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Un(COOLLIST) Type Happenings
Hi, y'all. My last few days here in Austin have been a slight bummer.
First, tuesday morning, as I leave for work, I notice that my bike was
missing from the bike rack outside my apartment. OK, go check the rack
by the pool: no bike there either. It appears to have been stolen.
This bothers me, even though it wasn't a great bike: 11 years old, city
men's 10-speed, Western Flyer, charcoal colored. I guess I'm on the
lookout for a new bicycle now, one that will do well both on the
streets of Austin and on the dirt trails, one that has multiple speeds
and isn't too heavy, and one that I can store in my apartment when not
in use, rather than leaving chained outside.
Of course, my folly was that I had a rather insecure lock/chain on it.
It was what I had gotten at Kmart to hold me until I could get to a
real bike shop. Apparently, I should have gotten a good lock right
from the start.
OK, bummer number two. Yesterday (Wednesday), the SSO-Austin group was
called for a staff meeting, where a memo from the top of the Paging
Products Group was read. The memo announced that all the various
organizations within paging were being required to reduce headcount in
order to make PPG more profitable in the face of increased competition
here in the North and South American markets. The Austin group was not
severely affected: one designer who moved to Motorola's Semiconductor
Sector was counted as our token layoff. However, it does hurt whenever
you are affected by cutbacks like this; it also is rather scary for
someone just hired.
Enough with bummers for now, though. I've family visiting me Friday
through Sunday, a order for a faster modem (a Motorola Power 28.8) in
the pipeline, a freshly recorded copy of _The Breakfast Club_ to watch
at some point in the future, and a dual-processor SPARCstation 20
sitting on my desk (to be sent away to Florida when the real SS20 comes
in, and I get my hand-me-down SS10).
Dig we must,
--
Ben Combee, CAD Software Engineer, UNIX guru, self-inflicting poet
Motorola Paging Products Group, Strategic Semiconductor Operation--Austin
combee@ptsg-austin.sps.mot.com +1 512 891 7141 Pager #897141 - Austin