Jerd King

Working with Lexan

2011-02-15T22:17:00.043-05:00

Well, after waiting over a year for my 4' x 8' sheet of Lexan that was my "Christmas present," work began on the Germination Station Gen 2. Since Lexan is quite expensive, I scaled the station down to a 2 foot square from the original 4 foot square.

My dad and I trimming a piece of Lexan on the table saw.

We found out pretty quickly that cutting a huge sheet of Lexan on a table saw is not easy. I tried to take into account the width of the blade when making all my measurements but it was hard getting precise cuts because the Lexan would warp and bend as it was being cut. I messed up the roof by 1/2 inch because when I calculated the hypotenuse, I forgot to add 1/4 inch on both ends of the roof where the front and back pieces would meet. In the end, it was a good learning experience. A laser cutter would have been nice :)

I set up a jig in my garage to glue the pieces of Lexan together. The glue wasn't really glue; it was a solvent that kind of melted the pieces together.

The box all glued up and taped.

The finished box
I put a bead of clear water proof silicone on all of the jointing edges. I haven't done a water test yet.

The box is pretty solid, and I am surprised by how much it weighs. I need to put some brackets on the inside for the lights, and I have to figure out how to put a vent in the back so that the box can be cooled.

Mixed Feelings

2010-07-20T16:30:00.001-05:00

So I started reworking www.mymakespace.org a couple of weeks ago. It has been laying dormant for awhile and I haven't taken the time to upgrade to the latest version of BuddyPress. In the meantime, a couple of really cool addons have reached a good level of maturity so I decided to implement them. This leaves only one big feature missing, a Help Wanted section. The update broke my translation and some of the color scheme but that's ok for now.

Back in February, My Make Space had become fairly stable, but very raw. I had posted my pcb design and had gotten some feedback, but barely any traffic. So since I am a noob php programmer, I decided to solicit help from a couple of my favorite hack/make sites. I sent emails to Dale Dougherty at Make(I had some nominal contact with him about a Make Ning group a couple years ago), Hack-a-day and Chris Anderson at Wired. I didn't expect anything to come of these emails but I figured I would give it a shot.

So the owner of Hackaday made an interesting post last week on the 12th. The jist was the he really wanted Hackaday to expand its mission statement.
Quote: "Expand the mission statement to something along the lines of “hack everything” (or maybe “hack anything” sounds more ambitious/fun?). Perhaps best said is: “hack everything, and inspire and help others to do that same.”"

This is not 100% like what I envisioned for mymakespace but it is really close especially the quote/slogan that I had on the welcome page: "Hacking Anything for Everyone".

On Saturday, I got an very interesting Blog post in my RSS feed. Basically it was Make Magazine announcing that they are going to be starting a "Projects" section to the site. They currently have a projects section but it is just posts about internal projects.

Quote: "The new Make: Projects platform will be a place where we, Maker Media, can post our step-by-step projects, and a place where you, the maker community, can too (and we can all add to and improve each other's content)."

This is basically what I have been laying out of the last 3-4 years. You can still find a post I created in 2007 on the make forums. I know this is not an unique idea and probably multiple people have thought of this simultaneously.(heck if it can happen with Calculus). I am really glad this is avenue is available but it is frustrating because this idea has been a passion for me over the last 5 years. I know that I haven't put as much work into it as possible but it does seem like it has been poached to some extent. Well now I can get on with my hardware/garden hacks:)

Open Squid is Released!!!

2010-01-24T20:41:00.003-05:00

Well, right before Christmas, I ordered another set of PCB's. I seriously messed up on my first attempt, so I made sure that the second time around, the board was laid out correctly.

The whole idea came from the Squid Relay from Liquidware. I created the first version which worked but was messy and kind of dangerous.

Here are some pics of the PCB:

Just the PCB. I added some text and mounting holes. More on that later.

Board fully assembled with cables attached.

Got a couple Power Strip Savers from Jameco.

Fully assembled Open Squid with cables attached.

I wanted to add some helpful features to the Squid, so I added mounting holes that will allow you to mount the Arduino above the Open Squid. One of the guys at work helped me find some standoffs.
Here are a couple of pics:

I didn't realize that one of the mounting holes was smaller than the other ones. I couldn't find a standoff that would fit that one, but even with only two standoffs, it is very stable.

I really want to sell this as a kit (minus the cables). How much would you guys pay for this? $25? All of the files are available on my other project Mymakespace in the Open Relay Squid project.

Please give me your feedback.

PCBs are here!!!!

2009-08-26T17:50:00.000-05:00

I ordered a single PCB like 3 weeks ago, and it finally came today. BatchPCB threw in an extra one, for which I am very grateful, because I am probably going to mess up one board trying to put on the surface mount parts.

I ordered all the parts last week, and they came on Saturday.

Here are some pics:

Once I build the boards and test them out, I will post the results.

Germination Station 2.0 Timeline

2009-08-03T18:00:00.000-05:00

After being somewhat disorganized with Germination Station 1.0, I am making a better attempt to plan out future steps to address the problems that I ran into the first time around.

Step 1:
Currently, I am working on a pyQT Gui so that I can communicate and view the sensor data better. It took a while to figure out how to communicate asynchronously with the Arduino. I found an example of an asynchronous I/O program, and I added a pyserial read. Right now, I am reading the serial data and displaying it in a text box. I am messing around with graphing the data, but that is proving to be more difficult.

Step 2:
The next stage will be to develop a serial protocol on the Arduino that I can use to read all the sensors and change parameters.

Step 3:
Test new relay board circuit. Spin PCB design and order prototypes. It would be great to turn this into a little kit. I am going to look into the cost of the BOM and what kind of markup is feasible.

Step 4:
I want to get one variable working from top(gui) to bottom(sensor and variable control).
I plan on growing some blueberries, and I might create a little sub-project that will just water the plants in pots on the deck. That would just deal with moisture and pump control. (I would need to look into some cheap pumps/values.)

Step 5:
Integrate Fire, Wind, and Earth variables one at a time.

Optional:
I am looking at a hard plastic for the roof so that I can fix some of the water run off issues, but the current quote that I have is pretty steep ($109 for a 4'x8'x 0.125" lexan.). I might try to put that off for as long as possible, but I think that having a hard roof is going to be a necessity.

I have not decided if I am going to implement Xbee on this version. Just the Xbee units would be about $40, and it could cost more if I decide not to use the Xbee arduino adapter boards that I already have. They might have been the reason that the last Xbee units got toasted.

Germination Station Part II

2009-07-17T14:07:00.006-05:00

Electronics and Arduino Programming

I had fun naming my control variables. Earth = temperature of the soil, wind = temperature of the air, water = moisture, and fire = light.

The sensor stalk

I needed a way to connect all the sensors into the Arduino. I made my own shield and used a motherboard firewire cable. I used the heating pad (earth) from the previous project, a hair dryer, and a 12 DC fan (wind) and the two fluorescent lights (fire).

Finding the right layout was kind of a pain using a cheap board from radio shack (not so cheap).

Firewire cable had just the right amount of wires.

Three sensors: two thermistors and a photocell. This is the first version. The original plan was to be able to differentiate between daylight (higher) and the artificial lights (lower), but the photocell would get saturated and keep rising. I had to put an extension on it so that it was above the lights. I did not implement the water sensor because I did not have a pump.

Testing out the fan circuit. Used a TIP120.

Sensor Stalk header: I/O for the open squid, 2 pins for the the 12VDC, and 2 pins for the fan.

A little bit fuzzy, but everything hooked up.

Fire

The goal of the Fire (light) control was to turn on the lights at 6am and then turn the lights off when the sensor (sunlight) reached a specific point. The lights would turn on again if the sensor value dropped below the determined value and stay on until 8pm. As summer approached, the light would be used less and less.

Challenges:

I used the DateTime library. Syncing up the time with a pc and adjusting for a timezone were a pain.

I got the fire variable to work sporadically, but it never worked longer than a period of a couple days.

The lights are on!!! Having to haul my work laptop onto the porch did not help with debugging, especially when it is all software. I have really old Arduinos that still require the manual reset so that did not help either. I have not gotten around to modding them.

Here is a little clip from testing the photocell circuit. I sound ridiculous. That is Noelle's beautiful thumb at the end.

Timers

I used the FrequencyTimer2 library. Something wasn't running 100% correctly because the calculated overflow did not come out right, and I had to tweak it until it was approximately 1ms. I created an earth and wind PWM timer based off of the 1 ms tick. The wind period was 100sec, and the earth period was10sec broken into 100 increments with a divisor. This strategy needs to be evaluated because I was constantly troubleshooting the timers to see if they were correct.

Earth
Earth was almost the exact same algorithm that I used with the original PID controller. I cleaned up some of the calculations and added a larger range to the thermistor formula for both thermistors. The PID function producted a value from 0-100, which was used as the duty cycle of the earth PWM.

Wind
Wind was a bit more complicated. I designed the algorithm to turn off the hairdryer and turn on the 12VDC fan. The wind PID algorithm was allowed to go negative. The negative state would mean that the station had gotten too hot, and the fan needed to turn on. I think I got this working right at the end of the project, but I figured out that the fan did not have the CFM to cool down the germination station as the days got warmer. My original idea was to have one fan and a large heat sink with a film heater attached. I think that would have been a little neater, but the control algorithm would have been a little more complex.

In the end, I did not feel confident enough to leave some plants in the germination station. Whenever it rained hard, the plastic concaved a little and caught some water. I did not frame out the entire base of the station so the water leaked back inside. Thank goodness nothing got fried!

Here is some analysis of what problems I ran into and what I can do better next time. If anyone has additional input, I would be grateful.

Scope - I really wanted to have a GUI and a solid communications protocol so that I could read the data live. I hacked together a serial protocol, but it was not robust enough, and the fact that I had to sit outside on the deck did not help the whole development process.

One of the interesting philosophies that my boss has mentioned when developing our products (embedded systems) at work is to take a single slice of the project and make it work top to bottom. One of my goals going forward is to get a single element working (i.e. thermistor) and have it communicating with my new laptop (birthday present!!!!) with a pyQT UI. If I can get that to work, then I can slowly add the other variables.

