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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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…
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).
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.
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.
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
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,
Shame on me. I had meant to do homework tonight, but I foolishly decided to start a book while eating supper. Bad idea – something I realized at 9 PM, 11 PM, and 2 AM when I couldn’t put it down. And the thing was it wasn’t even that good – it was like a fantasy soap opera. Don’t know how he managed to do that, but it was sorta weird. OK, time to do homework for real.
My Engineering Analysis class is pretty useless, but I do get to learn some semi-interesting algorithms. On such one is a root finder, so I’ll upload the source code to that after I turn it in tomorrow.
OK, I’m am officially sick and tired of hurricanes. When Jeanne started making tracks towards our neck of the woods again in Vero Beach, our whole family headed across the state to our vacation spot in Tarpon Springs near Tampa. From our hotel, we watched this guy on TV in one of our shopping plazas in Vero Beach being virtual blown away (they are tied down with a rope around their foot for a reason!). Not fun to say the least. Then the hurricane didn’t do what it was expected to and came straight through where we were in Tarpon Springs. So we spent another day without electricity. Our house didn’t loose it’s roof, but we had a lot of water damage which had to be fixed with this basement waterproofing company. I’m think my sister has the right of it: move to Montana and dig a whole in the ground and call it home!
I’d first like to take a moment to remember this day 3 years ago and take a moment to think about the US (and other nation’s) troops around the globe. On a less serious note, there is another hurricane headed this way! Noooooo! (goes and cries). It’s a mean one too: cat 5 with 165 mph sustained winds. That means there’s got to be over 200 mph gusts! Whew! I’m glad it’s not headed straight for us, but pray for the people in it’s path. Today our whole UCF Robotics Lab went down to the Orlando Science Center with our gears and demos and setup an exhibition. I got very little sleep last night because I was working on a sample program that would identify ping-pong balls or other stuff in real time. After fooling around, I found out that one version picked up skin in addition to ping-pongs. Make the background black, and you get this really strange looking image of your head, arms and hands! All the little kids loved the Robotic Connect 4 game, and we also had the vision demo (mine), the SICK laser demo (a plot of the nearest objects in a 180 degree sweep in realtime (think radar)), and some of our robots. Anyhow, enough, time to go to zzzzz….
What a terrible weekend! Instead of going to Tarpon Springs for vacation, I instead headed down to my home in Vero Beach Thursday. I got there at 1:30 PM, and spent the next 7 hours hauling sheets of plywood, drills, screws, stakes, panels, equipment, and all sorts of other stuff around. When working late into the night, you know you are working way too late when the sun starts to rise. Actually, it was the first time I went 24 hours without sleep. Not a fun experience at all! Anyhow, we got on the road and went to a little town in Barberville, about 50 miles north of Orlando (well inland). My grandparents were there (they have a fern farm there). Anyhow, we spent the weekend there and went two days without power (not fun!). Even 50 miles away from the hurricane, we got very high winds that knocked down power lines and trees. In fact, we couldn’t even get out of our driveway until somebody came down with chainsaws and tractors to haul away the trees. Here are some pictures: (Picture of the blocked driveway) & (Closeup). Today we came back to Orlando and we had power (and hot showers!!!!) and everything seems to be getting back to normal. Unfortunately, my home in Vero doesn’t seem like it fared to well, but we’ll see…
Well, it’s about 40 minutes until Thursday and I’m about to evacuate…TOWARDS the hurricane. I’m headed home to help my parents board up. and then we are all headed out. So much for a peaceful weekend doing robotics, re-installing my system, and doing homework.
What an unlucky week. Another category 4 hurricane headed directly for us, my computer won’t boot Windows because system files are “missing or corrupt.” Arg! Well, at least I haven’t lost any data quite yet. Linux to the rescue! I’ve moved all the data from my 5 GB partition over to my (now defunct) 20 GB Windows parition. Now I’ve installed Windows XP on that partition and hopefully can actually work until I have time to do a good job of a re-install. I guess that depends on how Hurricane Frances feels…
I survived my first week of classes! Hurrah! I’m taking Differential Equations, Engineering Analysis, Engineering Statics, Intro to Digital Circuits, and Electrical Networks. In addition, I’m auditing Expert Systems Knolwedge Engineering. Today I worked more on vision stuff for the new robot.
So tired…my 7:30 AM class is pretty early. The only reason I took it was because the professor was supposed to be really good. But unfortunately, they swapped professors on me! Arg! Would post more, but zzzz…..
Long time, no news. I survived hurricane Charley (I evacuated from the middle of the state to the coast – which just seemed wrong!). I bought all my books to start a new semester tomorrow. I upgraded my ceiling fan light from one 60 watt bulbs to four 60 watt bulbs – what a nightmare. I had to install it and take it a part 3 times before it worked – and all because I forgot to pull the little 2 inch chain. I kept flicking the light switch and wondering what was wrong. Robotics is going well, and I’m making some progress.
Up at 6:30 AM, packed by 7:30, gassing up at 8:00, on the road for 2 hours, at my new appartments at 9:30, unpacked by 11:30, a brief Chick-Fil-A lunch, at the ISL lab at 12:15 PM, working until 5:30 PM, on the road for another 2 hours home, home at 7:30, super, some programming a business time clocking system for my father, answering some emails, and now at 11:00 PM, I’m dead tired. Goodnight!
This past week I have had a fantastic time vacationing in North Carolina. I hiked probably 5 miles on the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway, shopped until I was ready to throttle my sister, ready 10 books (the stack probably comes up to my knee), constructed a new website for my grandfather (http://christmastrees4u.com), ported Simply KoolB to RapidQ basic, and the morning I left the mountains, the temperature was 38 degrees Farhenheit. Totally awesome dude!
Well, I bombed my Physics II final exam yesterday. Out of 5 questions, I missed at least one and a half. And that one was a giveme question to – I just blanked on it. I’m praying there is a nice hefty curve, but we’ll see. Hopefully I can do better on today’s Calc III final will go much better. And right after that, my family and I are headed up to North Carolina for vacation.
After church today, I spent 4 hours driving around to various public libraries tracking down some good books to read. I finally got my quota of 10 books, a collection of David Webber, L.E. Modesitt, Andre Norton, Anne McAffrey, and some others…ahh, yes…I feel good times acoming…unfortunately, I’ve got to wait until after this week as I have finals. Oh well…such is life.