GIACOMOTTO

Sarah and I will be parents soon, in October,
and no, we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl…

What an ordeal…

That was the most painful move I ever did. This is probably why I haven’t got any time to write about anything that is going on with me.

Of course, we started looking for a place to rent in SJ during one of the biggest shortage of rental, that didn’t help. Next we were 2h away which makes it real hard to just drop in and sign paper with craiglist ads (which stays on for a few hours only…).

So, we started to freak out seriously at the end of July since our lease was ending in at the end of august. “Luckily” Our friends Scott and Jenella were going to Australia, to study insects, for a good 9-10 weeks. We took the job and stayed at their big house in Davis.

Amazing house huge garden, 2 dogs, 10 chickens. You get the idea. We didn’t get out of Davis too much. The place had a storage room so we were able to stack all of our stuff which ended up being a huge mountain of crap.

Many things happened since the quals.

First it went ok, my thesis is going to be about the following :”Clock storage elements and clock distribution co-design for energy efficiency”. Obscure no? hope so, that’s what thesis titles are supposed to be no? Anyway, it is still a lot of work, but it is moving.

Then, at my job they decided to get an office in San Jose and eventually move everyone there. So, since Sarah graduated we moved from Davis to SJ.

Yes, It is moving on,

I believe I have a topic and next week I’m passing qualification examination which basically decides if my research proposal is ok for the thesis…

So next Tuesday is going to be stressful since i’ll have to convince in 30min a panel of 5 professor that my thesis will be great when i’ll finish it sometime in the next 12 months. It always feel a little presumptuous to assure that I’ll be able to have great research done when I have no idea right now how I am going to do it later.

anyway there are 3 step in this Ph.D. and this is the second one! so…Yeeeaaah!

Actually, this one we had to, let me explain…

Sarah and I had 2 cars, a honda civic wagon (he) from 1983 -and yes, it’s a vintage car- and a 96 VW Jetta (she).
Well, she got into trouble. Mandeep and I were coming back from work and since the freeway was backed up we took a back road. It was night and there was no light on that road. At some point that road cross the railroad -your imagination is running wild now- and of course at the railroad crossing there was still no light… On top of it, since the road is parallel to the railroad, the crossing happen with a sharp left-right. Basically you turn on the railroad track.
Since we could not see crap, instead of a ninety degree turn, we did a sixty and she went straight bouncing on the tracks! We were not going very fast since we noticed the crossing signs, the airbags did not even go off. It did not really feel like an accident, there was just a loud noise from the car falling on the rail and the car slided a bit on the rail, just enough to leave the concrete of the crossing. So now the car is stuck on the rails, the left wheels dangling in the air. We get out of the car and we started wondering if we could somehow move the car. Shortly after that Mandeep looks at the horizon and yes indeed a distant bright light is looking at us -a train is coming- and yes the railroad crossing signal starts ringing…
We of course left the car and we were expecting some fireworks… luckily the train passed by - at full speed! - on the other track. After that the cops arrived then the tow truck and so on. Unfortunately, her engine/transmission landed on the train track, so she is totaled.

We got new car then, because the honda can’t go uphill, so we could not get out of the valley…

It’s a new 2006 Subaru Impreza Outback 2.5i, 173hp, 300miles, manual with all the features you could think of. We got it for 18780 with 0% apr (2 yrs).

I joined a small start up called smachines and we’re gonna make some cool chips. It’s part time and in sacramento which is great for me since I still have to spend some time at UCD .

It’s kindda nice, we’re a small team and people are cool. Starting tomorrow …

For this year holiday season we have a very tight schedule …

We first go see sarah’s grandma in alabama then get to georgia to visit sarah’s dad for christmas then come back to alabama to spend a bit more time with grandma and then fly back to davis.
Wait, it doesn’t end there! the next day we leave for seattle on a short road trip with Nikola and Ceca for new years’ eve and stay at sarah’s mom. So basically for the next 2 weeks we are going to cover sarah’s family all over US !
Well, we are leaving tonight at 4:30 am to catch a plane at 6am to get to the south, and we have 2 stops Denver and DC, it’s kindda weird that the cheapest flight are the longest (aren’t we using more fuel??).

Anyway, 6am on a sunday that should be against the law…stupid airlines…

I have been working on that technical paper for a while now. There has been some long pauses along the way and “it” has been hanging in the back of my head all along. The problem with this paper is that it’s a “philosophy paper” meaning that I’m trying to convince a certain group of very competent people that I have a better way of looking at a particular controversial problem. On top of it everyone in that group of people, academic and industrial alike, are strongly emotionally attached to their way of thinking about that problem. After several revisions, I finally put the paper mostly together and the last round of internal lab revision is going on.

Hopefully I’ll submit soon !

I found this picture on the web (1930×3000, ~10.5Mb) of the cell processor. We can see all the various cache and register files for each CPU as well as the central bus. It seems a little light in cache with no L3 and relatively small L2s but it makes sense for a graphics processing oriented machine.

I was watching this US election on TV tonite and it just struck me. Real news does not exist in the US and everyone is fine with it. I just just can’t believe everyone is ok with only propaganda on the news. I mean FOX and CNN both alike. And worse, it’s starting to become entertainment. News is not entertainment, should be serious. These “official news” people try now to get the audience from colbert report and the daily show by imitating them a bit. This is really sad because it means the shows that are there to make fun of what’s happening actually contain more “news” than the official ones !

Some of the sentences said by these so called journalist on FOX/CNN would have been impossible in France, these guys would be fired on the spot, they would be done with their journalist careers and, all the politician would be finger pointing at the news channel director…

Now, of course French news channels are a tiny bit biased, we all know which way. But it is never apparent and sometimes hard to tell, since all the show about politics always have both parties.

In US, news channels are so one-way it just has nothing to do with news. It kindda piss me off to see people swimming in ignorance: real democratic countries have real news. hello? american people? your country is not democratic!