I am going to have to adjust the Frame structure so that it is more stable. I plan on getting a sheet of lexan for the room. I would like to make the whole structure out of lexan but that might be cost prohibitive.

I have some really good ideas for the water sensor and pump. I am currently trying to figure out what method would be the cheapest and easiest to control (ac pump vs. dc pump).

The end game of this project is to have a system that will transmit the control data to a web server so that the station can be monitored remotely. Tweaking the PID values online would be kind of neat, but I don't think that is necessary.

Next post, whenever I get around to it, will be about the raised bed and garden that Noelle and I created this summer.

Germination Station Part I

2009-07-17T07:53:00.007-05:00

I have been working on this project all spring, and I am finally getting around to posting about it. Unfortunately, it did not turn out to be as successful as I would have liked it to be. A couple of years ago, I created a PID controller that controlled the soil temperature of a Biodome. Now that we own a home, I was hoping to be able to add a bunch of other variables. The variables were the following: soil temperature, air temperature, light, and moisture. I also wanted to have Xbee units to relay the information back to a Webserver so that I could view the system's status from the web.

The Xbee idea had to be postponed because 1 of my Xbee units got toasted. As a result, I had to be tethered to the project via a USB cable, and that caused some technical and logistical problems. I still got a lot done, but in the end, the entire system did not work.

The Structure:

The base: I wanted to see how much of the deck it took up.

The side supports. I will expand upon my rationale for this shape later.

I attached two fluorescent lights as part of the support structure. They were also the most costly part of the project.

Additional supports and hinges so that I would be able to easily lift the cover.

Cover attached to the base

You can see that I did not line up the cross supports. The whole structure was not as stable as I wanted it to be, which may have been responsible for water flow issues.

Plastic covering

I took a 4" by 4' PVC pipe and cut it in half(horribly) and glued it together. Attaching it to the structure was very precarious, and I will need to think this out better the next time around. The pipe was to funnel water into the trash can. The plastic that was connected to the "roof" of the pipe was very leaky, so it did not work as efficiently as it could have.

Electrical Systems

Wiring the Lights

I took a basic extension cord and cut the end off, then wired the lights in parallel together.

Electronics (Arduino and Open Squid)

I planned on using the Arduino again. I had an extra one on hand, but I didn't need to use it for the system. It was useful for debugging basic code at lunch, though.

Open Squid

I needed to control multiple AC devices (hair dryer, heating pad, and lights). Last time, I hacked a digital AC timer. That would have been a little too costly this time. I found the relay squid by Liquidware, but it was a little out of my price range, and I figured I could build one cheaper.

Got these from Mouser. Really cheap. Just cut the ends off of them. Time for some soldering!!!

I spent a good 2 hours working on the circuit in the top left corner, and it just would not work. I found out that the relays that I had picked could be driven with just the output current of the Arduino. (After examining the Atmega and relay documentation, the relays should have blown out the IO on the board, but for some reason that did not happen) I am working on redesigning the circuit now.

I wired the ground and neutral straight through to all the plugs and switched the hot.

Soldering the AC lines on the board was tedious. I am surprised it all worked. I put some hot glue down to protect the connections and keep everything in place.

All done! Time to get it in the box (project box from radio shack).

Everything hooked up to the Open Squid.

I have created a schematic in Eagle with the correct transistor switching circuit. I have laid out the PCB, but I want to do some testing of the circuit before I ordered the PCBs. All the schematics and gerbers will be available after I do a system test.

Next time, I will go into the Sensor Stalk and the Arduino program and the problems that I ran into while working on this project.

My Dad's Tomato Plant setup

2009-05-13T12:07:00.000-05:00

Well my Dad wanted to buy some of those tomato plant holders that allow you to hang the plant upside down. Since he is an independent contractor and has a whole bunch of tools I suggested that he make them. I found a couple of tutorials and an instructable online, but I never thought he would follow through with it. I was really surprised to hear that he actually made 4 of them. He went a bit overboard and made this huge setup that suspends the plants. Its pretty cool. I told him he was a hacker/maker, but he did not get it.

Here are some pics:

Plastic container with cloth to hold the soil.

The posts are supported by the deck and they are tall enough to walk under.

Status and TV habits

2009-03-10T09:50:00.000-05:00

Well, I have made some serious progress with the germination station, and I hope to get it all put together sometime this week. I did a full integration test and got all the major systems working outside. I want to add some sort of real time monitoring but getting a USB cable through a sliding glass door is going to be difficult.

Here is an interesting breakdown of what and how I watch my TV.
Sunday:

Family Time:) Noelle and I watch Amazing Race on CBS.
Monday:
Chuck, Heroes and Big Bang Theory.
Chuck/Heroes sometimes live, but most of the time on Hulu.
Big Bang Theory: CBS is a bunch of idiots, and they have not gotten on the Web TV train yet. They post 3, 2 minute clips from a 22 minute episode, so I bitorent this one.
24, but I am going to wait until it is all done then watch it on Hulu or bittorrent the whole season.

Tuesday:
Noelle watches AI, but I usuallly sit on the couch with the laptop messing around.
Fringe a week or 2 later on Hulu.

Wednesday:
Again, Noelle watches AI, but I usuallly sit on the couch with the laptop messing around.
Lost but same as 24.(no Hulu option)

Thursday:
The Office, 30 Rock on Hulu(usually fri/sat) bt CSI

Friday:
Watch BSG and Dollhouse live unless we go out then watch them on Hulu.

Saturday/Sunday:

Catch up on shows I missed during the week.

The Mentalist, Psych(USA) and BurnNotice(USA). Don't know what nights they are on, but I Hulu and bittorrent the Mentalist.

I really like time shifting. It is really good for the summer to find a show that you liked but missed a bunch of episodes. Late Spring additions: Reaper, Eureka, and maybe BBC Robinhood. It may seem like a lot but once you take out all the comercials, you reduce the length by a third.

A quick thought

2009-02-09T10:19:00.012-05:00

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.

The unexpected joys of home ownership

2009-02-02T10:52:00.041-05:00

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.

A whole bunch of stuff............

2009-01-30T11:45:00.130-05:00

The first post of the new year:

This could have been broken down into 3 posts but I did not get around to posting them.

In an attempt to further ensconce myself in the nerd hall of fame, I got a Tron poster. (No one got it for me for Christmas.) Noelle had a coupon for a frame at Michael's, so the poster will be safety preserved for future generations. In my enthusiasm for the poster, I watched the 20th anniversary edition (digitally remastered). It is amazing how good it looked, even more so if you take into consideration that it was released in '82. (Nerd moment: Just think how ridiculous Star Wars Episode I is going to look 20+ years after it was released; heck, it looks bad now.) The crazy and awesome thing is that they are going to make a sequel to Tron: TR2N. It's set to be release in 2011, 1 year short of Tron's 30 year anniversary...that's crazy!

Along with the Tron poster, I got By Schism Rent Asunder, which is the sequel to Off Armageddon Reef. David Webber is more known for his Honor Harrington series. The Honor Harrington books are the ones you see people reading on planes with the really cheesy covers. I have read the first 3, and they are better than the covers make them look, but there are 20 books in all, and I can see a pattern already in the first 3. Most of Webber's books have nautical themes, whether it be space navy battles or standard seafaring. I read the first book last year on one of my trips to Seattle. The main storyline is set in the world of Safehold ,which holds the remnants of human society. Safehold has been permanently restricted to a Medieval level of technology to avoid destruction from an alien race. The main hero/heroin is a cyborg (named Merlin) who was hidden in the mountains (for 800 years) by a sect of the original settlers. They wanted to advance human technology so that if the aliens find them, they will be able to defend themselves. The author does a wonderful job of endearing you, the reader, to the main characters. The one aspect that I like is the altering of technology. Merlin's task is to slowly transform the society into one that can defend itself if the aliens return. He does all this tweaking of the ships, cannons, and guns. I always wonder how an engineer could alter our existence if he were to go back and have a conversation with the Royal Society in England in the 1600s. I finished all of the first book while I was on the trip to Seatle, and I finished the second one in under a week. The one bad thing is that By Schism Rent Asunder and the 3rd book By Heresies Distressed are basically 1 book and were split up because it was going to be too big. So the ending of By Schism was not as clean as Off Armageddon Reef, and I have to wait until June for the Hardcover of By Heresies Distressed.

As a side note, the second and third book's titles in the series are from the hymn The Church's One Foundation.

My Make Space

2008-12-31T21:32:00.003-05:00

So a couple of weeks ago, I had my wisdom teeth removed. For some reason, that weekend I just got feed up with the inactivity in my life(in many areas).

One of the crazy things that happened is that I have stopped playing WoW cold turkey. During that time I have been working on a project that I have mentioned on the blog before Mymakespace. One interesting repercussion of this change is that I can't get any sleep, haha.

I will give everyone a recap: Mymakespace is a collaborative project social network. Mymakespace will combine collaborative software project sites like Sourceforge + environment and attitude of Make.

In the past I looked into a open source version of sourceforge called Gforge, but it was overly complicated. I looked into and got elgg running(kind of) on my home lamp stack. The documentation was very weak and there just did not seem to be a community around it. So along comes buddypress,

Buddypress is just a bunch of plugins for Wordpress MU. Wordpress MU is just the multi-user edition of wordpress similar to what www.wordpress.com runs.

Wordpress MU and Buddypress are quite easy to setup. The hardest part was getting the email to work. In the end, I just used one of my gmail accounts with smtp.
So here is my first/continual attempt: Mymakespace
Most of the changes have been done very ad hoc and probably not in the correct manner. I have changed Groups to Projects. Projects will be the focal point of the site.

So far only a couple of friends and family have signed up but this is just a Proof of Concept and I am just an EE with little web programming experience so test it out and give me some feedback.

