You plug it all together, turn it on and… it’s not working. You have made N mistakes, where N>0.

So:
1) Read datasheet, manual and internet
2) Try to understand d, m & i
3) Measure what chips are doing, see if this matches your understanding of d, m & i
4) Discover your mistake
5) Fix mistake.
6) Reduce N by 1
7) Go back to first step

Repeat until N=0.

At N=0, three things now line up. There’s what you think it’s doing; what is really is doing; and what it should be doing,

I haven’t got there yet. N is still >0. However, N today is less than N yesturday. This make take some time. Also, please do not interrupt.

[EDIT – Oops, chip that’s supposed to be listening is instead resetting itself, continuously. That’s not going to help. Still, N–, or will be when I’ve reconnected that pin. Unfortunately, connection is under the surface-mount chip, so I have to desolder the whole bastard thing. Time to take contacts out again.]
[EDIT moar – N–; N still != 0]

Gloom! Doom! Global warming means we’re all screwed!

Ah, forget that. We’re humans, we’re like cockroaches, damn hard to eradicate, coz we adapt¹. One adaptation – it’s now warm enough to grow potatoes in Greenland. Given that the entire food supply there is either shipped in or hunted/fished, then a few fresh veggies would go down a treat².

De Spiegel – Global Warming a Boon for Greenland’s Farmers
New Statesman – The Greening of Greenland

This is an unequivocably good thing for Greenland, given that their economy consists of subsistence hunting, fishing in over-fished waters, welfare from Denmark, getting screwed over by Denmark, and drinking themselves to death. So hey, more income, more nutrients, less imports, less dependence upon Denmark and more potato vodka. It’s a win all round³.

(Coz I’m a policy wonk, I can’t write anything without a pile of footnotes, so here goes:

1 – Doesn’t mean we’re happy about adapting.

2 – Obviously, the long-term problem for farmers in Greenland isn’t the weather, it’s the dire soil – there isn’t any, just rock ground to sand by glaciers. But that’s solvable, just return whatever organic material you can find to the soil. Give it twenty years of nuturing and she’ll be right.

3 – Now, the real problem for farmers globally is not so much warming, as it is variability. If you know it’ll be two Celcius warmer, fine, plant crops for that. But warming is increasing variability, so farmers will have to deal with more floods, droughts, early or delayed rains or frosts, and that is a problem for global food supply. Hey, Greenland, population 57,000 people, approximately 0.001% of humanity is benefitting, but here’s a global warming feel-good story.)

This is an example of incorrect cat labelling:

This kind of japery might be considered amusing by some, but it puts at risk the health and safety of all those who load or handle cats for a living. They’re not laughing, I assure you.

Remember – make sure your cats are correctly labelled.

Spoke too soon. Laptop still tits up. Possible bill of $600 expected for new motherboard.

Waaaa!!!

I’m going to have to return that pie.

Then again, in the three hours that it was alive last night, I improved the layout of two of my driver boards to the point where they can be one-sided, which makes life so much easier, and spotted yet another error in the third (luckily, trivial to fix). So this week hasn’t been a total washout on the ‘needing a laptop to get the Mitochondrion built’ front.

My laptop died. Call the waaambulance and get me the waaartificial respiration.

Turns on, hmms for three seconds, falls over. Arse. Took it to the laptop hospital last week.

Get a call from them today, wandered down to Wakefield Street expecting the usual thousand dollar bill, coz it’s two and a half years old. Sorry, what? Free? Free!

So I sat in the sun and celebrated with a pie.

* this offer expires when I feel like it

Surface mount soldering – fiddly but doable, hence:

Mitochondrion, step 5.2 – built but not yet tested

Back to aerials training – arms munted

JetPilot flowing from Rez to Cosm’s Another one bites the dust, whilst looking over a moon-lit valley between snow-tipped mountains – tunegasm

Yes, thanks to modern technology, Man can now make mistakes faster and better than ever before. By using the modern personal microcomputer, mistakes that were once confined to industry can now be made in the comfort of your own home. For example, the use of automatic circuit layout software enabled this mistake to be made in a kitchen in cozy Newtown:

(Yes, that’s surface mount soldering. Yes, it’s hard to do by hand, but feasible. The mistake? The board is an exact mirror image of what it should be. Bother.)