"Use this patch immediately !"

I get a lot of spam and virus emails (and I mean a lot), but every now and then I look at the body of one of the emails and I really wonder how hard it would've been to at least make a grammatically correct waste of space in my inbox. Case in point would be the most recent message I received:

"Dear friend , use this Internet Explorer patch now!
There are dangerous virus in the Internet now!
More than 500.000 already infected!"

You really can't get more fake-sounding than that, but maybe there are folks who fall for this stuff. With the amount of mass media reporting on MyDoom I'd hope that fewer people are opening these attachments...high hopes.

I was sick for the entire weekend, Vinney was down on her break after exams (yes they take exams after their winter break) so she took care of me. And then it snowed/iced all over the place, which left Raleigh shut down until Wednesday. I didn't mind as it kept me in bed and recovering instead of in class.

My driveway was a single sheet of ice on Wednesday when I ventured outside. My car sort of skated down the driveway and I turned the wheel to the right just before hitting the street so I'd be pointing in the right direction when I needed to be...it worked well, and luckily very few people live in this subdivision so I didn't have to worry about traffic.

My parking space at school was also a slab of ice, luckily one wheel got traction on something and I finessed my way into a spot and not someone's fender - gotta love AWD.

We've finally decided on a wedding location and a date, so in theory everything else should begin to fall into place starting...now...right? So far the process hasn't really been bad, other than the fact that there's a significant lack of places to hold a wedding where you'd like to have Indian food catered. And for some reason whenever I'd call and ask if the banquet hall would cater Indian food the sales manager would respond with something along the lines of any of the following:

1) "No but a guy at work is from a place that sounds like India"
2) "We are actually preparing a Vietnamese dinner right now..."
3) "We can do something Indian-like"

With the exception of the first one, there is no exaggeration to those statements. It's like I was living in a Seinfeld episode or something; I got a kick out of them, I guess I always did like Seinfeld :)

Prescott is almost here, just a few more days and the wait will be over. Derek has been working feverishly on the benchmarking and I've got a meeting with some more architects tomorrow to go over some of the finer points about the architecture. Derek and I will be tag teaming the review and we're both hoping you'll enjoy it.

Derek is actually going to be dropping by in a few minutes to pick up some Northwoods and another 875P board to speed testing up a bit. Afterwards it's off to my ASIC design class, which is actually getting pretty interesting. All of my initial projects in that class will be using 0.8-micron libraries but by the end of the semester we should be down to 0.25-micron designs. The first project is a pretty simple design, but it's very interesting going through the design process and seeing how decisions that are made well before manufacturing can truly impact how overclockable a chip is. I'm just shooting for a nice 30MHz on my fastest design synthesis :)

That's all for now, gotta go delete some more emails.

Take care.