Checksum Arcanius

Email fun
Yesterday I modified my aliases file to send mail both to my mailbox on silverfir and to my gmail account. Its quite nice to access my main mail live while at work and whatnot, a d I’m noticing myself almost liking gmail better than thunderbird. Its hard to beat Thunderbird’s offline capabilities though, so I’ll keep it around at least to store all my mail locally.

Work
Work was good. I had two big stacks of boxed Flics than my head when I was done. Good stuff. I also sent out additional Gmail invites to members of the TRC that wanted it. Just another perk of the club. I don’t know how many invitations are normal, but I’ve had 14 given to me so far. Some people thought that there were usually a lot fewer than this. Anyone else have info on this?

After Work
I left just after 5, and tried to find a Big Five in Kirkland. The directions (Frm QwestDex.com) were crap, and I ended up on NB 405 again. So I turned around at 160th and just went to Gart Sports in Downtown Bellevue. There, I was mistaken for the store manager before I found out that they didn’t have any normal frisbees. I did get an interesting LED nightglow Disc out of the deal though. And ome cones. That might be nice at the next game. The reason for all this hoopla is that I was teaching (or just coaching really) a youth group my mom works with on frisbee techniques. Although it was the first time for a lot of them, many showed some good potential. They were invited to Saturday Ultimate at Robinswood park.

FireFox 0.9
I haven’t really had enough time to test it out extensively, but except for the ABSOLUTE CRAP default theme, it seems to be pretty good.

Belkin Sux
My brother not-so-recently bought a Belkin 54g wireless ethernet bridge. Except for absolutely sucking like no other, its very nice looking. Don’t buy anything from Belkin EVER, except maybe cables. My USB hub from them is a piece of junk as well. Well, I wanted to transfer some mp3s I had just ripped from my Santana CD to the hard drive on the desktop. And it was taking forever using the linksys WET11. So I swaped out for the Belkin. Well, its fast… at least 10 times faster in throguhput it seems. But, well, it seems to die once about every minute. The connection goes kaput. The more packets you try to stuff through, the worse it gets. So probally most of you will have trouble getting this page. But thats ok, it will only give me more incentive to get this darn house wired.

Goodnight, folks
Yay, overuse of subtitles.

Today went a lot better than yesterday at work. Thing got moving early, and I was able to get a lot done. I took a ridiculously long lunch break (2.5 hours, but it wasn’t supposed to be that long) in order to go up to a building that my brtoher manages to take a look at the sprinkler system, because suposedly I am an expert on the things because I spent a summer installing them a few years ago. With some ideas from the the maintenance guy, we got the water flowing again. Unfortunately, in a vain attempt to get water ut earlier, all the valves were manually set on. So I got to go around, braving the spraying water (which wasn’t too hard on such a warm day) turning the valves back off. But some of them were really hard to find. After that was done, it had been way too long and I didn’t really have time to try dinking around with the controller to program it. Either somebody else will or I’ll have the “opportunuty” to try it later.

After getting back from work, I got back to work and things went well through six o’clock. Then I wrapped things up and headed for Grass Lawn park via a place to eat. The place to eat ended up being Subway on Willow’s road. The park was extremely busy, so we ended up playing on some not-too-nie grass, but the game ended up being very good. My team got down by six at one point, but we managed to tie it. Unfortunately, the other team scored again with just seconds left and took the game. But it was still good, because I am noticing that I am either jumping higher or simply timing my jumps better and have a better idea of how high I can jump. I like to think that I’m jumping higher though. And my forehand flick isn’t up to snuff yet, but its improving, especially for lighter throws. The two-a-week frisbee is going to be good.

After ultimate, I tok Dan and Bob home, and then Bob and I talked about the TRC summer hack sessions for a while. We laid out tenative dates, and I will be checking with Larry for availability of his place and my mom for availability of some resources at the office park. What would be ideal is simply a place large enough for two or three groups of 3-5 people to meet where there are simple things like soldering irons and electricity. Ok, a milling machine, lathe, and bandsaw would be nice too. But still, that really isn’t asking too much, I don’t think, especially after a $2+ million addition to the school that benefits primarily the drama club. But hey, we have our very own room now (never mind that its smaller than the space we had before, and its all we have now, and its really just what the Drama club vacated because its too far from the new Perfoming Arts Center. Meh. Enough for now.

And after that, I came home. Pretty good nice long day.

If you are bored, go check out this update for the SRS site and tell me what you think. Then compare it to the current page. I think its better, but then, I’m not so hot on the whole beautification part of things. I think the text links could use some CSS beautification. Any suggestions?

That was my main project after a slow and frustrating day at work. I expect tomorrow to go better.

In other news, on a leisurely lunch break I took from work, I saw two (2) RX-8’s in the parking lot. One was a nice sparkly red, but it was an automatic. The other was sleek black, a manual. I think I’d go with a sparkly red with the manual transmission and the sunroof. The RX-8 is such a nice car! I’ll try to remember my camera next time.

