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

I spent a lot of time in my room looking out the window and working on my computer.

There was much to do. On Thursday Night I stayed the night inside Siebel Center working away. Fortunately though I got to see Dawn from the Balcony of Siebel, which was kind of cool. I really don’t want to stay up that late anymore though.

When I got home I found my Clock was still not back from being cleaned. Maybe I should call them up? I had to look at how the time was flying by on my Nixie clock instead.

Finally on the weekend, I spent some time doing things like getting lunch, and I ran across an ATM where I could set my preferences! This was a wondrous discovery as it appears I will not need to tell them again that I both want a receipt and that I speak English. I like dim lighting on weekends too.

I tried to go geocaching this weekend–I really wanted to go, but unfortunately due to the snow and it getting dark before I got outside, I failed. I did watch some TV though, through my VCR on the projector, because this is easily accomplished at night.

2.0.1 did fix that XML-RPC problem.

The End.

Please feel free to continue this story in comments.

Every so often, after an amazingly terrible Monday, one needs some stress relief. Today I took a 10 minute break and fabricated one of those 555-timer blinking LED circuits on my tiny proto-board. The “hello world” of circuits; so confidence building, so classic. Oh how it is a wondrous thing, sitting there in my window, blinking its little red LED away.

Ah the therapy of circuit construction.

Now back to the paper writing, schoolwork, and other sundry tasks…

1. Happy Groundhog Day. It was yesterday.
2. Re: Item #1, I meant to post this whole thing yesterday
3. I cannot recommend Deutscher Filmabend enough. This recommendation may be in part due to my great affinity for watching crazy german films.
4. The second hard thing about using LaTeX (Re: It is no fun being a LaTeX n00bz0r) is that, well, you have to know hard stuff in order to warrant writing it with LaTeX, so you can’t just focus on using the tool.
5. {Psi, Phi}, in the mathematical sense.
6. The tale of Elevator Hacking has been around for years; I really want to hack elevators. Unfortunately, the elevators where I live don’t even HAVE close door buttons, so this hack is useless. It also did not work for me in Siebel yesterday. Maybe I should send this to the Mythbusters? Does it work for anybody?
7. I’ve been busy. Real busy.
8. iVolume sounds like a pretty cool product because it seems to fill the role of an on-demand iTunes volume tag analyzer I was looking for. Additionally, its superior algorithm promises better results than iTunes’ built in algorithm. I haven’t yet tried it…
9. Charlie Deets, of Sally, just pulled it off. He switched to DreamHost. That was pretty hardcore of him. I helped a little bit with the intense hacking part.
10. Check out this cool logo that I designed for my friends project, RingCycle:
    I am not a graphic designer, but am pretty proud of it…
    
11. Days are getting LONGER! It was still light outside when I left work at like 5:15 the other day. Sweet. That means its getting closer to Fall, my favourite month. *edit*(where “month” is defined to mean “season”)
12. A long sleeved t-shirt is exactly what I need. I’ll have to find a cool one.
13. The best thing about walking home from the Siebel Center at 5:00 AM is the ability to sing along with one’s iPod, completely unrestrained, because everyone is sleeping.

When commenting, please reference numbers above.

Just when I thought I had the best ringtone on my phone, I created a new, better one to surpass it. I present you with the Yip Yip martians. Right out of Sesame Street. Instant classic.

I have implemented, with the help of Mr. Paul Nepywoda, the Facebook APA; Automated Poke Attack. It is now nearly impossible for Facebook to poke me and go un-repoked for more than 1 hour. The details are classified.

I collaborated intensively with Charlie Deets this morning and in to the afternoon, regarding the status of his ability to post pictures with WordPress 2.0. Unfortunately PHP safe mode imposes difficult restrictions that required great efforts in order to circumvent. Hopefully, upon his hosting company’s action upon a support ticket, operations will be restored to nominal state. I am eagerly awaiting an update.

Also, last night I went with John to see the UI Symphony Orchestra for Mozart’s birthday. It was excellent. It sure is fun to do things other than homework.