Books, Bungalows and Boondoggles

2008-11-11T08:56:00.003-05:00

Since a lot has happened since my last post, I am going to break down this post into three areas:

Books:

More like just 1 book...the final review of Anathem

Bungalows:

Our adventure into home ownership

Boondoggles:

The election, in all its glory

Books:

Well, I finally finished Anathem. It was a good book, but it was very painful to read in some parts. About 2/3 of the way through, there is a section that is really tedious. Basically, you are observing a group of philosophers sitting around a table and arguing over extremely theoretical subjects. I think that went on for a little too long, but then the book gets back to a little action. Anathem could really be split into 3 books, but I am glad Stephenson lets you read the whole thing in one shot. Most of his books have abrupt conclusions

(There is a specific literary term for it, but I can't think of it now.), but this one has a couple of big jumps at the end while still giving a solid, less detailed closing.

As a whole, I think Stephenson comes to the conclusion that the "secluded scientists" of the world can't corner themselves off. Christians fall into that trap as well. It is interesting how we create are own little worlds and get very upset when "apple carts" get turned over.

Bungalows:

So, we finally moved into the Haas last weekend, and we were battered, bruised, and exhausted Saturday and Sunday after moving the remainder of our belongings on Friday. The final car load was delivered to our new house at 8:00pm on Halloween. It was crazy to drive through our neighborhood and see 50-100 people dressed up from hunters and faeries to parents looking like Jason.

We have painted the whole house (inside), and we had new carpet installed on the Friday that we moved in.

I spent a good portion of Saturday and Sunday setting up the computer room. We have 4 computers in there so it can get quite toasty. With the cooler weather coming, that should be nice. We still have some big issues that we have to address: now that we don't live in a 1 bedroom apartment, we have room for and need new furniture (whether we can afford it is a different issue, haha). We need a second chair or "love seat" of some kind in the living room. Noelle and I actually don't have any kind of bedroom furniture for either of us, and our mattress is falling apart. The guest bedroom doesn't have any furniture in it at all. The only room that is fully furnished is the computer room...shows where our priorities are, hahahaha. However, I am missing two little things from the computer room, aka "The Lab": a huge white wipe board (for brainstorming) and a Tron poster (Who knew they were that expensive!), or maybe a poster for this.

The one project that I am really looking forward to is creating a garden. We have a wooden playset in our backyard, and I am trying to give it away. (Someone at our church is currently interested.) Once I get that out of the way, I will be laying out how big the garden is going to be. When we went to Green Bay for my Grandmother's funeral back in May, my Grandpa (a master tomato grower) had Organic Gardening magazines laying all over the place. My Mom noticed that both Noelle and I thought it was interesting, and she got us a subscription for our birthdays. They have some really interesting tips so it will be cool to try some of them.

Here is what I am planning for now: strawberries and tomatoes are the easiest and most popular to grow. Beans, green bell peppers, and cucumbers all get along with strawberries and tomatoes, so they will be in the garden as well. I really like raspberries, but South Carolina humidity supposedly is not very kind to them, as well as the fact that raspberries take 1-2 years to bear fruit. I am not sure about that yet. It will be interesting to see how the garden works out. Hopefully, I can augment the garden with some cool electronic sensors similar to what I was doing with my previous Project Tomatoes just on a larger scale.

Boondoggles:

I guess I could be stereotyped as a Rightwing Nutjob. This election was a little bit different for me. Here is what it was like to me: What do you do when you want a hamburger and your choices are a veggieburger (McCain) and salad(Obama)? To be honest, none of the candidates in the primary represented me. I really did not know what I was going to do.

With all that said, Noelle and I were supposed to vote at the polling location near our new house. Well, when we changed our registration, the lady forgot to give us a letter so that if we were not on the roll by election day, the poll workers could just add us to the bottom. Needless to say, we weren't on the list when we went to vote. We had to go to the Lexington County voter registration office and wait in line there for an additional hour and half. They finally let us vote, and I have to say that I am really disappointed in the system that is in place right now. South Carolina does not allow write-in votes for President (who knows why), and I had already decided that I was not going to vote for McCain or Obama...so I abstained. In previous elections, Noelle and I had made the decision that if we did not know about a specific race or who the candidates were, we were not going to vote for anyone. An uninformed voter is just as bad as not voting, in my opinion. I voted for my House Representative, and I wrote in Mike Ditka for one of my Senators. All the state and county elections were very disappointing since there was only 1 person up for re-election against no one except a write-in vote. In the end, I don't think I voted for more that 2 people, and then I voted on the amendments to the South Carolina Constitution and the school bond issue for Lexington County.

Noelle was upset about the overall election results, but for some reason I had a peace about it. (Either I had peace that God is still sovereign, or I am really that apathetic.) My Dad thinks we are going to be plunged into a massive depression. He is even planning a garden in case it gets really bad. The next 4 years are going to be interesting to say the least.

Peace out

Anathem: Reviewing Neal Stephenson's new book

2008-09-30T14:55:00.003-05:00

When I read that Neal Stephenson was going to release a new book, I got really excited. I own all of his books from Snow Crash forward. I was really interested to hear about the topic of the new book.

Here is the general description:

Anathem is set on a planet called Arbre, where the protagonist, Erasmas, is among a cohort of secluded scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who are called upon to save the world from impending catastrophe. Erasmas - Raz to his friends - has spent most of his life inside a 3,400-year-old sanctuary. The rest of society — the Sæcular world — is described as an "endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change." Their planet, Arbre, has a history and culture that is roughly analogous to Earth. Resident scholars, including Raz, are unexpectedly summoned by a frightened Sæcular power to leave their monastic stronghold in the hope that they may prevent an approaching catastrophe.

At first, I was just confused, and then I was a bit concerned. I read a lot of tech blogs ( Boing Boing, Makezine, Hack-a-day), and there is this outright contempt for people who don't believe in evolution, man-made global warming, and other science based "facts". They seem to paint this picture of this select group of Tech geeks that believe in science "facts", and then there are the rest of us who just care about what Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are doing. Maybe that's my misunderstanding, but that's what it sounds like to me. So I was afraid this new book was going to be another disposition on this dichotomy. However, I am such a big fan of NS's topics and style, I got the book anyway.

Initial Thoughts:
I am about 120 pages through this 910 page monstrosity. At first, it was really difficult to grasp all of the meaning of the sentences because all of the vocabulary is made up. I am horrible at pronunciation, so I know I am creating fictional ways of saying these words. After about 60 or so pages, you start to get a little bit more comfortable with the words, and Stephenson picks the perfect time to start building the mystery.
I am very happy with the book so far. The issues above that I was concerned about are there, but Stephenson is not very heavy-handed with it.

Here is one good quote from the book that I think applies to me:
"Boredom is the mask that frustration wears."
The question is what to do about it.

Other observations:
The "secluded scientists" are basically just Augustinians Monks or at least characatures of them, but they just study a different topic. It is an interesting point to see that this same behavior is rationalized when studying Pythagoras' theorem, but it is sheer folly when it is the Old Testament.

Well, I will try to do another update half way through the book and also at the end. If I get "carried away to a dream world of magic", then I might not post again until the end.

Boston, Babies and Explosive Gases

2008-09-03T14:52:00.005-05:00

I know I have been a slacker and have not updated the blog, so I will just throw out a little synopsis of my Labor day weekend in Boston.

I went to visit my friend Chris. He is a smart ass(double masters from MIT), but we went to school from 1st grade through our senior year in college. This was my first time in the Boston/New England area. The weather was great: low 70s, sunny, and a nice breeze.

The house where I stayed was pretty crazy. 7 adults, 2 18-month olds, and 2 babies under 3 months. A solid night's sleep was nonexistent(not that I am complaining :P). I also got stuck in Philly for 2 extra hours because I missed my connecting flight by 10 minutes, but that allowed me to see some of the South Carolina/NC State game.

Spending time with "Frankie-stein" (Chris's 1.5 year old daughter), I was encouraged that I was not clueless about children and felt like I was somewhat competent. (I did not have to do any of the hard stuff, though, hahaha.) But all the other crazy stuff (everything having to do with have a child) is very intimidating. Who knows where that puts me.

Overall, the weekend was great. I got to go to the Children's Science museum, MIT campus, and to Rockport, Mass (a small town on the coast).

One of the things that Chris and I wanted to do was to figure out if my compressed gas cannon idea was even feasible.

I have messed around with the physics but was never able to get a definitive answer with the math. We used an interesting selection of resources from plain old Thermodynamics text books to Wikipedia.

We calculated that to get 1 kg object to LEO, you would need about 2 kg of Oxygen and 0.5 kg of hydrogen. This is a good thing because it is not a ridiculous amount of gas that it would not even be possible. The next hurdle was the conversion of the energy from that explosion into heat or delta T (difference in temperature).

This is where we hit a roadblock. After doing some calculations using the specific heat formula, we come up with the delta T of 6000 degrees C, which just happens to be the temperature of the sun's surface. So that made us think delta T is incorrect.

After consulting the text books and searching online, the only real way we found to get this information was to actually blow up some gas in a bomb calorimeter. We don't have one, so basically we said we would just start to do some experiments with H2 and 02 and see what we might get.

Furture steps:
1. Create a setup for producing and capturing 02 and H2 through electrolysis.
2. Design/build/make up a fixture for exploding the gas- Chris's idea is an old engine block.
3. If results are above average, convert fixture into a cannon.

Scraping the World of Warcraft armory with Python

2008-05-30T14:28:00.006-05:00

Well, in the last couple of weeks I started a new project. This was totally random but gave me great results.

I wrote a Python(man this language is awesome) program to scrape the WoW armory for my guild's gear. We have been progressing really well over the last couple of months, and we have been talking about killing two of the really big bosses. I wanted to see how well we were geared for these two encounters.

I googled around and I found this post. Got to give Peter credit; he got me started down the path that forced me to learn a little Python.

My code is horribly ugly, and I know a script monkey could have done this better and in his/her sleep. But I am very happy with the results that I got.

I didn't know and still don't know very much about navigating xml with Python, so I manually filtered my guild's toons with the armory and saved the xml file.
I hacked down the file so that all that was left was a list of members.
XML guild file layout looked like this:

<members>
<character url= rank= raceid= race= name= level= genderid= gender= classid= class=>
</character>
</members>

Each character had its own line.

