Retired Life

I have read some good trading books.

There is the classic "Technical Analysis of Stock Trends" by Edwards, Magee,
and Bassetti.
Another is "Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom" by Van K Tharp.

I have a long reading list that I am still working my way through.

(from an older, wiser friend)

Articulation - The Power of Communication

Why are social skills so important (coming from someone who wished he had started training much earlier :) ). Here's one angle to consider : The better you are with people, the easier you open up and talk about what's important to you. Smart people discuss ideas. Ideas are your real children. Have you thought about why you have ideas that you never talk about? Because you're afraid of having them mocked at. You want to protect your children. But, with good social skills, you can create a safe place for your ideas in minutes. I was surprised today to hear myself articulate how what I really want to be doing is building security systems and applications - how I want to be in surveillance and remote monitoring. That is the key to this country going green and cutting costs in healthcare and achieving energy independence. We can do it if we approach it the right way. We are spending way too much money having people watch our backs when they could be doing more useful work.

How Fast is a Wilson Current Mirror?

Assuming you want a reasonable phase margin (meaning, if you have two poles, keep the 2nd one at 2x UGB).

You'll see why your PMOS mirror usually gets away without any explicit compensation cap..

If we assume,

Then, assuming the source follower works good (i.e., its Cgs doesn't come into play because its V(S) = V(S) due to unity gain.. (nice, in reality, you don't get that because of the gmbs - so, straightaway, some of the CGS *has* to come into play)

Also, assuming that 

We get, if you go around the loop,

and 

So, if one substitutes the expression for gm, one gets, again, using 

What we are interested in is, how fast will the cap that the input current sees take to charge to the final voltage. Or, how does this Cc (which is what the I_in now sees) compare with the effective input cap for a simple current mirror? If you call that cap C_simple, it has to be 2 * W1 * L1 *Cox

Giving

Moral? If you want to see a benefit, keep the mirror devices' aspect ratio as low as possible and the aspect ratio of the cascode (which does the unity gain buffer role) devices as large as possible.

NEdit word delimiters

For some reason, unknown to me, on RHEL4, with Gnome, the word delimiters in my .Xdefaults weren't taking effect - so '/' was a delimiter, due to which I couldn't select a whole pathname with a double-click.

Fixed by

ln -s .Xdefaults .Xresources

I Could Pick Up Julia Roberts if She Were Single

Also sprach meine freund. He says there are three rules :

1) Eliminate all desire
2) Do something nice with the girl
3) Retreat. Don't pursue

You should make a spiritual non-religious connection with the girl. What they are thinking about is :

1) How interesting will their life be with you
2) How good a father will you make

There you have it. Now go forth and multiply.

Richard Mulvey : The 4 Minute Man

Check out a segment by this South African. Might be useful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPzclUzBa1I

Maybe you need to buy new clothes if a certain meeting is important to you.

Conner's Specialty : Stating the Obvious

He had to write a book after a great year. Problem is, he did it because he had to do it. Result, a painfully mediocre effort. The only useful stuff is on pgs 13-15 :

Self-image : make mental affirmations to improve your behaviour. Your conduct must reinforce the positive image you have of yourself.

How do you come across? Dress? Resume? Homework? Think ahead of what kind of image you'll be projecting in the moment of truth.

How do you speak about your expectations? Salary? You must know what you want and where you want to go. Responsibilities you'd like to have? Think about all this in advance. You must have a clear statement when faced with these questions. What questions do you have for your interviewer? Consider "Where do you expect this co to be in x years?", "Whom do u consider your biggest c?", "What's been your most successful line de prods?" worthwhile, as opposed to "What kind of quals are you lookng for?", "Is there room for promo?", "When will I have my first PR?".

Like I said, obvious.

Horizontal Scrolling in Windows

You can use the scrollwheel to navigate up and down a page. What about left and right? Hold down the SHIFT key! After 6 years as a dedicated Windows user!

NEdit = Super Edit

Somewhere along the line, they upgraded to full regex support I believe. The backreference thing didn't work well for me, but anyway. Here are the things I've added (though the menus, but you can cut&paste) to get syntax highlighting with Autohotkey code. A true software type might do a much better job at this.

In each section (denoted by nedit.whatever - shown here just as a label - don't add this line) add the lines given

nedit.highlightPatterns: Ada:Default\n\

Autohotkey:1:0{\n\
comment:"(;.+$)|(^/\\*.+^\\*/)":::Comment::\n\
hotkey:"^[ \\t]*[^:]+(?=::)":::Flag::\n\
command:"^ *[a-zA-Z0-9_]+(?=($|[ \\t]*,|[ \\t]+[^ \\t:=(]))":::Keyword::\n\
string:"""[^""]*""|'[^']*'":::String1::\n\
builtin:"(?iif|loop|return|break|continue|while)\\s*(?=\\()":::Subroutine::\n\
expression:"^\\s*\\w+\\s*(?=[:=])":::Storage Type::\n\
}

nedit.languageModes: Ada:.ada .ad .ads .adb .a:::::::\n\
Autohotkey:.ahk::Smart:None:4::".,/\\\\`'!$@#%^&*()-=+{}[]"":;<>?~|":

nedit.macroCommands: \
Comments>Comment@Autohotkey:F3::: {\n\
replace_in_selection("^", "; ", "regex")\n\
process_cancel()\n\
}\n\
Comments>Uncomment@Autohotkey:F4::: {\n\
replace_in_selection("^; ", "", "regex")\n\
}\n

Correctly Setting Your Prompt in tcsh or csh

This is *the* way (no arguments please)

set prompt='%~/ !>'

How to set your PATH - the wrong way :

(wrong)

setenv PATH whatever
or
set PATH ($PATH:/dir/dir2)

right way :

set path ($path /dir/dir2)
(that's magic, $PATH gets set automatically, in tcsh or csh - bash is crap of course)

Good aliases to set

ll ls -l !\*
lt ls -lt !\* \| less -X
nes echo \$cwd/!\*