Quick summary of the past few weeks:
The big project for the Major Client got done. Everybody happy. The Big Boss said thanks for all my efforts.
The company is having budget trouble. Guess we weren't as recession-proof as management thought. Big surprise there. So everyone gets a 5% pay cut. The owners took a 10% cut, which sounds pretty noble, except that the prez just hired his wife a few months ago, so he's still getting more money than he was a year ago. Plus he gets to benefit from Dubya's tax cuts a lot more than us grunts.
Took a vacation to Williamsburg. Cool place. Lots of neat stuff if you're into history. Plus some good roller coasters at Busch Gardens. Wasn't as relaxing as the last couple of trips to Disney World, though - never really got a chance to turn my brain off.

Okay, now for what's on my mind.
Buffy ends tonight. I am majorly bummed.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer is only the second show I have watched from beginning to end. This doesn't count ones that ended after just a couple of episodes. The first was The Muppet Show, which ended a quarter-century ago. I came late to MASH, and Murphy Brown and Mad About You just got stale and I dropped them before the end. But tonight I have to say goodbye to Buffy, Xander, Giles, Spike and the Hellmouth. and especially Willow. This is gonna be painful.

As of yesterday, the big project for the Major Client was at 500 iterations and running strong. Amazing. A high detail model in just over six weeks. All it took was two senior engineers and one rookie working a gazillion hours of unpaid overtime. I sure hope the Big Boss realizes that this cannot be the norm in the future, or it'll be time to dust of the resume...

Last year I built a model of an F-18 for Lockheed-Martin for some studies they were conducting. It was a huge model and took a lot of effort on my part to get it going. Long before I got any meaningful results I was being hounded by people in our sales department for some images they could show around, presumably so that potential customers would think that we've all got huge penises. So I checked with the client and he said it was OK to show some pics. I passed a few on to the sales guys, with the instructions that they could show these pictures, but they were not allowed to leave them with clients.

Guess what I saw today. A picture of my model, emblazed across the cover of a brochure. A brochure! Jesus Freakin Christ. Now, Lockheed-Martin doesn't build the F-18, and I'm about 99% sure that the geometry data they gave me was stuff they got out of the public domain, so I doubt anyone will get pissed about this particular image. But I know for a fact that we didn't have anybody's permission to publish this in one of our documents, let alone on the front cover! It'll be a cold day in Hell before I let the sales guys see anything I'm working on without a gold-plated certificate from the client saying we can do whatever we want with his data, including submitting to Fark for a photoshop contest.

Getting close to the deadline on the big project for the Major Client. It sort of runs but not really. Spent all weekend at the office. Going in a couple of hours early to get more work done. I'm really tired of this damn thing.

Got a week of productive work in. Started assembling the meshes today (yes, working on a Saturday again). Made good progress on the dreaded box. Figured out how it can be generated after the debugging is done - makes it much easier that way. Trimming in multiple overlapping sections turned out to work very well. Much better than the vaunted es-parallel-flavor-of-the-month. Yea on me.

On the down side, time is running short. Got two weeks before I go on vacation and leave poor Sato on his own. Well, Joe's there, but he's still learning the ropes. That means we've got to get a geometry write done no later than Thursday. Eek.

Apparently the Major Client checked with his boys, and they said, "no, we don't need 4. 6 is good enough." So we're going with 6. I'll back off from my penis boasting comments. Still trying to generate a clean box to meet the new requirement. Major pain.

Got another job that ran for a month. I was getting ready to send results to the client and discovered that it was all wrong. Worse, it would have been easy to catch if I'd been paying attention. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Gotta do better on these simple ones.

More instructions from the Major Client today. We were already going to go with a cell size of 5 for the key components, with 2.5 for the grill. Not enough he says. He wants 4. But we're supposed to keep the total count under 9 million. Excuse me? Nobody's done one finer than 6, and he wants 4??? Only way to meet both criteria is to coarsen everything else. Wheels, exterior, even the grill. I'm beginning to think this is more about penis size than it is about doing the best analysis. So I play the whore and say "Sure, 4. Why not?"

Prediction: Next fiscal year, they'll be wanting 2.5. Only way that'll work is if they stop dorking around and give us CAD data that fits together - no gaps, no interfering. Otherwise it'll be pure penis boasting with no real value.

One more post to check formatting changes.

Spent much of the day negotiating with Sato over what cell sizes to use for the custom mesh. He wanted to keep the size high so it could be done on a linux box. I felt we had to go small even if that meant generating and cutting on 34 or 35, which are big (6 GB RAM) but slow. In the end we decided to break the domain up into three chunks which could be managed on any platform. Means tossing our fancy "Expert System" softare out the window, but that may be a good thing. The Big Boss says we gotta call the Major Client today and get their approval for whatever cell size we go with. Sometimes I wonder whose side he's on.

Not entirely satisfied with the look - too bright. One more post just to tweek it a bit.

Showed the results of Saturday's work to the Big Boss. He was less than enthused. Wants me to go with Plan B. More work for me. Wanker.

Lunux7's disk drives were full yesterday. 100% on u1, 97% on u2. One guy had 18 gigs on it. Told him to get his stuff off or I'd become him and rm -rf it all. (He's been promising for a couple of weeks to back it up and clean up). I think I finally got his attention - 5 or 6 gigs were gone immediately and he said he had a tape running. We'll see.

Red and Sky are both fully utilized these days. Good thing they got Red working finally. I think we need another 64 nodes soon, though...

Changed the template a bit. We'll see how it looks.

Gonna practice adding a link. monster.com. Ta-da.

Worked on the damn box around the hx package for six hours. Looks easy enough on paper, but the details get you. Lots and lots of details. Got a lot of them, still a few more to deal with. The Major Client better be satisfied with what I give them...

License servers were down for the Linux platforms. Glad thing I hadn't logged out when I left Friday.

Just updated the fonts on the template. Did it work?

Working now. Cool. Now to add a link from the Double-Secret web-page.

Still trying to post using ftp...

Got to go in to the office on Saturday, again. Got a Major Client with a real tight deadline. To make things more interesting, they want more stuff than we've ever done before, they want it faster than ever before, and they were nearly a week late with the CAD data.

Wankers.

Got to go in to the office on Saturday, again. Got a Major Client with a real tight deadline. To make things more interesting, they want more stuff than we've ever done before, they want it faster than ever before, and they were nearly a week late with the CAD data.

Wankers.

Entry number one.

Can I get this to work???