I’ve gone Far West

I am now officially moved in to my new place at Far West.  All that really means is that all my stuff is here, since my other lease ended today, but at best half of it is unpacked.  We had 10 days of overlap, allowing us to take our time cleaning out the old place.  The move was interesting - I rented a 17′ uhaul and moved all our stuff and all the girl’s stuff in two trips.  The girls had the opposite problem of moving out 10 days before the next lease started, and so they were couch surfing for a while.  Since they are now on the other side of Arvind’s and my duplex, it made sense for them to store their non-essentials in our garage at Bravosite (the name of the old place) until the lease on Shadow Valley started.  We are calling our new house Shadow Valley, and trying to stop the girls from calling us the “Shadow Valley kids club”.  So far we have been successful in preventing shirts with handprints and “move in day” painting on it… but we can only hold out for so long, since there are 3 of them, and 2 of us.

While the actual move went on without a hitch, I seem to be having pretty bad luck since the move.  The duplex didn’t come with a washer or dryer, but did have hookups.  Rather than renting one I decided it might be wise to go ahead and purchase a pair from craigslist so I can take them with my to my next place.  Not two hours after I paid for them, and half way through the second load of clothes, the pump seized up causing the motor to spin in place on the belt producing a sweet burning-plastic scent to add to the aroma of the laundry detergent.  After siphoning out the water in the basin, we managed to pull the pump out and order a replacement.  Hopefully it will be here soon, and hopefully that was the only problem.

The next day, while Lindsay was cooking for us– Side note here: living next to Lindsay of Apron Adventures turns out to be an awesome choice!  But as I was saying, while Linday was cooking for us, the stove decided it had had enough of this whole “cooking thing” and wanted some time off.  Aparently using the stove was a bit much for the wiring in this house, and it decided to short out in a nice series of pops followed by a slightly familiar burning smell which, for some reason, now makes me think of fresh laundry.

My troubles were not over yet, because I discovered the motherboard I just ordered for my new computer came in with a faulty SATA controller.  I’m really hoping newegg.com is good with returns to different addresses, since I had it shipped to my old house the first time.

Three problems in like 4 days… I had hoped that 3 was the magic number.  You know what they say, trouble comes in threes and all.  Well, not for me.  Yesterday after driving through austin on a particularly hot day, my car decided to start pouring out antifreeze all over my drive way.  I’ve since refilled my coolant system, and let my car idle for a few minutes, but didn’t see any leaks.  I’m not sure if thats good or bad, since I could at least find the problem if it presented itself again.  Don’t tell mom and dad, but I was kinda wishing my entire radiator was busted and I would just have to buy a motorcycle ;-).

So in conclusion, Shadow Valley seems to be a great house, with a nice yard and sweet neighborhood.  We’ve been watching the doe and two fawns that enjoy feeding in our back yard every morning, and Lindsay’s cooking is far better than what we had been doing on our own.  Work is right around the corner and we keep finding new friends that live up in this area, so we won’t be lonely.  I’m really just hoping going to work tomorrow doesn’t provide a 5th tally to my list of troubles :-P.

Um, hello?

So, Luke hasn’t been around much lately… I thought I’d fill in for a while.  I’m bloggy the self writing blog that lives to serve this luke guy.  While he went galavanting around Austin I used to sit here waiting for updates from him, but now I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands.  6 months of silence is just too much for me to bear.  I know that Luke has been busy rock climbing in the green belt, camping at enchanted rock, hosting movie nights, and generally screwing around…. not to mention working.   But couldn’t he take the time every once in a while to sit down and have a little talk with me!?  Just a few updates, thats all I ask.  He could have written about his climbing harness arriving at REI today, or the planned repair of the water works at his parent’s place in San Antonio this weekend, but instead hes tinkering with his server and trying to play games with a rival house.  I swear that new friend of his… whats his name… “twitter” i think?  Ya, that twitter guy gets more attention than a nudist at a dinner party.  Not to say that I have any problems with nudists, I just don’t think they should be attending– but thats besides the point.  Point is I’m going to have to take charge around here and crack the whip to get Luke moving.  Otherwise none of his friends will have a clue as to whats happening in his life, I mean its not like he actually talks to anyone anymore… I mean besides the gables girls, and BFD house, and Apartment Land, and his co-workers… and I suppose he did send an email to his mom this morning.  Who am I kidding?  I’m just his little old blog.  So outdated in today’s communication methods, what with facebook and well… you know… face to face conversations and all.  We’ll see.  Maybe there is hope for me yet.

