I got into the EDA (electronic design automation) business 41 years ago. After a startup company I worked for failed (as most do), I went to work for the company next door which made tools for designing printed circuit boards.

I was part of a group tasked with improving the company's automatic routing software. In theory, my group was guided by the company's algorithms specialist, a Ph.D. who smoked a pipe and drew sketches on 11"×17" sheets of graph paper. In practice he wasn't good for much. My co‑workers and I were on our own, none of us with a graduate degree or previous EDA experience.

Engineering is fun when you're making progress and demoralizing when you aren't. It took us a while to find the right ideas. I remember us being at an impasse and the VP of software called us into his office to get a sense of why. After a bit of technical discussion, the VP said, "I have a different question: Why are there four dead people in my office?"

I wish I could tell you how we answered or what (if anything) he did to encourage us while the going was rough. But it was the way he phrased the question that made a lasting impression.

That VP of Software was a fun guy. From a discussion late one afternoon:

engineer A:	There are two main ways people avoid facing reality: religion and drugs.
engineer B:	I don't use either. I face reality.
VP:	You may think you're facing reality but you're really at the crossroads of choosing religion or drugs. And I urge you to take drugs.

I made progress on the Snake-in-the-Box problem earlier this month but I've been feeling stymied since then.

Yesterday I was watching a video with the mathematician Richard Borcherds where he took a question about how he deals with setbacks. His response took me a little by surprise but it was just what I needed to hear:

My normal procedure for dealing with difficulties is to ignore them because it's amazing how many problems go away if you just do nothing about them for a while.

I also liked this exchange from a 2021 discussion with Curt Jaimungal:

Jaimungal:	Do you have any thoughts on the existence of free will? Do you think you have free will and if not, then why not, and if so, why so, and how are you defining it?
Borcherds:	I've thought about this a bit and what I eventually came to the conclusion was that I didn't know how to define what free will was. So if you can't define something precisely, it makes it very hard to discuss.

A guy on my block used to have a wolf‑dog mix named Wyatt that roamed the neighborhood unsupervised. I was wary of him because he was inscrutable. I couldn't read his mood from his facial expressions or body language.

Similarly, I got no cues from this husky I saw in town yesterday. Come to think of it, he may have felt the same way about me.

My right hip started hurting a year ago. It hurts to walk but not to ride a bicycle.

I went to an orthopod who offered me the choice of a cortisone injection or physical therapy. I chose the latter. After the doctor left the room I heard conversation in the hallway: "Did he go for the cortisone shot?" I wondered if the staff bet on such things.

Physical therapy helped but it still hurts some to walk. It's December, cool enough out that I prefer walking over riding, and I considered going back for the cortisone option.

I looked up cortisone shots online to refresh my memory about the downside. Among the possible side effects one page lists: inappropriate happiness.

A short film about time ends with this conversation between a father and his young son:

dad:	Do you not like rushing?
son:	Yeah.
dad:	Yeah.
son:	I would say just take your time. But if you're late you should go fast but still take your time.

If I set out to say something that both made sense and didn't, I don't think I could do better than that.

I'm still working on Snake-in-the-Box. Around a month ago, I wrote

I'm rewriting my code to run on Nvidia hardware and I'm interested to see how that goes.

Porting to Nvidia was fun but my code didn't run fast there. Nvidia GPUs are great for doing a lot of the same operations in parallel. They're not the ticket for code that uses a lot of conditional branches.

I had a good experience trying Nvidia out though. It spurred me to reorganize my code in a way that made it perform better on conventional CPUs.

Snake-in-the-Box is easily visualized in 2‑d and 3‑d. The 4‑d instance is accessible by means of a drawing like the one in xkcd #3215.

Higher-dimensional cases are another story. Animation helps somewhat. I've posted a video to YouTube of a rotating 6‑d hypercube (with a length‑26 snake-in-the-box path) projected to two dimensions. If nothing else, it gives a sense of how solutions to this problem have chaotic shapes. For good viewing, set resolution to 1080p if YouTube doesn't do that for you automatically.

When I lived in Colorado from 2010‑2011, I rented a guest unit on the second story of a garage building behind a house. Such arrangements were common in that neighborhood and were called carriage houses, not that anyone kept horses there.

The Guardian had an article a couple days ago about carriage house‑style buildings for sale in England, including one offered at a mere £8,950,000. (It's somewhat more opulent than the carriage house I lived in.)

Notice anything strange about this image, excerpted from a pic at the web page listing the property?

In a dream last night, I was getting to know a new climbing partner. I'd heard he did metalworking for a living and I asked him what kind of work it was. He thought I was asking if he had craftsmanly skills and said he didn't believe in that. His shop had CNC machines which, he said, followed rules based on objective information about the properties of metals.

I said, "You're probably the kind of guy who doesn't compare audio equipment by ear and instead only looks at measurements."

No response.

Later in the dream he climbed a bookshelf in my house and then over a railing to the second story instead of using the stairs.

There are two kinds of people: those who tell me I could be making money doing <thing x> when they see I have a skill for it, and those who don't.

Explaining that I'm not into <thing x> for the money never satisfies people in the first camp. They continue to tell me I could be making money at it.

16 years ago, I wrote:

A guy at a cactus store once told me how it's cause for celebration when a saguaro adds another rib. As if to remind me of the inevitable pitfalls of desire, he was quick to point out that a saguaro could discontinue a rib as well, and how that was cause for discouragement.

Last month, I wrote about progress I made on the Snake-in-the-Box problem. The satisfaction I got from beating what Wikipedia said was the best result in 10 dimensions was deflated a couple weeks later when I learned that Wikipedia's results were out of date. In 2023, a team in France reached the same result that I had. Wikipedia's Snake-in-the Box page now reflects their results.

I've kept working on the problem and I now seem to be ahead in 11, 12, and 13 dimensions. I'm acutely aware that someone else may have beaten me to these records or even done much better. You can never know for sure. Someone could be working on the problem alone and keeping results private for who knows what reason.

I'm having fun either way. I'm rewriting my code to run on Nvidia hardware and I'm interested to see how that goes.

I see more people walking around in the open space across the street now that some houses in my neighborhood are rented via Airbnb. It's not out of control and most visitors are well‑behaved but those of who've lived here for a while miss how quiet it used to be.

Speaking of quiet, there were no trick-or-treaters yesterday as has been the case every Halloween since I've been living here. A friend who lives in the SF bay area gets over 1000, yikes.