And the new job continues to "amaze" me...

Yesterday I learned yet another new term. Administrative leave. Yeah!! Apparently, The Captain (doesn't matter what his real rank is as the commander of a Naval installation his title is "The Captain") has the discretion to award all of the people that work for him up to 59 minutes of administrative leave. One hour or more requires at least one layer higher in the chain of command. So yesterday, if you had clocked in to work you were awarded 59 minutes of leave (to be taken yesterday only) as a "thank you for working hard and let's kick off summer". So my "short" day (every other Friday I work eight hours - Mon-Thur I work 9) got even shorter. I won't argue. If yesterday had been my RDO (Regular Day Off for you non DoD folks - that would OBVIOUSLY be the Department of Defense) like several of the folks in my group, I would have "lost out" on the 59 minutes. Of course, I wouldn't have been working either :-)

The other news is that, in an apparently very unusual twist, I may get to help a department that works in the building across the street out of a bind. Seems that usually the various departments don't mix at all, especially not at the project level (due to the way things get funded). However, this department is in a bind because the main guy who had been working on the VHDL for this particular FPGA was notified recently that he was being deployed to Iraq. I am not sure if he is National Guard or Reserve but, not surprisingly, there are a lot of both on the base. They thought they still had it "covered" but his backup had a heart attack and died last weekend. Suddenly, they have no one in their department that knows VHDL at all. I don't have a lot to do right now, they have funding to pay me (my boss likes that aspect a lot) and I get to learn FPGA design by doing. And, in a few weeks, I will be able to add FPGA design to my resume. Sounds good to me. Now if I can just make the FPGA work. I have casually looked through some of this guy's code and it appears that there are some holes big enough to drive a truck through (shall I say software guy with little hardware experience writing what he considers software - they always seem to forget that the objective is to make hardware). But, alas, I HAVE seen this kind of stuff before and the chance to play with the FPGA programming software is just too tempting.