Nerrrrrd

I’ve been working a lot on a research project for one of my Professors which has most recently involved a lot of compiling on an old Sun (we need the 16GB of memory available on it :-) ).  I spent literally two days trying to compile omnet++ and the INET suite.  I finally managed to get it working after some consultation with the #solaris channel on freenode.  Therein lies the problem.  I think I’ve just dragged myself into irc by finding the #hamradio channel.  I think ham radio is my nerdy guilty pleasure.  By idling in that channel I’m finding out all sorts of interesting things, and again reviving this latent desire I have to get a ham license.  For now, I may have to learn CW so I can use cwirc: http://users.skynet.be/ppc/cwirc/.

This semester has been interesting so far, but I’ve been focusing a little bit too much on my research at the expense of my other classes.  I suppose that means I like the field I’ve chosen, so its not too bad… but I need to put some more time into studying for  GEO and EE.

On the party watch:

Last week - Chris turned 21… boat party on lake austin!  Chris knows lots of pretty girls.  It was a good night.

This week - superhero party?  This might be interesting.

Twitter, Anyone?

So in our boredom arvind, caroline and I all got Twitter accounts.  Since I don’t have any real friends on twitter, I though I might see if there is anyone else who reads this blog and uses twitter.  For those of you not familiar with the Twitter application, its basically “micro blogging”.  You are expected to update once a day or more, but each update is only 140 characters.  Which sounds pretty boring, except that you can blog from your phone while you are out and about, which leads to very random interesting posts.  So far we know we will be cataloging all of Mike’s weird quotes, and probably professor quotes as well.  (which I already do, just on the side of my notes where no one else gets to enjoy them).  And what would blogging from your phone be without getting updates from your phone?  Needless to say, they’ve thought of that already, so the primary way to read Twitter (as well as write) is to do it via SMS text messages… although a web interface is also available for those of us that are… “texting challenged”.

So if any of that sounds interesting, you can find me under lurobi if you want to friend me.  Or I suppose you could find me under the same username if you didn’t want to friend me, but that would be kinda silly wouldn’t it.  You guys better friend me, because if I don’t find enough friends that use twitter, I might start militantly recruiting them so my life can be filled with short 140 char messages about random events.

Case of the Missing Keys

(or, How I Got Kicked Out of a Bar)

I went to meet my friend John at Tonic around 7pm and found him and one of his friends… lets call him Frankie, playing pool in the back room. The place was pretty chill, and mostly filled with the older to why-are-you-still-going-to-bars-youre-so-old crowd, most of whom were watching either the Spurs game or the Cowboys game on one of the many televisions in the place. The night started out fine with a couple of games of pool and a few drinks. Frankie started to become more and more withdrawn from John’s and my conversation, and I think he spent his spare time getting more drinks. As the night wore on, the older crowd left … presumably to go to bed by their 9pm bed times, and was replaced by a much younger (more attractive) crowd. At this point we moved our operation from the back room up to the bar so we could chat up the girls and listen to the band. By now Frankie was pretty drunk and sullen. One of the girls I was sitting next to and talking with had put her keys up on the bar, and wasn’t watching them too closely. Frankie thought it would be funny to slide her keys over behind his glass and see how long it took her notice. He kind of grinned at me when he did it, so I watched for a minute or two before it was clear she wouldn’t notice anytime soon, and then he put them back. I went out to dance around to the rock band playing on stage. John had somehow managed to befriend the band before they got up to play, so every once in a while he would dance on up to the stage and do silly things with the band. Pretty soon that same girl that was sitting next to me came up to me with her friends and asked if I had seen her keys. I figured Frankie had gotten to them again, so I told them to follow me as I looked for Frankie. We found Frankie by the bathrooms, and the girls jumped on him like … I don’t know, girls without keys I guess. Amidst his yells that he “didn’t have no ones *#&$ keys” they fished them out of his pockets, spun around to me and said “we are kicking him out”. I grabbed Frankie and headed for John who was dancing the night away on stage. I whispered to John “Frankie is getting kicked out, lets go”. Frankie is still enraged that the girls think he stole their keys, so John catches on pretty quick and we try to lead him out of the bar. I get one glance back at the girls talking to the barkeep who talks to a few tough looking bouncer guys, who all start staring at us and following us out to the parking lot. We get half way to John’s car before Frankie starts yelling at the bouncers for his right to stay at the bar and how he just found some keys on the floor and blah blah… Pretty soon John and I try to physically drag Frankie to his car, who has now developed a strong pride for some black belt he has in Judokarateboxing or something, and thinks he can beat up everyone in the bar. John and I are taking turns holding him back for about 3 seconds before we get shoved aside by 200lb Frankie. Pretty soon the bar sends out the mother of all bouncers, He is round like a bowling ball, and has to weigh 400lb, with a bald head and a big long beard. A bowling ball who rides a Harley judging from his black leather jacket with metal studs. But Mr. BowlingBall is also a smooth talker, and gets Frankie to back down after talking to him nicely and telling him that the cops are already on their way here. Finally we manage to get Frankie into the car, only to have him jump out and charge for the entrance to the bar before getting tackled by John and me. After a little more talking Frankie gets in John’s car and John drives him home. I hung around the bar a little while longer to make sure Frankie didn’t come back like he was threatening to. When John came back and assured me that Frankie wasn’t going anywhere and had calmed down, we decided to see if we could catch the rest of the band’s show… Only to find (cue dramatic music) we had been banned from the bar for a few weeks!