Once I had that in a nice format, I had to figure out how to navigate the xml.
Searching around I found the ElementTree module.
It took me a while to find out specifically how to use it, but when I did it was very easy.
I started with:

from xml.etree.ElementTree import XML, fromstring, tostring
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

Then to parse the xml file.

try:
tree = ET.parse("guild70s.xml")
except Exception, inst:
print "Unexpected error opening %s: %s" % (xml_file, inst)
elem = tree.getroot()

This was the most confusing point to me. When I look at an xml file, i understand it, but I did not know how Python/ElementTree looks at it.
I just used print to figure out where I was in the xml file.

In this case, elem is equal to members element in the guild xml file.
Using a basic "for" e equals the characters in the elem members.

for e in elem:

Getting at specific attributes in the character lines was easy as well.

strUrl = "http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?" + e.get("url")

You just need to look in the xml file and find the name of the attribute that you want to retrieve. This also points out another neat thing about the guild xml file that I downloaded earlier. Each toon has their url as an attribute including all the formating, i.e. url="r=Zul%27jin&n=Noldor" for my toon. This is great so you don't have to worry about the url formating compared to what Pete did above.

At this point, I could read each toon's xml file from the armory. The problem that I ran into was I kept getting 503 errors (website error) randomly throughout the script. I don't know if there was a lot of traffic or the site was going down for maintenance. To avoid having to run the script over and over, I saved each toon's xml file to a folder.

Navigating the toon xml files was a bit more complicated. Someone more skilled than I would know how to do this better, but this is how I got it to work.
I started with this:

   children = elem[0]
child = children[1]
items = child.find("items")

Got it down to:

    children = elem[0]
items = children[1].find("items")

I could not figure out how to do it in one line, so if anyone has any thoughts that would be great.

Basically that covers all the hard parts. I downloaded all the items that each toon had.
I used:

os.path.isfile(geardir + e.get("id") + ".xml")

To skip toons and gear which I had already downloaded.

In the end, I created a useful tool to see how well my guild is geared for the content that we are in.

The code is splintered into multiple files so I can't post all of them. I will just post one.
This code reads the guild roster xml file, finds the character, and then retrieves the items for that toon. Then it goes on to the next toon until all the guild's gear has been downloaded.

#!/usr/bin/python2.5
import urllib2
import xml.dom.minidom
from xml.etree.ElementTree import XML, fromstring, tostring
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
import os
itemurl = "http://www.wowarmory.com/item-info.xml?i="
geardir = "gear/"

try:
  tree = ET.parse("guild70s.xml")
except Exception, inst:
  print "Unexpected error opening %s: %s" % (xml_file, inst)
elem = tree.getroot()
for z in elem:

  try:
          tree = ET.parse("characters/" + z.get("url") + ".xml")
  except Exception, inst:
          print "Unexpected error opening %s: %s" % (xml_file, inst)
  print z.get("url")
  elem = tree.getroot()
  children = elem[0]
  child = children[1]
  items = child.find("items")

  itemstr = ""
  for e in items:
          if os.path.isfile(geardir + e.get("id") + ".xml") :
                  continue
          oOpener = urllib2.build_opener()
          oOpener.addheaders = [
          ('user-agent',
          'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4'),
          ]
          req = urllib2.Request(itemurl + e.get("id"))
          itemstr = oOpener.open(req).read()
          fout = open(geardir + e.get("id") + ".xml", 'w')
          fout.write(itemstr)
          fout.close()
          print e.get("id")

Side Note: When I did this the special E/Alt-144 ascii character was not working. We had two people in our guild that used it, and I could not even see their pages with firefox, so it must be an Armory issue.

Project Tomato 4 review

2008-05-21T21:29:00.003-05:00

Well, Project Tomato did not come to fruition this year. It was cool to see that some planning does get the ball rolling, but it boiled down to not having enough time to work on it in the correct environment (i.e. a lab).

I worked on the Zigbee aspect for a couple of days after work at my desk here at the apartment, and I just could not get it to work. In the end, I may have torched one of the Zigbee units.

I did get a moisture sensor made and soldered into a nice package. I got the code running on the Arduino, but I did not quantify what was wet, normal and dry. The other part was wiring up a FET circuit for the fan. That is about were the project died. I had the fan working, but it was not responding to changes in the temperature of the thermistor. It was my first time using the onboard PWM, so i probably will have to debug that part to understand what number I am putting in that function and how the PID algorithm is calculating it.

In the end, I started too late in the season to make the true project I wanted. Hopefully, next year I will have a house and a garden to mess around with.

Project Tomato 4

2008-03-06T09:30:00.006-05:00

Well, I am finally getting off my butt and putting one of my projects into action. The key to me even starting this project was being stuck on a plane flying from SEA-TAC to Atlanta. Man, that 787 plant is awesome.

This will be the 4th year in a row that I have done some sort of Project Tomato. Each year I have been getting progressively better results. The problem that I have now is that Noelle and I live in a one bedroom apartment, so there is no room or permission to do Project Tomato. Another discovery that I learned from last year was the failings of plant lights. So I want to do this outside in a sunny area to avoid that problem.

My parents live about 10 miles away, so I was thinking that I could do something at their house. But how do I kept track of what is going on?

Here is the idea:
I am going to keep all of the functionality of last year's project and add more sensors and controls. In addition to that, I am going to setup a zigbee transceiver that will relay information back to another arduino (minus the chip) connected to my parent's PC. I am trying to figure out the best way to get the information on the web so that I can view it from my apartment...still working out the details.

I have two arduinos and all the hardware from last year. I have ordered two Xbee shield kits and two Xbee 2.5 Transceivers from Digikey. I went with the new Xbee transceivers because they are a new model, cheaper, and slightly higher wattage. From the little I have read, only a few people have used them with the Xbee shield. They are pin compatible but cannot receive or transmit to the first gen Xbee models. I also ordered some other miscellaneous parts including two more Atmega168. My mega8 is working fine, but something happened to my 16 so I ordered two more just in case.

Three sensors- two temperature, one moisture
I am going to use the same thermistors I used last time, but I am adding one to measure the air temp. I am going to use the moisture circuit from the twitter project.

Two control variables - Heating pad and fan
I was contemplating adding a film heater attached to a heat sink so that I could heat the dome if needed, but since I am starting this so late, I am hoping that it won't be a problem. I could also include some sort of pump for watering, but I think I have all I can handle for now.

Tasks:
1. I gave my dad the biodome enclosure, and he is going to mod it so that I can mount a fan. I
originally wanted a large box to go over the whole dome, i.e. a dome over the dome. He
suggested just adding some lexan or Plexiglas to make the dome taller.

2. When the Xbee kits come in, I need to put them together and test them out.

3. I need to assemble the circuits for the moisture sensor and fan drive and reassemble Project
Tomato v3, with the addition of the other thermistor.

4. Rewrite the code for thermistor reading and start working on the rest of the capabilities.

5. Find a way to upload the data from the usb/arduino/xbee transceiver to a website.

Risks:
This is a lot to bite off in a small amount of time.
I am not sure that the arduino can handle all the code that I am going to need.
The whole Xbee capability is a big step, especially since I have never done anything with them. Who knows what the weather is going to bring...We had a big storm on Tuesday and that would have destroyed this project.

Any thoughts or ideas that you have? Please comment.

Hopefully if this works I can enter this Arduino Contest.

Projects List

2008-02-18T14:09:00.004-05:00

I figured I would just do a small post about all my projects that I have percolating in my brain:

This is just in a random order...I wrote it down the other night.

Breakfast Machine- I have had this idea since about 5th grade. I figured this would be pretty cool to pull off with some Arduinos.

Soccer cleats- removing the laces from the top to allow for more surface area.

Compress Gas Cannon- already posted this one.

More detailed Project Tomato- Since Noelle and I are living in an apartment, I would not be able to do this. My idea was to do it at my parents house and get the temp info on to a website so I can check it at my place.

Video Game: The Age of Invention- Hundreds of basic items that combine to become more complicated tools to progress the town and society the player lives in. While not directly related, this game could become a MMO, and Metaplace seems to be an interesting project.

Local Telemetry System- This is a problem that relates to the next item. Cheap, detailed location systems are not available for small to medium size robots. GPS is ok, but is +-6 to 12 feet. I am looking for +-3 inches. I know this is a pretty hard problem or it would have already been solved.

Robotics system- picking fruit, mowing the lawn, eventually build homes.

Cell Phone ARG- After reading Halting State by Charles Stross, there is a great opportunity to do this in the coming years, and with Android Cellphone coming, writing your own program is possible. Wired has a great article about the ARG that NIN did. I am not a big fan of the band, but the ARG that they pulled off was pretty cool. I really like the Spy ARG in Halting State but that would be hard to pull off, and I am sure in this post 911 world it would not go over well. In one of Alastair Reynolds' books, there is a game that the wealthy play in which they are hunted by an assassin. I think that would be a great start with lazer tag or water guns.

Hopefully I will be able to expand or even work on some of these ideas.

2008-01-18T15:38:00.000-05:00

Mechanical:
I am going to layout a basic physical design then run some calculations.

2 x Stainless Pipe 2.5” nom. (2.88” OD x 0.12” Wall x 2.635” ID) Cut to 60”
120$ after shipping from Amazon(Metalonline)
4.07 Liters per pipe

1 x Stainless Pipe 2” nom. (2.38” OD x 0.11” Wall x 2.157” ID) Cut to 72”
140$ after shipping from Amazon(Metalonline)

2008-01-09T21:23:00.000-05:00

Dual-Gas Combustion Satellite Cannon

This has been my greatest idea and passion. I have not done anything yet, but I continue to build it in my mind. This idea has been eating at me for a couple of years since the Ansari X Prize competition. It is based on Project Harp and more recent Project SHARP. Since then the private industry has taken off and is making greater strides than NASA and all their money. The largest road block to space is the cost per kg. The current cost is in the thousands of dollars per kilogram. This is a good reason why ground-based launching, which includes rail and scram guns, is better since the infrastructure is reusable. The turnaround cycle for multiple launches would be faster as well.

