Monday, February 09, 2009

A quick thought

NASA has published some great pictures(artwork) from the 70s.
I remember reading books similar to these in elementary school.

On the personal projects side,  I spend 8 hours on Saturday toiling fruitlessly on my lastest Arduino/Garden project.  I hope to get the atmega168 flashed today but we will see.

After Lunch:

Woot, I brought some arduino stuff to work so I could mess with it during lunch.  In 30 minutes, I had 4 chips flashed and 2 arduinos tested and running.  I was missing a cable for my STK500 and I found one similar.  It made flashing the chips trivial.

Now that I have work the boards working. I need to integrate two more control loops(lighting and air heating/cooling) into the current thermistor code.

Monday, February 02, 2009

The unexpected joys of home ownership

One of the unexpected joys of home ownership, as well as the fact we live farther out in the "boonies," is the great view of the sky.  We have a big sliding glass door on the back of our house that faces south.  I am constantly amazed by the stars, the moon, and the planets that float above.  My favorite constellation, Orion (I think that should be a requirement of a nerd.), can easily be seen almost all night.  It was really cool seeing the Moon, Jupiter, and Venus all line up a couple months ago.

Honestly, just looking up at all the stars is mind blowing.  I wonder what other people think when they look at those same stars.  One of my goals in life is to capture an asteroid and return it to earth.  If I last as long as my grandparents, I have a little under 60 years to pull this off.  That's a huge amount of time, but it is a monstrous undertaking.