Oh, and Terriyaki, etc! in Bothell competes well with Fuji Terriyaki in Bellevue, I have discovered. The prices aren’t quite as good, but the tastes are slightly better, from my latest experience. I am happy.

I’ve been really sporadic on posting recently, which is bad because posting here gives me a chance to materialize some thoughts, which seems to be a healthy thing for me to do.

Today in my Differential Equations class, we had the third and final midterm – I studied practically all night, albeit not very efficiently due to distractions of the Counterstike type. I went to sleep around the time the sky began to light up again, then woke up at verious 7 minute intevals between two and four hours later. Mother cooked me an excellent breakfast, and after brushing up on a few problems and missing my tennis class, I proceded to campus to take the test. It went alright – I’m fairly confident on 6 out of the 8 problems. The other two went pretty badly, though I may scrounge up some partial credit. Barring stupid mistakes on the 6 problems (which is not out of the question), I should do passably on the test. Otherwise it could get ugly.

The lesson to be learned here is that my time management, work ethic, and focus under pressue still need major improvements if I am to become a well-rounded functional person. My natural gift for test taking and blind intuition can only carry me so far thorugh life without additional effort.

On Sunday, Shai and I went to Bellingham to visit Beth and Greg. We had a good time walking among the Ski to Sea race extravaganza which included many street booths. We ate at Lemon Grass, the best Thai food resturant ever. Excellent food, good prices, excellent service, and a good time was had by all. We also thre in some frisbee and Lava tag with some WWU students that showed up before returning.

I have fallen rather far behind in my photography class as well, not having done anything to speak of in the last two weeks other than thinking about the upcoming assignment (due Tuesday). I will take pictures this weekend and develop and print on Monday, which I am getting off of work. Also due on Tuesday is the final project in the Diff.Eq. Class, which I haven’t even taken a look at yet. That will also have to be done this weekend, emailed in for comment, and tweaked (or rewritten as the case may be) Monday night.

My grueling work schedule over the last two weeks has played a big part in my lack of progress in other parts of my life – an average of more than 30 hours the last three weeks. The time outside of this is often wasted, I have to admit, usually by myself but also sometimes by others. I wouldn’t call the trip to Bellingham a waste, but the 2-3 hours of Couterstrike every night is definitely excessive, as are some of my other, less talked-about habits, such as surfing the web and other messings around involving, generally, my laptop, on which I have been on a rather lengthy binge. Of course there are classes as well (but reall yonly 7-10 hours), and the Seattle International Film Festival just grabs a little more time out of the pot. The result is that I’ve only taken a few hours for schoolwork, which was mostly composed of catching up in reading my Diff.Eq. book, because I got behind by, surprise, not reading any of it for a long time (and this well after the FIRST Championship Event, so I cannot place any blame there).

I do wonder how it is that I can get myself out of this rut. For the whole time, I was on the pills, (although they ran out today), but then I also have to wonder what affect those have other than leveling my mood – at least thats what I think they do, its so hard to tell, especially since I’m so insensitive to change.

Well, enough of that for now, back to work I guess.

Today’s big news is that a freak storm came through, downing trees, spreading hail, lighting, thunder, and strong winds, and generally causing all sorts of chaos. The traffic lights just outside of work were even off, although at microvision, the lights did nothing more than flicker once.

like work will actually go back to normal levels soon, so I won’t actually hae to spend every day after school there. Now if I could only get myself to do my homework, I might be in a prett good position. Today, I actually managed to do some useful stuff in the kitchen before I feel back into getting nothing done. As I said in an IM to a friend, I’m not very good at the “Work” part of Schoolwork.

In other news, Kelly is not dead – I saw her today between tennis and math, but I was talking with my polish friend who likes to talk so she can improve her english, so I didn’t even have to consider approaching her. She still looks good. And thats that, I guess.

I’ve neglected you all for a few days, sorry! (although, I never know who you are because you never leave comments… lurkers!)

Today, I learned about differential coffee, painted a cookie can black, and scanned many barcodes at work (can you believe they pay me to do that!?). That was all before I got home. Then I got home, ate, and played CS. I was on tonight. In fact, for the first time, I maintained, long term, a 4:1 kill:death ratio. And
I did it on Seattle T3 CS 1.5 #2 to boot.

Then I looked at pictures of the UW’s Trash Can Robot. Then I wondered how it is that KIRO will come to interview a trah can, but they don’t even mention that a local team won the entire Pacific Northwest Region in a national robotics competition. Sigh.

Speaking of the dumbness of the media, toight on the news there was a segment on how this movie called “10.5” showed the Space Needle falling over. How dumb is that. Seriously, that is the least important thing ever. Well, not quite ever, but tis so unimportant its ridiculous, and here’s this 5 minute news item on it. The media is so dumb.

Next up, I talked with Bobby abut Color Spaces, and then I thought that maybe I should do some homework. Then I ate graham crackers and decided to write this post instead. Well, the order is a little mixed up there, but thats the general idea.

Rich signed my fmaily up to clean the building tomorrow, and since its conference week, we get to do it at 7:45. Hurray for friends.

Obviously I didn’t write this one in Word.

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!