My idea is a little bit different. Most of the designs I have seen only use a L shape structure. My launcher looks like an inverted T. The launch vehicle will be placed at the base blocking the junction between both wings of the T. The basic example would be that oxygen and hydrogen would be injected into each wing separately. Two rams would compress their respective gases against the body of the vehicle. As the rams reach the center junction the vehicle will be moved forward(mechanically) and the gas would be ignited, causing the vehicle to travel down the barrel of the launcher.

There are a couple of improvements that I have thought of to get as much energy into the gas and thus the vehicle. The gases could be heated as they go into each wing chamber. Each chamber could be prepressurized with the gas, adding to the over-all pressure at the combustion junction.

Similar ideas have been tested by professionals and have been fruitful. I am just trying to get my thoughts down and hopefully improve the design process. I just need to be more productive in life in general anyway.

Some key areas need to be covered:
What would it take to build a gross proof of concept?
Mechanical
Electrical
Chemical

2007-12-06T16:46:00.000-05:00

I know that I just pointed out the obvious when I made the predictions in my last blog, but it is cool to see some of this stuff happen.

Here are a series of articles pertaining to Verizon Wireless network, Google Android, and the 700MHz Spectrum auction.

Verizon Wireless announces that they are opening their network.
http://news.vzw.com/news/2007/11/pr2007-11-27.html

Verizon Wireless Embraces Android
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2007/tc2007123_429930.htm

Google Confirms they are bidding on the 700MHz Spectrum.
http://wireless.itworld.com/4279/071130google700mhz/page_1.html

A look at what Google phones are going to look like.
http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202805257&pgno=1&queryText=

There is another article somewhere, maybe one of the above that says that Google has a working version of Android on a 700MHz broadband device. I know a lot of people (at least in the tech boards that I read) think that Verizon is a horrible company and that this is just one of their evil ploys. I guess I have had so much trouble with AT&T and Comcast that I don't think as badly of Verizon. I am really glad that they did this. AT&T cannot continue their exclusivity deal with Apple. I hope that Verizon learns that they can get a lot more customers by being open, but in the end it is a business and that's a hard road to walk.

Well, that is about all for this post. Noelle and I are going on a cruise in a week for our 5th Anniversary. It is unreal to think that we are going on the cruise and that we have been married for 5 years. As I tell Noelle, I hope God gives us 50 more years of marriage.
Elephant Juice!!!!

2007-11-14T10:55:00.000-05:00

As you can see from the previous blog IM/micro blogging is just not for me. I make way to many grammatical errors as it is let alone trying to fix them in an IM window.

On to some cool stuff, I am very intrigued by the Open Handset Alliance. Google is trying to break into the Cellphone industry and I for one am sick from all the crap cellphone companies give you( as well as Telcos and Cable companies).

I have messed around with installing the SDK, it is very easy and they have put a massive amount of energy into providing free tools. There is also a contest. To me providing free tools and an impetus(money WOOT!!) for programing is a great way to foster innovation. I have no idea if this is going to go any where but more competition is never a bad thing.

One prediction: If Google is nominally successful with Android, I believe that they are going to port this over to their Broadband UHF devices when they purchase the 700MHz spectrum. Google almost has to buy the spectrum because if Cable and Telcos start tiering internet services Google is going to be at the ISPs whim. Net Neutrality is a much hyped issue and I am trying to find the balance between the freedom that has made the net great and the financial need for expanding the network, but that is another post.

I enjoy watching the IPTV show CrankyGeeks. What makes me cranky is a question they ask the audience?
Well, I thought it was awesome when the iPhone was cracked and everyone thinks it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But one thing everyone does not mention is that the hack only works on a GSM network. T-Mobile is the only main US provider that has a GSM network, Sprint and Verizone Wireless are CDMA which means you can't think of moving your phone over to those carriers. With all the hype around this hack it disappoints me that noone really points this out.

Side note: I think most of Europe is GSM so you could take your iPhone to England and put a European SIM card in it and it can be hacked to work there.

This is a test

2007-11-09T10:41:00.001-05:00

I am testing out this service called IMified.com. They allow you to setup widgets that tie your IM in this call Gchat to various services and sites like Blogger twitter and other doto list and reminders

2007-10-19T10:00:00.001-05:00

Well I apologize for not updating the blog. Things have been crazy at the King household the last 4 weeks. I got a job offer to work for Cooper Power tools in Lexington, SC. So bye-bye DC and DISA and Hello SC again.

Since we have moved I had to give up my laptop back to the Feds. So now we have only one PC and that one is about 5 years old with little upgrades here and there. I have wanted to build a new PC and Noelle has wanted me to as well. She is tired of it crashing during a Kara Raid. So knowing that I wasn't going to be able to make a new PC for myself I talked her into buy the parts for two new PCs. That definitely is a WOOT.

I ordered all the parts on Sunday Night and they got here Yesterday. Here are two pics of the boxes, can you tell that I am excited, hehehehehe.

The Boxes

Just plain cool

2007-02-26T08:58:00.000-05:00

Let the cool stuff begin.

After a month of messing around, I finally got my act together and started working on my PID heating pad controller. Well, actually it is only a P heating pad controller right now, but I will go into that later.

The Goal: Create a PID controlled heating pad to regulate the temperature of a Bio-Dome.

I got two Arduinos for Christmas, so I had most of the hardware to control the heating pad. I was hoping that I would just be able to modify the pad's circuits, but it is not just an on and off switch and the only IC on it was made in China by some unknown company so I could not find any info on it.

Arduino with thermistor

History:
I used to work for a company in SC called Kryotech. They started overclocking PCs (Super G 2) in the late 90s, but when that was not commercially viable, they moved to Industrial test equipment. I helped develop a push-pull PID controller for a system we sold to a Japanese company, Advantest. The company was run horribly, and Intel forced us to be sold to one of their buddies in summer 2004.

I got some free samples from Thermistor.com so that was very helpful. Just your basic NTC thermistors.

The ideal temperature for germination of tomato seeds is 75-85F. The resting temp in the house is about 67, to 60 at night.

Heater Pad(removed standard control system) with fuse holder.
Thermistor in Biodome sponge

The next issue was how to control the heating pad since I could not use the built-in system. I asked around, and someone on the Makezine forum suggested hacking an AC light timer. I found one at Target for about $10. It was pretty easy finding out how to switch the relay despite the LCD falling off the second I opened it. Once I figured out the control line, I just ran the GND and the control line to the port that I was switching on the Arduino. The only problem right now with the relay is that it clicks on and off very loudly. It did not seem like it was getting very hot, so I just wrapped a blanket around it to muffle the noise.

Timer with control line and GND wires. I should have taken a pic of the underside of the board.

Coding:
Thermistors are non-linear, so I created a piece-wise linear table for temperatures between 50-77F and 77-104F. I don't need very precise termperatures, so that is a simplified version of the actual table. Temperatures below 50F and above 104F turn the controller off.

All my experience is with PIC18s, and we used a commercial compiler so we had plenty of room for code. From what I have heard, the GCC compiler is not very optimized so I ran out of space quickly on the Atmega8.

The other system I worked on was push-pull; it had cooling as well as heating capabilities. That was a little more complicated, but this is pretty easy. I choose a 10hz square wave because the period is 100ms. The duty cycle is the control variable from 0-100ms, 0= GND and 100= ~5v output. The basic equation is duty = P* error. The P is a constant that is input manually to control the behavior of the system. Error in my case is target temperature - current temperature.

Example:

setpoint = 80
current temp = 70F
P= 5

Duty = 5*(80-70)=50% duty cycle(50ms high,50ms low)

Since I ran out of room on the Atmega8, I was not able to put the I in. I have upgraded to a Atmega168 on the other Arduino but there is something wrong with the timing of the square wave so I have yet to implement that.

I is Integral control. It uses the error from the last two readings to boost the performance.

duty = P* error + I*(error + last error)/2

The best example would be in a situation where the proportional cannot get to the setpoint unless the P is changed and this results in a large overshoot. Then I can add just a little to the P so that it can get to the setpoint without overshooting the target.

The Derivative is the opposite of the integral. It measures the dynamic change, and since this system is so slow, it is not going to have those issues. I am probably not going to use it. So in the end, it is a PI system right now with only the P currently working, haha.

Phase One Setup

Hope you enjoyed this. The next phase is going to be the lighting. Orginally, I wanted to dim the light based on the time of day, but DC control AC dimmers are kind of expensive and/or time consuming. I am working on hacking a motor to an AC dimmer switch, but in the end, I might just buy another AC timer, unhacked this time.

The third phase should be pretty easy to implement. I just have to figure out how to interpret the information. It is going to be a mositure sensor. Three resistors in series with the middle being very large somewhere around 1-2 Mohms. Wires will be placed on either side of the resistor creating an open circut in parellel. The wires with be inserted in the soil and the resistance of the soil will change based on the water content of the soil, i.e. more water = lower resistance. I am going to have to do some tests with how much water I put into the soil to find out what value dictates that I need to water the plants.

Hopefully I will update the blog sooner than in a month.

2007-01-23T08:59:00.000-05:00

Ok, so despite The Burning Crusade expansion (for WoW) coming out this last week, I actually got the lab work table finished. I made the legs over MLK Jr day, and then I finished up the frame this past weekend.

This has definitely been a learning experience. If I had better tools and a little more patience, the work table would be even better, but I am happy so far with what I accomplished...On to the pics!

I made the top here. My original design idea was to have the legs be 4x4s, but I figured that they would be too heavy and a bit too expensive, so I just went with 2x4s and came up with a design to interconnect them. Design- two sets of 2 vertical 2x4s connected and separated by a board on the bottom and the top. I used our current computer desk's height to figure out a good height for the legs. I also had to take into consideration the AC unit against the wall.

I cut the legs to about 30". As you can see, they are not as even as I would like, but all I have is a Black and Decker skill saw. It would be cool to get a Dewalt chop saw, but I doubt I would have any room for it in the house.

