mahalo.

made the xbox work for its money today. went to fry’s and bought two games, morrowind and dead or alive 3 (dude, i don’t want to hear it. it was 20 bucks). tried those out before dinner. then after dinner, kelly and sri came over and we threw grenades at each other all night playing halo. good stuff.

spent the entire afternoon (since i woke up at noon) re-arranging my room. there’s a lot more usable space now and if i want, i can use my computer from my bed =).

after that, went to dinner w/ the family at stone house in cupertino village. kinda sorta funny thing happened. we were sitting next to a table with a guy that was talking REALLY loud. like, so loud that you could hear him several tables over. i wanted to tell him to shut up, but obviously i didn’t.

about 15 minutes after we sat down though, he’s continuing on with his conversation when ANOTHER guy starts chattering with him as well. so, i’m thinking “great, now we got a loud cross-table conversation going.” next thing you know, the loud guy slams his hands on the table and he and the guy next to him stand up like they want to step up, and he’s saying something about how a it’s a “public place” so he should be able to have his conversation. yeah… then as the restaurant gets all quiet, that’s when i realize something’s not right there…

turns out my chinese is just really crappy and the guy that said something to the loud guy basically said something to the effect of “why don’t you just stand up and talk to everyone!?” whoops.

anyways, besides that, dinner was great. when i got home, sri and i were both real bored so since he hadn’t watched matrix revolutions yet, and since i’ve only watched it four times, i brought the dvd over there and watched that.

With all the people leaving the company, a lot have already been interviewing. Here’s a of the questions one of my colleagues was asked:

Say you have three registers: A, B and R. The are initial contents of these registers are arbitrary.

Then say in your architecture, there are only 4 instructions:
STOR A: A <- R
STOR B: B <- R
SUB A: R <- R-A
SUB B: R <- R-B

How would you get the contents of A into B? The solutions I’ve seen used 7 or 8 instructions.

Some people are saving for houses. Some want cars. Others want tvs, computers and new toys.

Me? I want something that puts the biscuit in the net. That when I shoot, it asks. “How far?” “How fast?” and “Which corner?”

feast your eyes…

The Easton Synergy

The Mission M1

11 goodbye emails, a beer and some junk food at gordon biersch, and a retention letter later, i’m a little sleepy. maybe it’s because i haven’t been to the gym in over a week and i’m just slowing down a bit.

i want to play some street hockey this weekend. i know kelly and one of his friends is interested as well. i’m not sure who really reads right now, but if anyone wants to get together over the weekend to play, let me know. if you don’t have sticks or skates, i still have a couple of spares.

yesterday, my manager took me into a conference room and gave me some pretty big news. the board of directors have decided that instead of putting in another round of funding to put us through january (when we would be getting the next chip out), that they were going to wrap the company up and prepare it for sale.

the plan was to issue a $3 million bridge loan, enough to keep the company in business for about 6 months with a core team of 15-16 employees. during the six months, this team would continue to sustain and develop the simulation model for the next chip. meanwhile, the board would contract the services of an ibank to shape up the company and find a buyer.

the point of my manager meeting with me, was to offer me one of those 16 spots (5 from our group) - i had a couple of hours to decide. this also came as a huge surprise because the night before, i was talking with a friend of mine who’s working at a company i was thinking about interviewing for. he had me pretty much sold that i would be able to get into one of the three open positions. additionally, the group that was hiring is a very prestigious one within the company, and the compensation would be pretty good.

so my dilemma (not a matter of possibly screwing myself over… really just passing up the better opportunity):
1. choose to stay.
* benefits : experience with preparing the company for a buyout, lots of responsibility, working very closely with executive management, get to keep working with my manager, and potentially huge financial return.

* risk : no buyer found, or the board just decides to give up on the bridge loan idea and just shut down the company altogether.
2. choose to interview with my friend’s company
* benefits : very stable, very good pay, but nowhere near the potential gain of staying at my current position. mix of finance background and cs. high-profile group.
* risk : no guarantee to get the position, i could be a complete disaster in the interview (not all that unlikely)

in the end i chose to stay. i figured that the chance to rake in a good amount of money at the end of 6 months, keep working with my boss (who is great), and the chance to work so closely with the board and management was too good to pass up. and if the bridge loan doesn’t go through at all, it wouldn’t be to late to pursue the interview again.

today the announcement of the plan was made to the entire company. pretty surprising for a lot of people to say the least… it sort of turned out that a lot of people were already expecting it and some were looking for jobs already, but for others, they handn’t really started preparing at all.

it was just pretty shocking overall… a lot of people have put a lot of work into this company. and you also have to consider all the people that have been there for several years working on this startup, and in the end, someone like me, who’s only been there about a year and a half could be reaping the potential rewards. obviously, i consider myself extremely fortunate.

in the end, the last day that the company will be open for the entire group of people that are there now will be friday. but after the announcement today, i know that some people won’t be coming in very much the next few days. our group, was no exception. after the meeting we went out with everyone to get lunch watch shrek 2.

so the point? big changes at work, and i got really lucky. now just hoping that everything works out.

crap. despite sleeping 8 hours last night, I was still really tired today at work. So I pledged to get lots of sleep tonight. now it’s almost 3AM and those 6 hours probably ain’t coming.

i was gonna go to the gym today, but i got sidetracked by some iguanas. i mean, burritos at iguana’s. pretty tasty. then i proceeded to head over to ebay where kelly whooped me like, 5 games of foosball to 1.

after having so much fun with “would you rather” yesterday, i think i’m going to add a “would you rather” section to this homepage. i’ll let people fill in two text forms proposing the two sides of the “would you rather” scenario and then put it up for vote on the front page. that should be fun don’t you think?

went to the element party in sf at greenhouse. ran into mike, tom and justin there. then got back to berkeley around 4, slept about 2.5 hours before waking up to get ready for the psych graduation. after that slow 2.5 hours, got some lunch, took a nap and headed on home. very tired. but hey, allen’s going back to taiwan on tuesday, so we couldn’t let him go without saying good bye, so we met up at coffee society. no caffeine for me though, got some hot apple cider, asked a lot of “would you rather” questions. ready to conk out real good.

t-x vs wolverine. who would win?

got the front-end of one of the assemblers working today. wrote and passed all unit tests as well, so i think it’s pretty solid. just a few more touch ups before getting to back-end and codegen work and then it should be in good shape for people to start using.

went to kitsho sushi for dinner w/ kelly and allen. had the chirashi with 10 pieces of sashimi which was pretty good for $14.75, but i think TGI still has the better deal with ~16 thick pieces for about $16.

after that met up with everyone else at bj’s and had ourselves some drinks. allen has gotten all weak sauce in taiwan and was drunk under the table by steph. i had a nice bottle of fruity cherry lambic for $7.50 when i only wanted the glass for $5.50. however the sapphire and tonic for $6 made up for it pretty well. drove allen home, drove myself home. comfortably tired. good times.

here’s a question posed by kelly. would you rather puke marbles or sweat cheese? my vote went with puke marbles. for one, you sweat a lot more often than you puke, and a coat of cheese would be pretty darn gross. and for some reason, i imagine marbles coming up pretty easily. i dunno, that was just sort of gross. but it sort of reminded me of the old days at the house when those questions floated around all the time. the one that sticks out in my mind… would you rather date a girl that couldn’t walk places, she always had to run, or would you rather date a girl that had music playing from her crotch? yeah. interesting ain’t it?

Well what can I say. I think we were outplayed. Last two games have been complete domination in the corners. Basically, Sharks dump puck in, Flames dump puck out. Repeat. Throw in a Flames get a break with speed every once in a while and score.