Travelling ...

I know, my writing pace has slowed down significantly. Like I previously said, I've been way too busy with mundane day-to-day stuff to make anything interesting, meaning that I just don't have that much to say. I'd rather not write completely pointless texts, so I choose to lessen my pace. Now, whether this qualifies as pointless text, that's up to you...


I might have said this before, but it is my firm opinion that travelling sucks.

Sorry, let me rephrase that, it's the travelling, being "on the road", part that sucks. I've never been the kind of person that enjoys the journey itself. However, being there part varies from being a chore to being simply glorious - and everything in between.

That's me in the hammock there, in a small village of Kep in Cambodia, 2007. Getting there involved total of around 40 hours of travelling - but this isn't really being fair since this was extended trip and we stopped in many many locations, before and after this specific point.
 
Longest single trip at that point (during that excursion and from point A to point B) had been about 24 hours. Mostly via planes and airports. Cheap air travel doesn't usually be via quickest possible route. That is the part that sucks - cheapest or not. Be it via planes, trains or automobiles, it all sucks equally. Getting from point A to point B takes often so long time, and while there might be some interesting stops on the way, more than often there is not, or you are now aware of them. Or can't be bothered to stop there. Or are just too tired to.

Recently I took a short business trip; just 14 hours total, just to be in a few meetings with total of maybe two hours. All the rest was travelling around or waiting. Can you guess already why I am not a fan of business travel? But really, sometimes you have to do things that aren't the most fun.

Again, I may be repeating myself from earlier post but maybe 20 years ago I read an opinion piece in a local newspaper, saying that business travel should be taxable benefit. Really, that person travelling for work should be taxed for being able to enjoy benefits of travelling for business.

Listen here, bud. You might want to try that for a while first, your opinion is very likely to change.

But, nevertheless, when everything goes better than expected and you find yourself having an extra day with no work to do (having finished early) - well, that one day might be worth all the trouble.

Assuming, of course, that you aren't in middle of nowhere, with nothing but (unfinished) factory and few personnel barracks around you...

Completely useless firmware

Not much blog activity lately, sorry about that, I just am swamped with work right now (uninteresting for readers) so I don't have anything new to post.

But I have to vent some frustration here.

Previously I dabbled with USB HID system with STM32F429 MCU, working fine, sources and all published earlier. I've since tried to get same code working with STM32F469, with no success. Couldn't figure out what was wrong (and I might have burned out one test board in process, oops - 5v tolerant like isn't very tolerant if rest of the board is unpowered...), so I wanted to try newer version of their library, maybe code for older processor isn't working because something in newer MCU had changed.

I want peripheral library to be essentially "drag and drop". Get source file (or directory for more complex subsystems like USB) and drop it in my project directory, change few lines at top of header and done.

This library from STMicro isn't like that. USB  system had been splintered in tiny pieces, thrown liberally around in dozen or so directories with pretty much no logic whatsoever (one file each, of course) in different places of messy directory structure, and with configuration thrown around, piece by piece, in those files. Very opposite of user friendly.

It's almost like they want to force people to use Expensive (with huge capital E) development systems for tasks that should be trivial...