This Will Not End Well

This showed up in my friend Brian's facebook inbox:



Nevermind the whole "give me free support" thing— one thing I've learned from AE is that "quick" and "easy" questions are NEVER quick OR easy. Click the picture for the full size version.

I'm Special!

So as most of you know, I have been the team leader for my team since October. But as of yesterday, I've taken on a new job--I'm an AE Specialist now.

It's technically in the same department, but it's definitely a different job. I no longer have daily phone shifts, which I'm pretty excited about. Now, I get to work very closely with our sales, marketing, R&D, and systems engineering departments. As a "test-side" AE Specialist, I'll mostly be doing proof-of-concept work for our sales force when they are trying to sell a big system; after all, big systems almost always include a whole lot of PXI. My first assignment is a unique challenge: I'm building a system with a giant PXI chassis connected to other hardware and a ridiculously-fast quad-core server, but it's for a company that builds and disassembles NUCLEAR WEAPONS, so I don't get to know much more about it than that.

I'm stoked that I get to stay in AE, which has a fantastic culture, and training that's second to none. But I also get out of the 'drudgery' of handling service requests every day, and I get to do a lot of varied, interesting work, and the visibility is fantastic. I'll make sure and add a post here when I get more interesting customer applications. I've always said that our customers do the coolest things in the world. Check out the video.

My Trip to Silicon Valley, California

I just got back from teaching a LabVIEW Basics class in Mountain View, CA, the heart of "Silicon Valley." It was an awesome trip--especially for a nerd like me.

My Cool Awesome Flickr Page

I'm in the process of uploading my archive of 4,000 or so photos to my public page on Flickr. If you haven't noticed yet, random pictures also appear on the sidebar. If you have some time to kill, go check it out. I'll post new stuff (like California) as it happens, and I'll be catching up on old stuff at the same time.

Welcome Friends, Family, and "Others"

Howdy!

I've secretly had a blog for a while, but it was mainly for techie stuff. But there's a whole lot going on with Katie and me right now, and I figured this would be a good way to keep everyone up to date. I'll still be posting about my various nerd projects, but I hope to include a lot more about personal stuff (like cool trips, etc). So check back often!

If you know how blogs work, great. There's an RSS link on the right side for you power users. If you read a lot of blogs and you've never heard of RSS, it's the best thing since sliced bread--check out Google Reader and then add my blog to Google Reader.

If you'd like to get an update by email every time I post something, just sign up for e-mail notifications in the sidebar on the right. Then, it's like each of my blog posts is a special message just for you! Except it's not.

And if you only want to get a subset of what I post, I plan on eventually setting up fancy URLs like blog.chadbailey.net/personal, blog.chadbailey.net/tech, and so on. More on that later.

P.S. If you want to read up on some techno-nerdery, just scroll down the page.

The 2-day Process Of Recovering Data From a Windows XP Home NTFS Hard Drive

I received the dreaded phone call from my dad a few days back: Windows wouldn't boot. Little did I know, I was in for the big one this time.

I tried my standard tricks. I used the ninja-style [eight commands to repair Windows][eight], which usually fixes it, but this time it didn't fix it. I tried CHKDSK, and I was told that *"The drive has suffered from one or more unrecoverable errors."* Hmmm, that's a new one.

[eight]: http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=313&p=1

A Normal Cell Phone Ring: My Small Effort to Reduce the General Annoyance of Being Amongst The Unwashed Masses

I like lots of music. I like loud rock. I like country. I like mellow white-boy music. I like old jazz. I like 'experimental world music.' I like the Yoshida Brothers song with the shamisen from the Wii commercials. I even like classical music.

What I don't like, however, is super-low-bitrate pseudo-techno or 5 seconds of the latest Fergie song playing on repeat, sounding like it's coming from a 1920's-era AM radio. Unfortunately, those are the hideous noises that come out of 95% of cell phones out in public today.

Fortunately, I have a solution.