The legs turned out pretty good. I used 5" x 1/8" bolts to connect the legs. The bottom edges where the legs come together could be sanded down or the holes could be a little bit higher, but it provides enough stability when they are put in the frame.
The L bench top is made of two pieces: a 6 foot board and a 4 foot board. Ideally, I wanted to have it symmetrical, but that did not work out. I had to attach the 6 foot board to the 4 foot board resulting in a 8 foot x 4 foot "L" on the outside edge and a 6 foot x 2 foot "L" on the inside edge. I wanted to design the bench so that it would not need a pole/support in the middle of the "L". (Don't you just love banging your knees or even worse on those supports??) I built three sets of legs; two sets attach directly while the other set joins the side of those cross beams.

I found this "L" bracket at Home Depot. They are not as strong as I wanted. I also wanted to use the second hole on the cross beam, but there was just not enough room for that. I noticed later that there were three hole "L" brackets, but those were alot bigger so I didn't mess with it. To give the legs more support, I bought 1.75 " bolts and drilled through to the cross beam. It would probably be even stronger if they were 2" bolts. I added a screw on top in a couple places just for some more support.

Pictures of the cross beams connecting to the main table.

A lot of the table was done on the fly. I placed the top pieces on to see where I had to notch out the beam so they could sit flat. The notches in the middle are from when I thought the 6 foot section was going to be the main structure. I had to notch out a section for the middle beam and a section for where the two edges would come together. Originally, I had made just a big notch so that I would not have to worry about having to cut the notch so precisely, but the second time around, I tried to be a little more careful. In the end that helped because since the notch is so tight the top is more stable and no more bracing was needed. All in all, this has been a good project. I am a bit unsure about the long-term life of the table, but I tried to design it so that it could be taken apart and put back together fairly easily. That is why I used all the bolts as opposed to wood screws. The legs do lean a little bit so if anyone has an idea to make them a little more sturdy then I would be grateful.

Finally finished!

Last night, I set up the file server/workstation. The table seems pretty strong considering that it has a 60 lb monitor on it. One other flaw with the table is that I wanted to put cross beams on the bottom rear of the frame to give it more stablilty, but I wasn't able to. But the monitor can fit on the main section despite being a little too close to the front of the desk. (I put all the cross beams inside of the legs so every thing is a little tight.) Also, there is no way to connect the long section's lower cross beam because there is not a beam coming across in the front of the shorter section.

Here is my new DMM and Ardunio waiting to be used. I plan on trying to create a closed loop control Biodome to control the temp and light to assist in germination for our small garden. If anyone is checking this out, I hope it was interesting. I would enjoy your comments!

2007-01-14T17:00:00.000-05:00

here are some pics of the cool stuff that I got for Christmas.

My vast amount of electronics equipment before Christmas

After Christmas, Woot.

2007-01-04T08:56:00.000-05:00

Well, I got some seriously cool stuff for Christmas, but I will go into that later when I have the pics from the camera. But I guess I have been on a New Year's resolutions kick over the past few days, or I have had too much free time at work. Either way some of the following tools could be helpful to you. I have heard of Getting Things Done before, but it was a wiki version and just took too much work to edit it. The whole process is still a little fuzzy, but I found a cool tool that makes it easier. GTDgmail is a plugin for Firefox that turns Gmail into a reminder or organizer of sorts. Basically, all it does is allow you to send yourself emails with labels (that you create) to break down your project into easy steps. I started with some basic ones such as "build legs for desk". When you are done with them, you change the label and move on to the next one.

The next site/web app is Joe's Goals. It is simple little app that lets you create small goals that you need to accomplish every day (i.e. - run) and give them + points or things you wish to avoid (i.e. - drinking soda in my case) and give them - points. Then it adds all your positive and negative points up for you. It is a cute little way to see if you are doing your daily tasks and avoiding your weaknesses. It even has an email reminder than can send you an email if you don't check it after X amount of time.

This one(The Couch-to-5K Running Plan) is more of a guide than an app. I cannot really apply it until my knee is a little more stable, but I hope to use it by February.

The last one is probably going to be the most helpful. Fitday is a site that allows you to log your meals. It calculates the calories and other nutritional information. It has a pretty big library of foods, but you can add your own custom ones. (It is pretty easy to find nutritional information on the web these days.)

I hope that I can keep at least some of these things up, but you know how New Year's resolutions go. Maybe there will be some cooler apps next year.

2006-12-20T08:32:00.000-05:00

Well, I have been working on my lab desk/work bench, so here is an update.

This coffee table was my first attempt at serious carpentry. I used a lot of my dad's equipment, and I worked on it over a longer period of time than the lab desk/work bench I am working on now.

Coffee Table picture #1

Coffee table picture #2

With the coffee table, I used biscuits and made the top out of 1 x4. Since that was a lot of work and I noticed that Home Depot had 24 x 48 x 1 and 24 x 72 x 1 on sale, I figured that I would save myself some trouble this time. The coffee table was made out of Poplar, but I choose Pine for the lab desk/work bench becuase it was cheaper and was available in the sizes above. I don't know if that is going to come back and bite me because Pine is a pretty soft wood. I am using some 2 x 1 to stabilize the table. I placed them all the way around the table as well as one in the middle. I don't know how much stability this will add, but I think it will help it to look a little better.

Here is the Dewalt Biscuit cutter that I "lifted" from my dad when we went home for Thanksgiving, haha. (I used this one and a smaller biscuit cutter for the coffee table.)

This is the 4 foot piece. I did not have any clamps at the time so I just put the 6 foot piece on top and a lot of heavy stuff. I was not very happy with the results since there were a lot of gaps between boards, and it just did not look at good as I thought it would. So when I did the 6 foot piece, I bought some clamps. I guess the wood quailty is not very good or maybe I should have sanded the wood down. At any rate, the results were marginally better with the 6 foot piece than with the 4 foot piece.

The plan is to make an "L" shaped desk. Orginally, I was going to have it be a symmetrical "L", but I don't have room for that in our office/lab room. So I am going to have to lay it out so that the desk will be 8x4 on the outside and 6x2 on the inside. Hopefully, that will work out.

I am going to set up an Instructable. I am hoping that I can get some good ideas for constructing the legs and also for attaching the two desk/bench sides together without a leg in the middle of the "L".

2006-12-06T11:36:00.000-05:00

Here is a quick update:

We decided to take a "Family" Photo on Sunday so here are two of the takes.Asa Kisses

The Family Picture

Have Fun.

2006-11-30T09:48:00.000-05:00

What's up ppl?

I have no idea how many people even read my blog, but I will still forge on.

Not that much has happened over the last two months. I had knee surgery in October so I am still limping around a little. My main concern is that I am healthy by June for Amazing Race. Noelle and I are going to apply to be on the show. We will see what happens, but you never know...Someone has to be on the show.

The remodeling of the house has stepped up a notch. Noelle has almost finished the Living and Dining rooms, and I bought a bunch of wood to build my desk, so that is encouraging. I will post the process of building the desk, along with pictures. Maybe I can get on the Make blog, which would be cool.

One cool thing is that Instructables implemented a version of my Maker's Forge idea. You can have your project listed as a collaberation so other people can join. The only issue I have is that it seems you have to have a good portion of the project started, and there is no way of advertising roles that are needed. However, it is a great step in the direction that I envisioned.

If I can get the desk done by Christmas, I am hoping to set up a little electronics work bench. I am hoping to get a Fluke DMM for Christmas and maybe a soldering iron and an Arduino.

The ultimate goal would be to create a little garden with some sensors in it. Temperature, mositure, then a watering device. It would be awesome to create some sort of robot that could pick the fruit, i.e. strawberries. The biggest problem that I have with robotics is that good GPS is very expensive, i.e. +- 2-3 inches. I think if there was a cheaper solution, then this would revolutionize the medium size robotics industry -- lawnmowers, street cleaners, even something like a strawberry picker in a large field.

P.S. -- Noelle did all my spelling and grammar checking, so hopefully this reads alot better than some of my other posts.

Take em' to the bridge

2006-09-27T08:26:00.000-05:00

Well, it has been a heck of a month. Noelle went to HH(Hilton Head) for a staff retreat so I got the house to myself for the weekend of the 8th. Guess what happens when she leaves me alone? I go out and tear my ACL playing football, nice. So I was a total bum and did not get anything done on our house, and I spent the rest of the weekend laying on the couch playing WoW. Now I have to prepare for the surgery on the 18th of October so that is going to be fun. The Doc said 2-weeks on crutches and 4 weeks til biking and 4 months till running and ~12 months until contact sports.

Well My Guild in WoW is great, Darkside of Death.
On the weekend that I hurt my knee I was able to run some of the raid instances with the Guild and that was pretty cool.

This Section is to the Members of DoD.
Noldor's Thoughts/Improvements (Please take everything I say with a grain of Salt)

A. It would be cool to have a forum site so that we could post topics to discuss, kind of like some of the things that will follow.

B. I think the Moonkin Looting System is pretty good.
Here are some tweaks:
Some people have mentioned the idea on Choosing how much CP they want to roll
i.e. Dazzed has 60 but he does not want to risk all of it.
The solution that I would suggest is that members can choose how much they want to roll but it has to be at least 50% of their accrued CP.
Hunter example:

Ellwinn has 120 CP, but only 100CP to roll see above.
Noldor has 70Cp
Caevyan has 37CP

Ell has to roll at least 50, Nol 35 and Caev 18(round up)

No matter what Ell has an advantage because he has done more raids or won less items.
Then the Blastershot Launcher drops, Holllly Craaaap.

I messed around this a couple Ideas but the best thing I think would be the character to whisper the Raid Leader there Bids, then the Raid leader would Roll for them based on the Bid.
This keeps people from bidding just over the previous person that rolls, but I don't know if that is exactly wrong but blind bidding would keep everyone honest.

If there is a single Class toon in a raid and an item drops that is a CP roll they can either take an automatic 50% CP cost or they can roll from their total CP both have the same outcome math wise. (if Ell is the only Hunter, then he can choose to lose 50 or roll out of 100)

C. Multiple Drops for one toon/class in the raid.
Thoughts to think about: if Instance CP are separated then drop rules should be separated by instance. ie a CP roll for each instance or have global CP. It seems a bit inconsistent but just a though.