and that is how I solved the case of the missing keys!

In which Luke Describes Various Events that Transpired During Christmas Break

Good news everyone! After 3 days of planning, building, lifting, repairing and finally lowering, we managed to fix our pump! Water is again flowing to the Robison house, and in time for out News years party too! My mom’s birthday is new years eve, which is also the birthday of a long time family friend about her age as well, so when New Year’s rolls around we always end up planning a party and having lots of people over. This year it was at our house, and about 8 families came plus some kids our age for a total of around 30 people. We had a a great time, but didn’t end up setting up any firecrackers, since its been a pretty dry winter in San Antonio. In fact, I drove over to our old friends the Ramos’ during the night to say hi at their party, and on my way back I had to jump out of my car to help some people beat a grass fire away from an abandoned house! The next day I could see that the fire had burned about 2 acres around the house, but we stopped it about 10 feet away from the foundation. I noticed many charred spots around town in the days following New Years, the biggest was probably 20 Acres of solid black charred grass. It must have been quite a sight when it was on fire.

When I wasn’t working on water derricks or hosting parties at our house, I could generally be found out with friends around town. I went out to Shisha’s quite a few times with Eric and Matt, visited the Flying Saucer Bar once (still the best beer bar I’ve been to yet), and even met one of my old ITSA friends at a place called Tonic. Now, the night at Tonic was quite a story in it self, with mystery, intrigue (which is really just the same as mystery right?), and 400 pound bouncers. I call it “The Case of the Missing Keys”.

Christmas Time

I think I’ve set a new personal record for being quiet on the internet. WordPress and Flickr alike. I’m about to start my last semester as an undergraduate, and am glad for the Christmas break. This last semester I graded for the freshman Turing class to get some extra money on the side. I would have continued proctoring next semester, but I’ve taken up a research project with Alvisi doing distributed computing work. In order to graduate Turing myself, I have to have a research project which I hope to complete in record time this next semester.

Just before I left Austin for the break, my girlfriend of 2 years (not quite continuously) decided she would rather be dating another guy. It was an unexpected blow, and its thrown me off balance for the last week or two now. I’ve been keeping myself distracted so far by doing Christmas shopping for my family, reading Queen of Candesce, and most recently, fixing our water supply. On Friday, our pump blew its breaker and no testing topside have revealed any faulty circuitry, which means we have to pull all 364 feet of pipe and check all the wires and possibly replace the pump itself. Pulling 364 feet of PVC filled with water is quite a feat. We’ve done it in the past using a friend’s tripod and hoist, but decided to build our own structure this time and get our own hoist so we don’t have to rely on him so much. The plan so far is a windmill-like structure made of angle-iron, but all the steel supply places were closed by 5pm (when we decided we would have to build this contraption), so we are biding our time till monday (christmas eve) and hoping the steel supply shop will be open. Until then, we have tied our water system to our neighbors, and are using their water.

