Code monkey get up get coffee; code monkey goto job

> DE wrote:
> Anyone interested in having a fantasy ice hockey league. No money
> involved, just for fun.

Disclaimer: When said Canadians are vendors, said stick also deals +4 pissed-off EE
damage and +n lamb nomination damage, where n is the number of available lambs.
NOTE: Flinging the dice at your opponent does 2d6 damage. But it may affect your
ability to participate in future games.

So, Tuesday begins the setup for Wednesday-Thurs’ big exhibition where hundreds of fellow corporate whores embedded geeks, wireless tweaks and sensor freaks exhibit their wares at the Boston Embedded Systems Conference. Including myself, as of 5pm Friday. Only one problem. That niggling little “yeah, you don’t have a demo together” problem, you say? Yeah, that’d be it. How smart you are.

Anyway, we’re sharing a booth with (Unspecified Vendor Eh?) since we have complementary technologies. This is really cool of them, since a booth is Wicked Expensive and the high-ups would have never sprung for it themselves (we’d have to sell, like, aboot 10 units just to break even). However, about a month ago, they kind of just dropped off the face of the planet, not responding to phone/email/voicemails/etc. starting aboot the day after we met with their sales rep in person. Now, as a small R&D company, I’m sort of used to this by now. Vendor sees we’re a small R&D company (“…marketing strategy? We put a blurb on our web site, what more do you want? …Yes, technically our marketing department is GoDaddy), realizes he’s wasting his breath and *poof* gone. So, when I suddenly got a reply to Thursday’s hail-mary email, I have to admit I was kind of caught with my pants down around my bootloader. So Sunday and today have been spent jerry-rigging a demo together, and realizing how [bleeping] much I [blippity] hate [nargin] MATLAB, the [@instrcallback] Language of [razza-fragga] Standing on the [message redacted] Street Corner Doing One [readasync()] Thing. Looks like tomorrow will be too*. I also discovered why laboratory shakers are so expensive, after trying and failing to build my own from scrounged lab gear. Once again that dissected Drmn’ toy has become a vibration source for an energy scavenging demo.

*Exploration for today: Discovering what particular flavour of crack MATLAB is smoking such that plotting points to a figure only causes said figure to update after the script terminates, which is non-optimal behaviour when said script is to read its input data continuously from a serial port from aboot 2-7pm, the length of time I’m sitting with it in a booth demoing. Oh, and it supports callbacks (triggered by, say, serial port carriage return), but only when not executing a loop, but also only in response to a readasync() which, if you’re reading more than one line, is in a loop.