I had the wonderful joy and heartache of being the only hunter in a Raid that dropped 4 Hunter eligible items. one was for a couple of Classes the other three were for just hunters.
I rolled on the first item and won it. Then some gloves dropped and I won that by default because I was the only hunter. Then this dropped. According to the rules, since I have won a CP and Default I could not get the bow, so the bow was rolled on by the rogues. Later some boots drop, I guess I got them out of pity because I was not able to get the bow. All in all, I came out of the Raid very well equipped and fairly happy but not overjoyed.

Since that Raid, multiple items have dropped for one class and either no one needs it but one person or there is only one of that class in the raid.
I don't know if these situation are just random instances or will keep happening, but the solution I would suggest would be to hold all rolls until the end of the Raid. I would have happily not rolled on the Drape if I would have a chance at the bow. I have no immediate use for the Drape because of my CC rep standings, but I could put the bow to great use, thus benefiting the Guild and that Raid.

Exception: Toon X has to leave and they want to roll on something. Everyone eligible for that item rolls and Toon X is not allowed back in the raid even if they come back online later, whether they win or not.

D. MC Raiders, hahaha
I think we have a great group of people that have a bunch of interests, and we are not forced into any one event. I enjoy doing the 20-man raid, probably more if we could shorten them a bit, and I am looking forward to the 25-man raids. I think this falls in line with where our guild is at character wise. I have heard many horror stories about MC from my wife, Caevyan and other guildies. I haven't done MC myself so I will make that judgment this coming weekend when we do our first run.

Couple of issues:
With the Xpac coming, why not continue to do well in ZG and improve in ZQ20?
Depending on how many people get the Xpac in our Guild, many people will be exploring the new 5-man instances and trying to level to 70. As long as it takes to get organized before a ZG boss, I have heard it is a lot worse in MC. I have no desire to sit around for 10minutes or longer before attacking the boss.
I guess my main issue is actively recruiting to increase our guild size when it is not going to be needed in the future and we really don't know the quality of the persons entering. Guildies inviting friends or other toons that they have an active relationship with seems to be the way to go, as opposed to posting a job application.

We will see how MC goes this weekend, but I think we should concentrate on ZG and AQ20. I think MC is a really good option once we get some toons in the upper 60s then we can do it in smaller numbers. This all depends on the new loot that is dropped from the new 5-mans because it might not matter.

E. I would think that people might get slightly upset at me because of this request but it is just a suggestion and I am just trying to improve guild dialogue.

I think that some of the chat and messaging is a bit over the top. i.e. the sexually explicit stuff. When Father says his ass hurts because of the chair that is all it means, I have no problem with making fun of him in jest (saying he has a big ass). But the way the conversation went was not in the best interest of the guild. Sometimes we can have the coolest conversation talking about Pop culture and personal interests, but I would just like to ask that the sexually explicit talk be curtailed a little. This is not a shot at anyone, any age, any gender, but just a request.

So I have said my piece so I will keep my peace.
I really enjoy being in this guild that was one awesome fight taking down Hakkar, I hope we can do it again soon.

please give me your thoughts

Seth/Noldor/Judicious/Pleather/Frekapotomus

2006-08-10T12:18:00.000-05:00

It has been almost three months

Over the last month Noelle and I have moved into an apartment/condo. All the apartments are old army barracks from the 40s that have been changed into condos in the last 30 years. The current landlord has not done anything to it, and most of the condo has not been updated in 20 years. It was my decision to move to this condo, so I have to lay in the bed that I have made. We have finished priming the kitchen after spending 3 weeks sanding down everything in sight. With all the work that we have done on it, it makes me want to buy the place so we could flip the house. But all the wiring needs to be redone, which would be nasty. Almost all of the outlets in the house don't have a ground, just two terminals. There was a little bubble in the ceiling in the kitchen so I started picking at it. I picked a two foot hole in the ceiling. This house is so old it does not have dry wall just the chicken wire with plaster over it. Man that stuff is dangerous. My parents came up to help us move, so my dad helped us by patching up the hole. Right now the current crisis is that it seems the tub is leaking right above that point. I think it is because the seal around the drain got damaged this weekend while I was snaking the tub pipes. I hope that is not going to be a big deal to fix -- just some caulking. It is amazing how much information is online about your house. I looked and found how much our condo is worth and how much our landlord paid for it. Even how much all the houses around us have been selling for. I would really contemplate buying the house because it would be cool, but tiring and costly to flip it! Besides, Noelle is against it since we would be living in the house at the same time.

Well, I have been teaching myself Java and MySQL. I have been messing around with the GWT
Combined with CSS(which I did not know anything about). You can make some seriously cool sites. I am working on my Maker's Forge ------> Sourceforge meets Make magazine . I think I mentioned that idea in the previous post. I have a layout,user signup, and MySQL database with a password and login stored in it. I now have it set up so that you get an email with your password if you forget it. I don't know how I am going to do some of the other stuff, but I am glad that I am making progress. I have been slacking off the last couple of weeks and need to get back on it.

2006-05-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

Well, I would like to correct something. I missed quoted where the article on distributed computing came from in my last blog. The article is on the popsci website on Make. But I probably spend more time looking at the Make blog, they have links to all these cool projects that people are working on across the world. That theme is what I had in mind with the project Tomato but that kind of bombed on me and I did not update the last stage before my plants got eaten.

Well E3 was a couple a weeks ago, I guess I would be described as a Sony person but not to the point of the Fanboy. I was looking forward to the release of the PS3 information and demos. I am not anti Xbox (both) but I just never had the desire to play them at all. I am horrible at FPS even since I played Golden Eye in college. I enjoy EA games, RPGs and strategies. At my bachelor party(Dec 2002) we only had a Xbox along with madden. Usually I am pretty good(above average) but I just could not get use to the controller and I guess that has turn me off since.

Everyone seems to be busting on the Price of the PS3, but I think it will still sellout. I think ~6 million unit from Nov06- March07. There has to be 6 million people in the world that will buy one no matter the price, especially in Japan where the Xbox has never done well. I have never bought a system right away since the Sega Genesis. So I probably will not buy any system for awhile especially since Noelle(wife) and I are addicted to WoW and I need to upgrade my PC. I am running and Athlon XP2200, 1GB ram and 6600GT. WoW does well but I having so issue with it crashing or freezing the whole system, could be Windows. I am looking at dual cores I will probably go with a AMD, I am trying to decide whether to get an Opteron or an Athlon. Newegg is awesome. I go look at the site just to salivate at all the stuff I could build.

Noelle and I put are two month notice in to the Apartment Office. We are trying to find something close to DC so we don't have to have long metro rides. I average about 45 minutes and Noelle about a little more than an hour, one way. I would like to have a room of some sort ideally a garage in the end to do some experiments and work on all the projects that I have in my head.

My main project that I keep thinking about over and over is the gas cannon. I have come up with some more ideas. I don't know if any of these ideas make mathematical sense because I have not calculated them out, there may not be any validity to any of them. The old Gas Cannon idea just used on L shaped structure. I came up with the idea why not make it an X and the base and have the launch tube come out the cross section of the X. This way the O2 and H2 can be separated and compressed and we don't have to worry about the gas combining before it get ignited. The key is getting a good seal against the rocket so that he gas can be initial compressed. Just thinking about this right now make the Mind/Brain want to explode with enthusiasm about the potential of the cannon. I dream of going to space or revoluationizing the space industry, I guess I have been reading to many Space Operas. I just finished Alastair Reynolds 4 book series and I was pretty good. I read them on the Metro going to work and back home.

Living in the DC area has two effects on you, I want to be in politics because I think I can make a difference in all the stupidity around and second you get feed up with all the BS that happens here and what you hear about on the News.

If I were to run for office I would think that I would want to do something at the state level. It seems that a Governor could see their results and would not have to deal with the politics of the whole nation. I am sure that a Governor runs into all the same things as say the President but it is on a much smaller scope, at least for smaller states ie SC.

Being an Engineer, I would like to apply my hands-on knowledge as well as general knowledge to the office with a younger view. It absolutely befudles me that there are senators and reps that have been in office longer than I have been alive(I will be 27 on the 30th). I would call my platform the Conservative Technologist. Well I started this 12 hours ago and I am finishing it now while I am in the Q for WoW.

Seeya The Dude

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the Illimitable Superior Spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
Albert Einstein

2006-04-17T11:39:00.000-05:00

Ok people I have not updated my blog in about a month and half. I have just documented the transplanting of the tomatoes into 5 gallon buckets. But over the weekend, before I was able to post the update, some birds ate the tomato plants. I did not expect this at all. I have three small strawberry plants that are still living but I don't know what is going to happen to them.

On to some other subjects, I read an issue of Make magazine this weekend, they had an article about a guy that has combined AI and Genetic programming. Supposedly the cluster of 1000 computers breeds and weeds out ideas until it gets a solution or improvement to the problem. This idea was very fascinating to me, what ideas can this computer cluster come up with. The creator said that we wanted hard problems that he could give to the cluster to solve, he is currently working on an alternative to the Electoral College. I mean goodness gracious, find some thing more important to put your time to especially since this computer has such promise.

My suggestion: South Carolina Schools

Project Tomato

2006-02-27T11:52:00.000-05:00

Well the tomato project is going pretty good. The tomatoes had been doing really well in their biodome – the lid. The pictures on the biodome website are very misleading or I did not do it correctly. On Friday, the tomatoes kind of started to fall over so I knew it was time to transplant them. I had been collecting 2-liter and 3-liter bottles: two 3-liter and two 2-liters. It will be interesting to see how the sets of bottles affect progress and quality of plants. My original plan was to glue the tops back on but leave a small hole for watering. However, the plants are bigger than I assumed and the top will probably hinder growth. I have thought about using them later as a kind of support but the plants will probably be needing another transplant to an even larger container by then.

