A momentary friend

Yesterday morning we parked at Tallaght in order to take the Luas into Dublin. Whilst waiting we exchanged pleasantries with a mother and her two boys possibly between four and six years in age, each with a three-wheeled scooter. One was messing about close enough to the edge of the platform to demand my attention. Just as the tram was coming in he stumbled and lurched towards the line. Jolted by an  adrenalin rush I jumped off my seat to help his mother pull him away. 

What could have happened had she, had I not reacted fast enough... well, such thoughts troubled my mind all the way into Dublin. This boy, hitherto unknown to me, suddenly had became someone I dearly cared for. It was almost as if I had become part of his family. When we alighted we waved goodbye and he waved back, momentarily friends. And this struck me as odd as it is extremely unlikely that I will ever meet him again or recognise him if I did. 

Free lunch

The Luas and Dublin

It's a view of Dublin from the footbridge outside the Red Cow hotel. The occasion - a free seminar on Cypress Bluetooth semiconductor products hosted by EBV. Not only a free lunch but also the freebies shown below including two hardware development kits (each worth $49). Although the seminar only scratched the surface it was a good introduction to these products and about the best kind of advertising a semiconductor house can engage in IMHO.

And the sun shining all day when I could have been mending the roof back at home...

Cypress freebies

For those of more technical bent, the main product was the "PSoC 4 BLE" chip that integrates a Bluetooth radio, touch-sensitive switch module, programmable general purpose analog and digital modules and a 48MHz ARM® Cortex™-M0 CPU. The development environment (also free) top level is schematic capture in which you drag and drop icons representing the various internal modules, configure them and then hit a key to automatically generate corresponding C-code which you can then optionally fine tune before compiling and programming the target device. Neat.