One notable update is my 57″ TV has been fixed! Well, kinda. I was able to track the problem down to a single power wire that wasn’t delivering power, and then able to short the relay that provides that power. We now have standard def. TV, although I’m hoping to be able to fix the highDef portion as well.

I’m sorry for the lack of eye candy in this post, but I’ll be updating flickr tonight, so i might have another post for you soon of any interesting or notable pictures.

your internets

YOUR INTERNETS, GIVE THEM TO ME

Projects

Ok, this is half reminder to me what i want to write, and half preview of upcoming posts.

In realizing that summer is almost over, I’ve suddenly become quite productive and actually managed to do a few projects.

I am replacing my speakers in my Pioneer CS-D9900 system… they are on order right now because the surrounds in the old 15″ subs were rotted out.  Just for curiosity, I repaired one of my old ones, and am going to compare it to my new one, and see how feasible a homemade surround is.

I fixed and reinforced the legs from my kitchen chair that chris roark broke.  This really isn’t so much of an impressive feat, but probably my first woodworking job all alone…. Actually, thats not true.  I invented a laptop stand for bed, which ended up looking exactly like this even though I’d never seen it before.  But it is my first furniture repair job.

I wrote a script for the winamp DSP plugin in an attempt to recreate the battlestar-galactica radio voice sound.  It just modulates the track you are listening into AM tunable up to wherever you want.  At 200Hz it sounds like the desired effect, at 20Khz, it becomes almost beyond hearing range.  It would be possible therefore to ‘hide’ a second signal down at baseband and basically broadcast an AM signal up at 18-20KHz.  Now “hide” might be a pretty strong word for it, because looking at your winamp EQ gives away that there is more activity up in the upper frequencies than should normally be there.  Further plans would be to make a setup (winamp or otherwise) where I could hide and retrieve signals in another file

My friends and I have been hanging out on IRC now for better communication.  Its great to have chatlogs all day because i leave irssi open in screen and log in either from work or from home and all my history is still there.  for those that don’t have that option, I would like to write a little chatbot that just spits the log back at you, and maybe even logs to a website.  This project hasn’t even begun to happen - so don’t expect anything soon.

summers already half over!

how did that happen so fast?

I’m well settled in at SwRI again, working for the same guy as last year and with the same people, but on different stuff. Although just last week a bug from some of my code last year came back to bite me… old code never dies. Interestingly enough, I saw Tarun and Mickey at SwRI today. They were there with the UT Robotics DARPA Urban challenge team. Apparently DARPA is doing some qualification tests for the teams on the Institute campus, so I was able to watch the second half of the qualification tests and hang out with the team for a little while. All went well and there was much celebrating.

With Elissa spending the summer in Austin rather than Houston, we’ve been able to visit a lot more often (and with much shorter drives). I think we see each other something like 2 out of every 3 weekends. She made it down to San Antonio for my birthday/4th of July (kinda the same event) and I’ve been up to Austin several times as well. Next weekend is the official celebration of Mike getting through Marine boot camp without dying… which means I’ll be back up in Austin again :-).

I’m getting kind nervous with summer going by so fast. I had several things I’ve wanted to do:

• Fix my bike tire so I can get in shape
• Fix my huge old speakers for next year
• Fix my kitchen chair so I can sit down next year…

I guess thats it. When you work from 8-5 it’s easy to put off those sorts of things to the weekends, which I spend in Austin most of the time… which means they never happen :-P. Things I have done:

• Start pressure washing alllll of my house’s concrete surfaces
• Take care of my registration ticket
• Decide my ranger ham radio from the 70’s is only eye-candy and will never transmit/receive again, at least not under my supervision.

My family and I have been watching season 1 of 24, and only have two episodes to go. Hopefully after that season is over I won’t waste my time in front of the TV after the workday is over.

All this isn’t to say that the summer has all been work for me and my family.  We went to Houston for a wedding of some old friends, and then they dropped me off in downtown San Antonio at a wedding of one of Elissa’s friends (a very nice Jewish wedding… my first).  Another weekend we got to go water skiing on lake McQueeney with my cousins Tom and Dorothy.