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.

the upper hand

So far our plans had failed. We had four sticky traps, two mouse traps, and we bought two of those huge snap-off-your-toe rat traps, but still the rat had free reign of the kitchen. One afternoon, when our apartment was at full capacity, our brave rat foe decided to try to go on a little hike through our living room. He made a dash for the tv, on the far side of the living room, and ran over Mike’s toes on the way there. We decided that this was it. We had to stand and fight. We closed up the rat’s hole using a CD and some duct-tape, and then we went hunting. The rat, completely unaware of the closed hole, finally made its way back to the kitchen after we started moving around furniture around in a vain attempt to find it. Finding it’s hole blocked, it decided to take residence in our stove. That was an easy problem to solve… we set the oven up to 450 and waited 10-15 minutes, or until golden brown. Luckily for us (and our noses), the intrepid rat scoundrel decided to take up residence somewhere else, unlucky for him, that place was our pantry, and we quickly shut the door. Since we had all the time in the world to plan our attack, we finally decided on taping a sticky trap to a bar (sticky side down), and sticking him to the end of it, where we could then take him outside and ‘deal with it’ however we wished.

In the following movie you can see exactly what happens when 4 computer scientists, one engineer, and an economy major put their heads together to catch a rat.

The final outcome of our encounter with the rats is that we found and killed 2 rats, and 2 mice in a period of a 2 or 3 weeks.  Then we moved out.  Good luck to whoever has the fortune of living in River Oaks #132 next year.