October 31, 2004

Because I was sick and coughing a lot, I didn’t go physically to church today, but I watched the live stream on the Internet. Last time I checked you couldn’t srpead germs via the Internet (that would be scary!). I also fooled around with some more robotics stuff, and came up with these images. Pretty nifity, even it the method I was using only works with about 1 in 100 or so.

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October 30, 2004

I had a hot date tonight – litterally! I took my sister to the Melting Pot for dinner. It was our first time, and I sure was impressed. For those who don’t know, it is a fondue restaurant (for those who don’t know what fondue is, go look it up in a recipie book and make it!). We ordered mexian cheese fondue, which was slightly spicy. It came with corn chips, a mix of breads, celery, carrots, cauliflower, and granny smith apples to dip. I found the apples eaten raw helped cut the cheesyness. It was like nachoes like you’ve never had nachoes before! Then we ordered the cookies and cream chocolate pot. Man, I think I went to heaven or something when it came out. Choocolate and marshmallows mixed together with strawberries, bananas, pineapple, cheescake, marshmallows, crumb cake, and brownies to dip in. When we were done, we both just about rolled out of the place we were so full. Excellent place!

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October 28, 2004

Argh!!!!! Just when I was thinking the cool weather was nice with Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, I had to be reminded of the not so nice things of this season: the cold. I’ve been battling with it for the past couple of days, and I’m losing…I’m just hoping it won’t be as bad as last year when I was flat on my back for 3 solid days – I litterly got out of bed to go lie down on the couch all day – and I got off the couch to go back to bed. Yeah, hopefully not that bad. Anyhow, I need to get more sleep to keep doing battle with it.

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October 26, 2004

You know you need a haircut when: Different friends on different occasions tell you so. Your parents tell you so. You could probably make a really good mohawk if you shaved off the sides of your head. Your haircutter comments halfway through cutting your hair that she’s cut off 5 pounds and there are only 5 pounds more to go. So yeah, I broke down and got a haircut today. It feels much better, but it’s still not short enough. I’ll probably have to get another cut around Christmas.

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October 25, 2004

Well, my friend Taj is writing a Linux distro (which is like way cool) and not being a great fan of Linux, I wrote some Linux experiences of mine down. See my Linux Rants page… On the subject of academics, when I went to school today, I got about 10 feet into the Engineering building before the alarm went off and a recorded voice told me that this was an emergency and to walk to the nearest exit. OK, so I did a quick 360 and was back out the door. About 30 minutes later, with multiple police and about 3 or 4 fire trucks, we were let back in. The reason for the evaucation? Somebody burned popcorn and set the fire alarm off. And these are the engineers of the future!?!? Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy!

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October 23, 2004

Well, the typo3 upgrade to 3.7.0 went remarkably smoothly, aside from some FTP server & client erors I had work around (my connection inbetween uploading files timedout, so I tar.gz the files, uploaded the package, and then unziped). However, RealURL will not work no matter what I do to it. I can get it working with page IDs, but not page names. I spent like 6 hours, and I’ve thouroughly fed up with it. It’s not like it is rocket science either – I wrote some similar php code back in high school! Arg!! Oh well…homework time.

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October 22, 2004

Whew, a lot of fanagaling to coax Typo3 to work. Apparently the contact form broke. Some investigating through PHP code shows a file got deleted, so I downloaded Typo3 source and replaced it. That works now. And messing around with my RTE, I managed to break it. So I had to mess around and try to get that to work again. But I managed. Now if I can get Typo3 upgraded and RealURL installed, I think I’ll be a happy guy.

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October 19, 2004

Cooking went better a bit better this week – I only managed to cook my okra into a pile of slimy green goo (those who are familiar with okra will testify that it is indeed pretty slimy). I took a statics exam today and I think I did pretty well. I have a Diff Eq exam Thursday that I am totally not prepared for, so I need to do like massive studying tomorrow. Off to bed…

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October 11, 2004

The start of a new week, hip hip hurrah. OK, maybe not. I tried to to cook last night and stuck in a frozen lazana in the oven. Unfortunately, I messed up the cook time and so instead of cooking for 2 hours, it just sat there. So instead of being done at 8:30 PM, I had to re-start it at 8:30 PM to be done at 10:30. I also made some banana bread, which turned out OK – it needed some real bananas to make it a lot better. Oh, I finished up the DirectX code for the DLL that allows you to capture video from any webcam/DV camcorder. It’s really cool and it can be accessed from any language – and the DLL is only like 50 KB to! I’ll have to upload it soon. I’m also installing some stuff like webmail and file managers on this site so that I can more easily check my mail anywhere and keep all my files in one place (on this site).

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October 10, 2004

My parents came up to visit and showed me some pictures of our house and property after Jeanne came through. Man, it was really disappointing to see stuff you had worked hard for and built over many months and years strewn all over the place. We lost plywood sheets off our boarded up house that we never did find! They just blew off our 10 acres I guess. Anyhow, one of these days I’ll have to put together a hurricane gallery with comentatry to remember this wild and wacky hurricane season by.

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October 5, 2004

I’m working on making some of our robotics stuff into a compiled DLL so that anybody with any language can use the code. This is mighty helpful when the source code depends on litterally gigabytes worth of librarys (DirectX 9, Platform SDK, PTypes, libpng, zlib, and our own libraries). My Engineering Analysis exam was a total joke. 2 questions – you could use the book and her handouts that told you step by step how to do the problems. Now watch her mark the whole problem wrong because I forgot to something stupid like not put it in the right format. Hopefully not.

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October 4, 2004

Today I had my first Electrical Networks exam and I was a bit nervous because I didn’t have as much time to study as I would have liked. However, I had plenty of time on the exam (that’s a new one!) and was able to go back and double check answers and I think I might have actually pulled of a decent grade. I’ll have to wait and see.

Sunday 10-3-2004 Pics:

Pole Barn Before

Pole & Panel Barn Before

Panel Barn Before

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October 1, 2004

Only another month to go! Can we do it without another hurricane? I sure hope so! With our track record, we are due for another in about another week (they seem to come in waves of ever other week). One can hope, right? For Robotics, we decided to write a cross-platform video capture library. The Windows side will use DirectX and the Linux version might use Video 4 Linux or DVlib. I’m was in charge of converting our old DirectX code from BlackKnight into the library and I finally got it working (I think). It’s really cool to be able to capture frames from any camera (USB webcam, firewire camcorder, etc) with just a couple lines of code,

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