I maintain such bad sleeping schedule. I also found this song I’ve been wondering about and looking for forever – its teh Alan Parson’s Project’s Sirius (Listening to it right now). I think its the best anticipation music ever.
Soo tired.
I’ve been neglecting some things recently and also more in general. I’ve neglected my athleticism – I’m trying to combat that with my tennis and soccer classes, but a more fundamental change will be needed for the long term. I’ve negelected silverfir.net, since I keep planning on doing the “real thing” with oasis. I’ve neglected my brain, studying only as hard as I need to to do well. But things might be changing on this front with my diff eq class. Or maybe thats jsut because I need the book to pass the class. I don’t really know.
I do suppose that its better to have too much to do than not enough. Nevertheless, I think another prohibition on CS or a hard limit would be good, so I can get mroe done with my limited time.
Yesterday, I went to Creighton’s, got my comuter working, then watched the Passion of the Chirst with Scott, who went home today. The movie was extremely well done and is the first movie of this type that I’ve seen that doens’t back away from the violence involved at all. I didn’t sense anti-semitism. I handled it alright, and thinking about it, I think I may want to see it again.
Today, it was a relatively busy Sunday – Missed some church, but made it in eventually. I dressed up a little more than usual. Next, i went to a LAN party at Tim’s to try out the new computer. It worked well. Then I helped out with the “Behold the Man” Production at my church. Then I returned home to play some CS and found the performance of my machine significantly downgraded. I thought maybe I got a virus at the lan party. So i reinstalled from scratch since I didn’t have much time invested into the computer yet. But that didn’t’ solve the problem. I checked for overheating, for loose cards, etc. But its even stranger. The problem is that whenever my mouse is plugged into my USB hub, the computer takes about 70% of its cycles when i move the mouse. If I move the mouse to any other USB port, no CPU cycles are consumed. Its extremely confusing – I’ve never heard of this happening before. If you have, let me know!
School starts again tomorrow, and I’m up way too late already, especially since I still need to by books. But first, some CS with a framerate that doesn’t drop below 99.9 even with smoke grenades…
Good music lifts my mood. I’m glad I decided to pull out the iPod and listen to some of my good music – I’ve been missing my music since Davis still has my firewire cable. Now its back, and I’m glad. As the title of this post sugests, I have many projects going on right now. I thought I would give an update on them.
Tim’s Senior Porject Combat Robot
Today was my first real day working on the combat robot. For the first part of the session, we mostly just played with fire, because the robot’s main weapon is going to be a flamethrower. In order for it to be effective, we want to make it more like a blow torch, so after trying some venturis that Larry suggested, I drew on my paintball experience to create a positive pressure air feed system. The muffin fan we tried the first time didn’t work so well, and the compressed air was way too powerful, but the FIRST robot’s compressor with a tube into which the fuel was fed about 3/4 of the tube length away from the end seemed to work very well for a strong blow torch effect. Feeling successful but hungry, we went to eat, and then returned to think about and work on the drive train. Now much work got done, but Tim and I figured out the main chasis (just a 2″x4″ thick wall aluminum tube down the center, to which the drivetrain will be bolted). The details will come.
New Desktop Computer
I purchased from Tim an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and now all I need to to is buy the rest of the computer to put around it. I wanted to go to Fry’s today, but it looks like that’ll be a trip for tomorrow after work.
Work
Work is going well. I go in early all week, so I have to get to bed real soon here. Going in early, of course, means getting out early as well, so I have lots of daylight to have fun by, for example, shopping at Fry’s. All the non-disclosure agreements I signed means I can’t yet tell you much about what I’m doing, since its all propreitary information not yet released to the public. But I should be writing up some troubleshooting guide for the Flic Wireless barcode scanner that will eventually become public, so maybe I can post that info at some point. But don’t hold your breath.
SilverFir.net
Moving over to oasis-as-server running Gentoo is more or less stalled right now. Its amazing how much something working well enough is an incentive to not change things. Despite being on the backburner, however, this one is still on the list. Currently, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are all installed. I still need to get the Apache logs parsed out to the proper domain directories, and set up secure email, ftp, and web servers, get web mail working, and set up a secure VPN with a Samba server for long-distance file sharing for windows (for my mp3 collection remotely, primarily). If you would like to help with the project, let me know.
DARPA Grand Challenge 2006
This is a very long-term goal right now. The first step is the SRA’s (Seattle Robotics Association, formerly SRSoceity) Mini Grand Challenge, which will involve navigating to orange cones located around the Seattle Center sometime later this year. In order to prove my concept of machine vision’s ability to find orange objects to naysaying Bob, we took some pictures of an Orange shirt of mine in various lighting conditions from way overexposed to way dark. In all cases except one (where the shirt was mostly black it was so underexposed), my machine vision technique (really just a photoshop action script) worked. I think using a regular digital camera and algorithms like photoshop’s, it should be fairly easy to navigate towards orange objects in a variety of lighting conditions.
Also, I got the names of people from Subaru, VW, and GMC from Mr. Chaplin, so now I need to put together a two-year plan that describes how the $1,000,000 I will be asking them for will be used to win the Grand Challenge with one of their vehicles (modified for drive by wire and for travelling in desert terrain, of course).
Laptop questions
I like my old laptop better than my current laptop. The only reason I use my current laptop is that its techincally faster. But I think I will be trading back. This laptop needs a reinstall from scratch anyway, so I will trade it for the one my mom is now using, which is the one I liked better anyway. And Mobius (the old laptop) has a serial port for programming robots as well. And 2400+ Athlon’s are still really fast, just not quite a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4. But I like how Mobius is lighter weight and better balanced and goes to sleep properly and… Well, I just like it better!
Those are all I can think of right now, but I bet there are more even!
Life is pretty good. My last Blockbuster shift is tomorrow, its midnight and I’m tired, Math final went well, I was 8th at BCC int eh AMATYC test, Photo Finals went decently, and life is pretty good. TRC is getting lots of money, but so far its mostly internal. We really need external donors. Enter Kent Chaplin, who gave em the names and numbers of representitives of GM, VW, and Subaru in the US. This weeekend, I get to come up with an action lan for talking to them about big time sponsorship of the TRC.
Like I said, I’m tried. Night.
Today was my first day oif work at Microvision. I filled out a lot of paperwork, took the tour, and actually did some testing. Found a problem too, but due to NDA’s galore, I don’t think I’m going to tell you anything more about that. Things went well overall.
Tomorrow, I’m spending most of the day in the photo lab printing up my final project.
And now, on to the title piece. My brother’s graduation from college and Steel Conflict are the same weekend. I almost gave up the graduation to attend the battlebot-like event, but I talked to Tim today, who is heading the battle bot project, and thought some more, and so I will go to my brother’s graduation and miss the first half of the competition.
The math midterm indeed did not go well – I got another 77. I can still pull an A- in the class by doing 140 or better out of 150 on the final. I plan on it.
Keeping it short and simple, since so much is going on.
While photographizing with Dan on Saturday night, I was drivng in the Saturn on eastgate way under the BCC overpass when a water baloon hit the windshield. It culprits got away, despite our calling of 911, and the windsheilf got cracked badly. I continued to photographize, just not in that same location.
“An armed society is a polite society”
USP or 1911 + Night Vision are on the shopping list
Next time, those punks better worry about more than leaving before the cops get there