Go Ahead. Just try and get 99 lives on this website.

I’m back at school for the Spring semester and am reasonably excited about it. As I sit here in my apartment, I am quite pleased that I can walk around for the first time in many months without shoes or socks on and not worry about getting my feet dirty. Thank you Roomba. Roomba stopped making beeps, and will need to go in for service, but cleans extremely well anyway. The iRobot people sent a replacement brush guard straight away–but I think this Roomba may have been treated poorly in it’s prior life.

The next few months will provide me with plenty to keep busy; microcontrollers and software and photographs and lasers and wire cutters and books and music and classes and learning and evenings and everything else, but I’ll miss some things from my winter break.

Esther having some foot, me having a messed up sleep schedule, interesting conversations in the bcfg2 IRC channel, and good times with friends.

I think I’m ready though. I’m relaxed. I have a new desktop pattern set. The floor is clean.

Electricity can be scary. As can be lasers. When working with high voltage and lasers always be sure to post appropriate warning signs. “But what if I don’t have the appropriate warning signs,” you plead. (Of course you are asking this, because of course you are commonly working with these, and other sorts of dangerous things…) The answer is simple. Make your own by following these simple steps:

1. Find appropriate warning sign on Google Images
2. Re-implement graphics in Adobe Illustrator
3. Mask, X-acto, and paint; repeat for each color

I followed this procedure exactly and produced a great warning sign for the power supply mentioned in a previous post.

I recommend using a good german font, like one from the Din Schrift family, and being careful with the masking. I covered the box in masking tape, printed my design, and taped the printed template. Next I used an X-acto knife to cut out areas of exposure for a given color. I repeated for each additional color, layering as I went.

Speaking of Power Supplies…

Every summer I spend way too much on eBay. Case in point:

Its a Power Designs TP 343B triple output power supply. Extremely well built on the outside, surprisingly modern on the inside, with ICs and such. I’m quite happy with my first real lab power supply. There will be at least one more post about summer eBay purchases within the next few weeks. I can make this guarantee because I have already made the purchase.

I took this picture of the Siebel Center the other day.

It’s worth viewing at full resolution. Click the thumbnail, then “View Full Picture.”

While of course there is a paper to rewrite, and a couple of last homework assignments to tu:n in, I instead hope to draw attention to more interesting things going on this week.

I’ve been listening to TwiT, with Leo Laporte & Friends — a fine podcast indeed, covering the week’s tech issues. They talked a little bit this week about Maker Faire an event which I’d love to visit given the opportunity. Maybe they’ll do it again next year?

So in the spirit of making things, last night I went to the ACM office and worked on an interesting project. Details to follow later this week.

This weekend Allerton is hosting their the annual plant sale. It should be really exciting– I plan on bringing my digital SLR to get some good pictures while I’m there. Anyone else up for a trip this weekend?

12:00:09, Morse M2 Metric Tap

This week I really enjoyed the first smells of spring as my cold subsided and I got outside. The weather has been beautiful, following some great storms. Today was so nice in fact, I went Geocaching after work. I rode my bike down to the big park on Windsor and had a really enjoyable time. For those interested in Geocaching, I highly recommend using the Google Earth KML file to visualize local cache locations and find convenient targets.

The Laser Galvo project is still going on. As you can see above, I got a special very fine tap in which I will use to thread the holes in the milled aluminum, once that work is done.

One special note about the photographs above; I took them with a Kodak Professional DCS 330 Digital camera, then proceeded to crop them to 2×3. It’s lots of fun to be able to use depth-of-field in a meaningful way again. And the colors are Fantastic. I forgot how great pictures through this old camera could be.

Now on to a beautiful evening of Coding.

At an unspecified time sometime likely Monday my vehicle experienced a delamination failure in plastic-plastic bond pictured below. The automobile component previous replaced in November 2001 was possibly exposed to high winds that day and temperature fluxuations of typical of winter. Fortunately an anonymous citizen returned the debris to a secure location for investigation. It does not appear as if any foul play was involved, as occurred in the previous incident regarding trunk mounted counterpart to this item in 2002.

The failed component is scheduled for replacement when I return home the week of the 19th.

Photo documentation:

Sometimes I mix up words. Like Authoritive and Authoritative. The key difference being Authoritative is a word, and Authoritive is not.