Altered Bottles and Garden soil- fairly cheap at Wal-Mart. (oh no, I went to Wal-Mart.)

Well, I filled all three bottles with some soil. I had clipped off the baby leaves a couple of days prior, and I planted the tomatoes deep so that the stems will grow roots and support the tomatoes better. I think that I could have planted them a bit deeper, but I wanted room for the roots to grow.

Close up of the tomato plants

The final setup: We have a bathroom upstairs in the loft that we don’t use very much so I switched out the lights with garden bulbs. I used a probe thermometer back when I used a heating pad to assist the germination stage, and I used it just to check the temp. But I don’t know how I would use temp. information now. The blue green powder is some fertilizer that came with the biodome, but I can't tell if it does any good. The problem that I have had in the past was the amount of water and the frequency of watering. This first time, I watered with a ½ cup of lukewarm water and a 3-liter bottle cap of the fertilizer water. I have recorded the date and the amount, but I have to figure out when to water them again. Not that many people read this blog, if any, but if you have any gardening experience and run across this, please give me your thoughts/advice. This watering was done on Saturday, and on Sunday you could see the plants perk up a little bit and straighten out.

It has been a while

2006-01-31T09:39:00.000-05:00

Well it has been awhile since I posted, so let see what is going on.  In the sports world, BCS bowls happened, the SuperBowl happens this weekend and the Olympics starts in a couple weeks.  We hit a slow part of the sports calendar so I am not very opinionated about the sports right now.  I think signing day is today in College football, it would be nice if USC (South Carolina) could get some good recruits.

Well on the WoW front, my wife and I both started PvP this past weekend.  I had been trying to get into the battlegrounds but my character was in the 30s(there are 60 levels in WoW).  I hit 40 on Sunday and I played Warsong Gulch like 6 times, 3 wins, 3 loses.  I was skeptical about how much fun it would be but once you get playing it starts to be addictive.  My wife is a good 10 levels above me but she played at 49.  She has had problems getting in since she hit 50.  I really want to get to 60 but I just don’t seem to play enough to get there faster.  We have owned the game since August and we took a month off when we moved so we have been playing about 5 months but I guess since we are sharing an account that is not bad.

I have been working on a couple of other ideas.  I have all these harebrained schemes but I seem to never follow thought with them or start them and don’t finish them.  I got three projects going right now.  The first is my Sports league wiki site.  When I moved here (to Virginia), I really wanted to get involved in the community especially in flag football and soccer indoor or outdoor.  I had a really hard time finding organization online with clear information about the leagues in this area.  The goal of this website is to facilitate communication between player and clubs of all kinds hopefully expanding to any state and city that anybody wants to post. I got the Media wiki software up and running on the site and that was not as hard as I thought but I am having a hard time inputting data and making the site look the way I want it to.  The hardest part is just working on it period after work my wife and I have diner and either watch TV together or one of us plays WoW, but the social tendencies of two jerds (see definition below) is another issue.

The second project is pretty crazy.  After seeing a PBS or discovery channel story about using a gas cannon to put objects into low orbit, I got the idea that I should build one myself, a small one.  I have started a project using Basecamp, which is a pretty cool site.  I have put some basic goals and tasks up there but I don’t know how far it is going to go.  My wife and I live in a small apartment so there is no room for tinkering with 4 feet of steel pipe. Maybe I can find a workshop or someplace to mess around with this Idea.

The final and most realistic of the projects:  I purchased Bio Dome from Parkseed.  I have started some strawberries and tomato plants.  Both are doing fairly well, the tomato plants are getting bigger and starting to lean/fall over so I don’t know what to do about this but hopefully I will have better results than last year.  Once the tomato plants get bigger I am think of putting them in 3 litter bottles or gallon jugs so that it will not make a mess in the apartment.  Being farther north and our apartment is not in the best sun position I don’t know how much sun light we are going to get on our porch.  I am hoping as we get closer to spring and summer solace that the angle will improve.  Last year all the seed that I planted died and I order some strawberries plants which did pretty well but only a couple of strawberry were produced, I may have water them too much.

Well as I have taken up over a page in Word I guess that I have been very long winded so I bid everyone one Adieu.

2005-12-13T13:52:00.000-05:00

Sports update:

I was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin so it pains me to see the Packers doing so badly. (My Grandparents have season tickets and they live 3 blocks from the stadium) But on the awesome and cool side of things, if the Packers had not had so many injuries the running back Sam (Samkon) Gado would not have been able to play. I don't want to be one of those people who act like person X has been their best buddy since kindergarten so I won't. Sam went to the same high school and was in the youth group at the same time as me, granted I am a couple of years older than him. The success that he has had could not have happened to a better guy. I hope that he continues to improve and that the Packers will be able to sign him and improve overall when the draft comes around.

The last couple of weeks in the NFL have been more entertaining, mainly because College Football has had a break. I always enjoy the predicting and analysis of the playoff run. This year I hope that the Colts win it all, I would like for them to be able to go undefeated but that is not important in the long run. I guess Colts vs. Seahawks would be an interesting SuperBowl but is seems very foreign to me.

College football season is great. The BCS sucks. I was praying in the last weeks of the season that SoCal or Texas or even better, both would lose. But alas the both won out, even though there were, in my opinion, some really bad missed holding calls on some of Reggie Bush's “unbelievable” runs. I hope that the Texas/SoCal game is the ugliest game of all time, 4-5 turnovers each team and a 12-10 final score. I think that the BCS is going to go to a 4-team playoff in a couple of years with the 4 plus 1 formula. Personally I think the season should be cut back the 11 games having only one bye week, then have conference championships, then a 12-team playoff. (Notre Dame would be forced to join the Big 10/11) How many people would love to see Miami/Auburn and Georgia/VT? Can LSU @ the 12 seed run the table? I think that anyone of those teams could win the championship. I am just glad that my team the first USC (University of South Carolina) got to go to a bowl game even if it is the Independence Bowl. Hopefully we can win that game and get some good recruits.

On the fun stuff, The World Cup draw was done on Friday. The US got into a group with the Czech Republic, Italy and Ghana. This group is definitely going to be called the "Group of Death". I think this is a great opportunity to show off to the world how much the we care about Soccer as a Nation. I am looking forward to watching those games even those it is going to be hard to watch the up coming world cup (while I am at work) than it was to watch the one in 2002(while I should have slept). I always love the World Cup experience. I have been trying to watch and keep up with European soccer more, the Champions league final last may, was one of the awesomest game I have ever seen. I hope I will be able to watch some more this coming spring.

The other day I saw some kind of advertisement or something to do with the Olympics, which had totally slipped my mind. I am very grateful for the Olympics because it will help to make up for the void that is Winter/Spring sports in the US. i.e. NBA sucks. The Olympics will end right before March Madness and hopefully as I said above European football with carry me through to the end of May. And then the World Cup starts. This should be a great year in sports.

2005-12-09T11:25:00.000-05:00

Well this is going to be my first diatribe. I wanted to mention this before but I did not have solid ground for my critic. My beef is with the word, Podcast as the New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player". I know it does not have to be but in most cases to my understanding a "Podcast" is an mp3. I just don't understand and it is pissing me off with all this, download my Podcast crap. It’s just an mp3. I have no desire what so every listening to Brian Williams NBC news Podcast, some stuff kind of appeals to me Ronald Moore's Podcasts, but those have content that I can't get anywhere else and it is not a live event or summary of one. But I am a person that cannot watch taped sporting events so that might explain some stuff. I like listening to mp3s of songs and even books on mp3. The productization of the word just pisses me off.

2005-12-07T08:31:00.000-05:00

Number 2

Well there is a myriad of topics that I could talk about. I am a big fan of Slashdot. It is a pretty good site for people seeking the inner nerd. The articles are very informative but the posters (not necessarily the editors) are very opinionated, so don't be surprised about anything. There was a recent article that was about creating your own MMORPG. My wife and I enjoy playing WoW and I played a little Ultima Online back in college. Some of the ideas and other mmorgps that are in the article are very interesting. I have always what to make a game in the genre of FF/Crono trigger, Sega games: Warsong = Langrisser (japan), Shining Force, Dark Wizard(Sega CD) Later on UO, Warcraft II and as off late WoW. My entire life I have made up all sorts of stuff. I really enjoy creating things, I like to build/design PCBs, programming, even gardening and cooking are inventing to me. The central theme to my mmorpg would be interaction of thousands of items to create anything (stick + vines + stone = crude hammer/bludgeon) thus altering the world and your character. Since playing WoW I like some ideas i.e. mining nodes but I would make the contents of the node larger and more variable. I am a very big thinker but I never seem to get things rolling but I guess every nerd out there runs into the same problem now and then. I may go into more detail later. Not that anyone reads this but I was thinking of starting a Sourceforge project let me know if you want to help.

2005-11-29T12:30:00.000-05:00

"The First blog" Dum-dum dummmmm

Well Let me explain what a Jerd is? I would like to describe myself as combination of a Nerd and a Jock. I would say that I am more of a nerd than a jock but I guess that is subjective. For the record Jerd is 25% Jock and 75% Nerd.

My Jockdom: Play(ed) Soccer and Football. I still enjoy playing soccer but I seriously out of shape espically since this past Feburary when I messed up my left knee. My wife and I just moved to Northern Virginia so I am looking forward to finding a place to play indoor and/or outdoor. Love college football, hate the BCS!!!!

My Nerdom: I am an Electrical Engineer that automatically quaifies me as a nerd but I shall expound. I graduated from University of South Carolina (The first and orginal USC) in 2001. I Worked for a small company Kryotech designing microcontrollers for big temperature systems that would be used in semiconductor testing for Intel and AMD. Well the bosses did not really understand the dynamics of running a small company in SC and how to play with the Big Boys. In the end, Intel forced us to be sold to one of their buddies in San Diego. I got laid off because the product I was working on was almost done in the production cycle and they did not need me for technology transfer. One of my buddies got me a job at a computer store while I was looking for a engineering job. Currently I am working for the DoD as an electronics Engineer. And to cap that off my wonderful wife is a higher level than me on World of Warcraft, hahahaha.