The firm I joined last year+ grew 3x floorspace this year.
Making us fragile.
We are behind making a milestone so our major project
can pay us. Due largely to their delays in getting sheet metal
to us, followed by our assembly, but the contract doesn't handle that.

The financial crisis (tm) means the boss can't borrow money
from banks or friends. The economic situation means we haven't gotten more
business (engineering services) than thought. The accounts payables depts of those that do owe us
have closed and he can't make payroll, so I'm on unplanned unpaid vacation til the new year.
Furlough. Along with half the company. I think the others are getting paid in the
future but not now. When they get build a few units we get paid.

I can float for a month but my wife took my $35K buffer last year when she collected
taxes I had underpaid, she says.

Interesting times.

I'm glad I'm not the long pole in the tent.

We joked after the Meeting about the copper in the walls being worth less given the implosion.


But I left the day in an irrationally good mood because I had solved a problem involving
using I2C protocol on an NXP ARM7 SoC. (Which, it turns out as of three days ago,
is being cancelled, adding another engineering, financial and V&V (medical
device testing) twist to the story.)

This problem I solved gotten two other senior engineers including the VP of engineering who'se been an EE for 40 years. Somehow the CPU's I2C engine's "read" was broken and it would not generate clocks so the slave could output data. I manually grabbed the lines and toggled the clocks and it worked (aka "bit banging") indicating that all was well except for the damn I2C read.
The problem had also gotten me for several frustrating days. Since I map work progress to
mood, (which has pros and cons) it was bumming me out. So, as I'm waiting for my personal meeting with the boss
about getting furloughed, I'm finally able to read out the temperature from this super cool
network analyzer (analog network analyzer, not ethereal) AD5933 chip. Previously we had only
used it via an evaluation board and a Windows/Visual Basic/USB->I2C chain, so using the chip via raw I2C and using the NXP 79524's likely broken I2C engine was a real adventure.

Mind you, I studied artificial intelligence and vision as a lad. Pretty abstract.

I expect to go back to work in January, so my post volume might increase a tad in the interim.

The solution might be characterized as a hack. But it will work.

I had thought I was more insulated from the implosion as I don't own ridiculously
overextended, over-abstracted financial instruments. And my only debt is my
home (and kid :-) But through work we interact with many more. (Work is one of my
Paths to Clue.)

"Will code for liquidity."

At least I scored a GPS unit on black friday, my kid loves it, and is learning it more
than I. Though I have studied up a bit on how it works, and he doesn't know what a
correlator is, or how fixing a few points fixes you. I'm totally impressed, albeit my tax dollars have paid for a satellite (or two, it seems..)

I might volunteer in the kid's science class, I thought. We'll see.

At least gas is cheap again.

Rome did not fall in a day.