An electro technician's life - part 6

The rest of the shopping that day went quite fast for her. She knew what she
wanted and where to go to get it.
She was not really the one to run around while shopping, unless there was a new
tech store opened or some special orders had arrived. In that way she was quite
efficient, and perhaps a little boring to some. But since she always went
shopping on her own, she did most things on her own, it was nothing she gave any
deeper though about. So she had got the things she was after, and of course some
additional items she had got her hands on while she was in the store. So after a
cup of energizing stimula, much like the one made in her coffee machine made.
She wondered how this “coffee” had tasted when it was done. The beverage these
days were all made of either pure combinations of chemicals or by plants that
had been genetically modified to imitate the past. The little she had gotten
from the educational console was that the original coffee was brewed on grinded
beans that was cultivated, not made in tubes or in suited habitats. Surely there
has to be a difference in taste and experience when drinking that.

Why was she thinking so much about this coffee thing ? It was over a thousand
years ago since they would have had any chance to taste it, and she was surely
not born then so why bother about it now?
So she had swigged it down and started on getting homeward. Now the tram worked
well and even the door that had previously stucked now opened fine, she noticed
that the Material Maintenance Team ( MMT ) had been there and seen to that it
was working as it should and replaced some parts.

Once inside her apartment again she opened the large wall revealing the big
window and the light from the faraway stars shined into her apartment making
patterns on the opposite walls. She had placed her bag with all the parts on the
table and then headed for the kitchen fetching her favorite mug.

After filling it up she had gone back to the desk and started to sort out all
the different parts she had purchased during the day, there were some fine
things as a DM-X4 controller chipset, a real kicker when it came to handling
many operations at the same time, an Q-DAC board, great for gathering connectors
into one common interface outwards, a NIM-9 GPU for more advanced displaying
features ( mainly for consoles of some kinds ) and the SRAM circuit that was
meant for the portable device she was making. After some quick soldering it
would fit perfectly in the unit, but before she did she checked her blueprints
and made a cross reference with what she could find on INFO-NET. She had three
options of attaching it, where two of them were better. So now it was between
connecting the SRAM directly , which in return would affect the neuron-net (
storage handler ) that it had to take an extra route when storing state, or she
could attach it to the main CPU and thus cut down just about all bottleneck
communication between the SRAM and the CPU, on the cost of that the storing
state was disconnected. So it was between safe storing and performance. There
were no huge differences in performance, but why not tweak it while she was at
it. So she sat there thinking about the two options at hand when it struck her
mind. She got up and went over to a chest of drawers and opened the middle one.
Usually one would find clothes and such things in these drawers, but not in this
one.

It was filled with circuits, wires, LED’s. MEM-capsules and all other
things that was to be expected to find in a drawer of an female electro
technician. She looked carefully and did finally find the things she bought
extra a few weeks back when she was shopping, the Memory Cross Bridge ( MCB ).
Now her problems were fixed, and it was thanks to the MCB that she could
crosswire to act as a sort of routing unit for the SRAM. What it did was that it
got the signals from the SRAM, then it sent one pair of signals to the CPU and
another equal pair to the State Storing Device. This did that she got the
performance gain without the loss of safe storing.

“Well done” she thought to herself as she began soldering the MCB in place, it
was not a big chip and could easily fit into the holding of the portable device.
Due to its size it was a bit trickier to attach it, and add that she had to do a
small cross wiring of the chip to achieve the correct sending of signals. It
could be done via software update of the chip itself, though it would provide a
load on it as it had to emulate the routing. And since it’s only purpose was to
diverse, or copy, the signals to two locations it was easiest and better to
place that change on the hardware directly. Once the chip was securely soldered
in place she decided to call it a day. Even a small chip can take its time to
place right and time had certainly flown away since she got back home. Though
she had no rush about things so she set it aside to let it cool down and checked
her message box. It greeted her with an empty picture, seemed as no one wanted
to send her messages anymore. Well except those that used it as an advertising
channel, but after she had applied her little own made “filter” even those
messages had stopped. It was an functional filter indeed.

“Well, tomorrow was another free day so why not get some good rest and get
prepared for it” she thought, almost said out loud, as she headed for the bed.
Tomorrow she would continue attaching the SRAM to the portable device, after
some testing of the current ones of course.

She poured the nutritious fluid in the pot for the flower and then threw away
the empty bottle. Hopefully that would take care of it, in one way or another.
But for now it was time to get some good sleep and the bed looked too
comfortable to ignore any further.

Something was flashing in front of her, and a distant irritating sound caught
her attention. But what was it ?
Was she dreaming or just awoken by the irritating sound ? She opened her eyes
and found the source that was the cause of it. Her portable device was lying on
the desk next to the bed and it was flashing with its display light and buzzing
loudly. That could only mean one thing and a quick look at the display confirmed
it ;

“Error in Genetubes 1-20, D-Level Subsection 9 – 11, Emergency state initiated”