Anyway, its Saturday night, so I’ve got plenty of exciting things lined up–like reading for class– and–doing laundry and maybe even burning some DVD-Rs! er.. things lined up…

It seems like everybody is talking about CES, or predictions for the upcoming Macworld, or going back to school–and don’t get me wrong; I’m interested in all of that– but I’d rather talk about something completely different. Even though I’d like to talk about the new Western Digital Raptor X or Shure’s new E500 earphones.

I won’t.

Instead of these things, I will talk about Robots. Kuka Industrial Robots. I just found out about this wonderful new application for them. Even though it has apparently been around for three years or so the Robocoaster is completely impressive to me. Thats right, coaster-as-in-rollercoaster. I think it goes like this: some random guy working for Kuka thinks, “man, we could totally stick some people on the end of our robot, and whurr them around.” then they do. This article explains the specifics. They’ve apparently got one of these in the Wisconsin Dells. I’m going to have to go for a visit.

Maybe one day I could work for these guys and get them to switch OSes on their robots to Linux or something because other than that, these robots appear to be the most elegantly designed pieces of electro-mechanical wonder I have seen. Thank you Kuka, for taking a huge risk and investing a lot of money in TÜV certification. I hope you sell many robocoasters.

I am very impressed with the new Kodak V570 [imaging-resource.com] but almost certainly will not buy one. I probably won’t recommend it to my friends either. But I am extremely happy about it such that I hope many people buy it and use it!
Its not because I just got a new camera in October for my Birthday and not because it is a lower resolution than my current camera. Its because I don’t like Kodak cameras as much as Canon cameras.

That said, I have owned two Kodak cameras in the past; a DC265 and a DCS 330. I absolutely loved the DCS 330, but it is dated now, with its 3.2 megapixel sensor.

Anyway, the reason why I am so excited about the EasyShare V570 is that the industry is producing a reasonably priced camera with a genuine (23mm equiv) wide-angle lens. Being an avid QuickTime VR photographer for years now, I may be a bit biased to getting pictures with a great field of view, but I really think it will be useful for many everyday photographers. Holding the camera at arms length pointed at ones self takes on a whole new dimension when using a wide angle lens. Tight spaces and arid vistas are captured with incomparable spice given the adavantage of a wide-angle lens.

My setup is a Canon SD500 Digital Elph with a 1GB SanDisk Extreme III SD card. Additionally, i have a 28mm Screw Mount Adapter and Nikon WC-E63 Wide-Angle Lens Converter for a total focal-length range of 23.3mm to 117mm. @ 7.1 Megapixels. Score. And it looks way cool when I show up with this unreasonably large lens-adapter on my pocket-sized camera. I really enjoy every element of the setup, except feel the adapter was slightly overpriced. I also find my Delkin 5-in-1 Cardbus reader to perform exceptionally well, but have experienced a few problems with the Tiger version of the driver. Hopefully this will be resolved in the future.

I just got the wide-angle lens converter recently, so hopefully I’ll be posting more pictures taken with it. There is some distortion with the lens, but it is easily corrected. It certainly makes shooting the photos for a cubic QTVR easier than the wide-angle setting on the camera unassisted.
One interesting problem I have run in to is that the end of the built-in lens barrel on the SD500 is constructed of shiny metal. This unfortunately reflects light backwards in to the optics of the wide-angle converter essentially projecting a ring of light (with the focal-length markings visible) over the center of the picture, when taken in to a light source. I have come up with a solution to this problem that i think will work quite well. It is as simple as a piece of black felt placed in the adapter tube on the end of the lens. The ring-shaped piece blocks the mirror-like metal and prevents the unwanted reflection quite well. I hope to improve upon this in the future by securing it in the tube somehow, but I will need to be careful to avoid vignetting.

This setup has a few limitations; the flash is rendered inoperable with the converter mounted, as is the optical view finder. Its somewhat clunky and heavy, and not nearly as ingeniously engineered as the Kodak wide-angle solution, but wow, does a 72mm filter on the end say to my photographic subject that I mean business. In the end, I love the photos my SD500 takes with or without the adapter, and feel the camera’s software, size, and controls can’t be beat.

What do you think?