Strange how you don't miss people until they are gone. I miss cousin Tim
Dierenfield (for those who did not hear, he died in a fire on Friday). I
saw Tim last summer for the first time in 30 years. I had not thought
about him too much before or since then. I have thought much about him this
weekend though. Today 2 different pictures of him showed up on one of our
computers that was randomly displaying pictures. I guess my computers are
thinking about him also.
Nick spent much of this weekend studying colleges and starting the
application process. He narrowed it down to 9 schools. In no order:
University of Chicago, Williams (Mass.), Oberlin (Ohio), Reed (Oregon),
Carleton (MN), Macalister (MN), Grinnell (Iowa), Knox (Illinois), and Morris
(MN). Mostly private liberal arts colleges. No engineering schools,
but he can always do that for an advanced degree ;)
We had an ice storm here a few weeks ago. The highways were really slippery
for a few hours. Just our luck Zack was out driving then. He avoided
sliding into a highway intersection with a speeding semi in his path by
driving off the shoulder, but a few hours later on the return trip, we slid
off a different frontage road into a few rocks. Not a big disaster, but it
did take out the bumper and the inter-cooler, so the car no longer works.
So we have been sharing the van for the past few weeks while Zack tracks
down parts for a new intercooler.
My bosses boss took 3 of us out to lunch last week and gave us awards for a
set of programs we have worked on for the last few years. It was a pretty
big, long term project which took a toolset we had developed in Rochester
and made it better so all IBM sites could use it. Other engineers and
programmers at other sites played bigger rolls than I did, but they were
getting similar awards there also. It is my third "Outstanding Technical
Achievement Award" at IBM. A nice $5k Christmas bonus. We might have to
get a bigger TV :)
That Blue Gene supercomputer we designed CPU for has been in the news
recently. Lots of buzz at the yearly Supercomputer trade show a few weeks
ago, mainly because it 10x the speed in 1/10th the power/area. Here are a
few links with photos in and info:
http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/20031114_bluegene.shtml
http://domino.research.ibm.com/Comm/bios.nsf/pages/bluegene2003.html
There is a plot of our chip you can barely seen behind the engineer on the
right in the first photo. It is the same plot that I brought home to show
you, Mom and Dad, that the cat later had fun with. No cats allowed in that
computer lab ;)
Bruce
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