. Once we both have steady paychecks rolling in, of course, we'll be more than able to replenish those funds.

Last weekend was more exciting this one. We took the Max (I guess "train" wasn't exciting enough for Portlanders) into downtown Portland and saw the sights. Our only stated mission was to eat a Voodoo doughnut, but we did a bit more than that. We saw Skidmore Fountain. We found the mall. We ran around Chinatown and peeked in through the windows of the Chinese Gardens. We ate lunch at the Ira Keller Fountain, which is much prettier than the linked picture. We played around on it for a while, and finally went back to the doughnut shop, where we got our quarry. They were worth the effort. My doughnut was delicious and had a mustache on it!

The you that I refuse to see

Things are really picking up with the wedding plans. Candy and I visited Bridal Veil Lakes last week, and we both felt it was pretty much perfect. It meets my only requirement that a body of water must be present. It's also in some very beautiful country, so I think people will really like it.

Candy's now looking at caterers to see who we can afford. If I could cook worth a damn, I'd start a catering business. Even if I only worked Saturdays I'd still make a fortune. We've also been visiting a lot of photographers' websites to try and choose one of them. There are a lot of talented folks out there, and that makes it hard to choose. I think we'll probably end up meeting a couple of them and seeing who makes us feel most comfortable.

In the process of gathering addresses, I got ahold of Jeremy Parks. It sounds like he's really turned a corner. He's been working steadily for nearly a year; he has a girlfriend, and they're living together in their own place. He's even working on starting a business. The biggest difference is that he sounds so much more positive about how things are going in his life and is planning for the future. I think it's going to be a bright one.

Interested in Netflix?

If you've thought about trying out Netflix, and you feel like entertaining Candy and me for a couple hours, leave a comment, and I'll send you a URL and referral code so that I'll get an extra movie in October.

I've had Netflix for a little over a year, and it's actually very cool. We get one movie at a time delivered to our house for $8.99 a month, plus unlimited streaming from their site. We generally average 5-6 DVDs a month, and one or two streaming movies (which you pretty much have to watch on a computer). The part I really like about Netflix is that it's very convenient. You pick some movies you want to see, and you get them one, two, or three at a time at your house to watch at your leisure. Then when you're done, you put them in the prepaid envelope and send them off. Two to three days later you have another movie in your mailbox.

Keeping the queue full is easier than it sounds. Between Candy and I, we add at least a movie a week. Netflix also does a pretty good job of suggesting movies you'll like, which has filled in some movies I never would have thought to have added.

Anyway, I'm definitely a Netflix fan, and if you wanna try it out, you can do so for free, even without helping me. Just visit Netflix.com and click the sign up button. If you want to help me out, I'll give you the sign up URL and referral code. I'll also answer any questions about the service in the comments.

Sick Day

It's been a while since I've done this, but I took a sick day today. I might be using the term a little loosely, so let me spell out what I did today. I slept in 'til about 09:30, then got on my laptop and responded to the work email that needed responding to. Then I worked on an Intel project for a few hours until Candy started asking me wedding questions, at which point I helped her make a spreadsheet that we'll be using to plan/budget the event.

Candy was pretty impressed with the spreadsheet's ability to calculate how many guests we're inviting, how many invitations we'll need to send for both the reception and the wedding. She was less impressed with its lack of ability to tell her which caterer to choose or what the shipping costs on the wedding favors are. Ah well, technology can only get better, right?

Update: on re-reading this, I should mention that I actually was feeling pretty badly this morning, and I haven't really felt right all week. Hopefully I'll sleep better than I have in nights past and really kick this thing.

Interesting Remarks Regarding Religion

Big Contrarian is an excellent site that often has thought-provoking entries.

This one in particular, on the tension between religion and science really hit home for me. I don't have time to read the linked article, but I look forward to the full text.