Archive for the ‘Short’ Category

Arduino: Day 1

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Part of my Halloween costume requires an micro controller to display a pattern on a led light strip. The light strip and the Arduino Uno micro controller I got to control it arrived today. In the span of about an hour I was able to:

  1. Borrow a USB A to B cable from my room mate as apparently I don’t own one.
  2. Find and follow this guide to working Arduino on Gentoo
  3. Install 16GB more ram while I was rebooting after making the kernel changes required in that guide, for a total of 23.50 Gigabytes of ram on the development system, which is also brand new.
  4. Build the circuit for the basic blink code
  5. Build and upload the basic blink code, which did require two totally hacky symbolic links before it would work.
  6. Realize that the uno includes an led on the board so I didn’t need to build the circuit and realize that it came pre-loaded with the basic blink code so that I can’t actually tell if I did anything yet.
  7. Change the blink code to use port 12 and be faster to prove I’m actually in control.
  8. Success!

Tomorrow or this weekend I hope to learn to how to talk to the led strip. Then I need to go get a fez of some kind. Oh and a Halloween party to attend in the costume, that would be a good thing to find as well.

Posted in Purchases, Short, Technical | Comments Closed

Fixed

Sunday, February 27th, 2011

I am proud to report that after 2 1/2 years of living with a stove with only 3 working burners, I managed to fix the spark/lighter on the 4th burner so that they all work now.

Now, I can move on to fixing this very recent problem.

Actually, it seems I may still a have some work to do on the stove. It still sparks, but only when I’m not trying to light that burner. But it did work for a good couple of hours, most of which I spent watching Black Swan to prepare for the Oscars. On the plus side, we’re considering using the 3D printer at work to make a replacement piece of plastic for the dryer.

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Highs and Lows

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

I met a really awesome girl named Celeste tonight, but failed (via not asking) to get her number. This was at Information Superhighway Five.

I lost my glasses during a crazy, enormous, pillow fight this afternoon.

Posted in ROFLCon, Short | Comments Closed

Making All the Lights

Monday, March 23rd, 2009


View Larger Map

Tonight, I made every single light on that route without stopping once. I did slow down a few times, but still no small feet. I’ve never made it from one side of Cambridge to the other so quickly.

In less than 16 hours I’m leaving to go Skiing in Utah with Paul. I’m his best man. W00t!

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On This Day: March 18th

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

March 18th is one of those days that I remember for a having a rather unremarkable collection of highly related events that occurred (or were said to have occurred) on it. On this day:

And in 1998 I knew all of this without having to vaguely look up things up on the net to remember why it’s one of those days.

Update: While researching the links for this post, I learned, or relearned, that Danica is in two episodes of How I Met Your Mother as Trudy. The episodes are The Pineapple Incident and Third Wheel. Clearly both of those were worth a re-watch. Apparently she’s also in The West Wing. There’s a vote for that show. I still haven’t decided what show from my list, I should start. Luckily I’ve been to busy for a show recently.

Posted in How I Met Your Mother, Short | Comments Closed

Tennis on Sunday

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

I played tennis this past Sunday with Mary and roommate Mike and his friend Debbie. We all suck, but it was beautiful out. I borrowed a racket. I made some great shots, but only when I was too busy positioning myself for the shot to worry about the shot itself. When things went slower I couldn’t help but make the ball sail out of bounds.

Posted in Fun, Short | Comments Closed

EC in Boston

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Climbing a Pedstal at MIT

Wow, am I behind. EC was in Boston a week ago, to volunteer for the Boston FIRST regional and hang out with all her Boston friends. Instead of detailing the whole thing I’m gonna start allowing myself to write in a more short form. In hopes that I can keep the blog more in sync with my life.

  • I had to skip out on EC friday because I had a date. We went to a comedy show, which was funny, would go again, but there won’t be another date :-/
  • Saturday I met up with EC. I got to be a tour guide without a plan; using my geography and local culture knowledge to great effect. I’ve been spending a lot of time boning up on local culture, news, and ‘things to do’ knowledge; it felt good to use it. It validated all the time I’ve been spending. We went to Sunset in Allston and later Miracle of Science for the record.
  • We hung out at MIT for maybe two hours, being cool, failing to provide directions, and snooping around in classrooms. One of the classrooms had some thermodynamics/aeronautical stuff on the board. EC was thrilled.
  • I met two former classmates of hers, they were both cool.
  • All of us went to party in East Cambridge. Tim Hwang was there, I’m the biggest fan of the show he does with Diana. I met them at ROFLCon last year. He remembered my name! He invited me to come to some talks hes organizing! So awesome.
  • At the party there was an RIP 2am card for everyone to sign. Good call, otherwise I’d have forgotten about the time change. Which is bad when your friend is flying out in the morning.
  • After 2 hours of sleep I drove her to the providence airport. We made it in perfect time. It was a great weekend. Then I came back and did some spring cleaning that really needed to be done.

Posted in ROFLCon, Short, Visits | Comments Closed