sorry for the slight delay... *cough*

Yeah, sorry even one for the long delay since my last post. I haven't had a lot to say recently. My days have been filled with work and playing WoW and just trying (somewhat) to clean up around the house (not so sucessfully). One of my machines lost a hard drive to a really violent storm. That was sad b/c it was calculating prime numbers for me. :-( The apartments are still slowly turning into condos. So I'm going to have to move soon, but that sucks, b/c there is no place that I really want to move too.

A girl I knew in Gainesville has been diagnosed with AML, a form of luekemia. If you can donate some to help cover her medical bills. http://www.kristenfund.com/


Something mildly entertaining:

http://persistent.info/overplot/

zoom in a little until you see the numbers and then click on them to get conversations over heard in the area... some funny some scary...

Oatmeal and honey...

....Is what I am having for breakfast the day after my 33rd birthday. I took the day off of work and spent it playing World of Warcraft and relaxing at home. Pooks was late getting in and we watched the Tim Burton movie The Corpse Bride It was decent, but Pooks was right, not something you'd want to pay movie prices to see.

As a birthday treat for myself, I purchased from amazon.com, a new pair of boots, Two Cadfael mysteries, and two Japanese action movies. Oh and the "Stunts and Effects" update to the Movies. I've setup a DVD player in my computer room so watch Movies while doing other things. That works really well for the anime since some of it is quite mindless.

I'm blogging now from my new mac mini, but I think I still want a laptop. Something I can take with me to play games or surf the web. I think the mini is great for my living room computer, but I'm not sure where else to best use it.


And iTunes keeps crapping out on me grrrr....

Movies & the Beach!

Monday was a semi-holiday b/c Tuesday was the real holiday, Independance Day!

However, I spent a patriotic pre-holiday evening entering data into my Movie Database! Driven by a need to have a list of the movies I already owned when movie shopping (so I don't by duplicates). I made a simple database to keep my movies in and then (of course) export it to the web! What a great idea... or what a cool & fun project to do! So I was up late Monday night entering in movie data. I got most of them entered with just a few more to do.

Tuesday we had a great day at Talbot Island State Park. Me, Pooks, tiaroo, Shanks, and Eve all chilled on the beach, ate, drank and got sunburns. We played in the surf, as much as we could, we ended up at the south end of the island b/c of the huge number of people that were there. On the south end they don't allow swimming b/c of the strong rip-tides that can pull you under. We splashed and played further up the shore and also in the tidal pool that was close by. My legs are super sore and all of my muscles ache. We did end up doing a lot of back and forth. We finished up the night with fireworks in the parking lot.

I did my introverted thing for a while once we got home. I crashed into bed with some books and relaxed in isolation. That's one of my way's of getting away. Eve & Pooks & tiaroo all did their own thing.

Still reelling from yesterday's adventure I'm at work today but the morning was shot with computer problems.

To terrorize and Annoy!!!

Yesterday my Pooks *(who is a wonderful woman) gave me my early birthday present. A new Lego Mindstorms NXT Robotics Set!!! We did not have batteries at first so I spent time working on robots with no brains and getting familiar with a newer set of lego blocks for making robotics & technical construction. I finally got it working yesterday and installed the software on my (new) mac mini and wrote a simple program to move the robot around the living room. Mainly like the old Logo programming I did in HighSchool, move forward 20, say "Lego", move forward 20, say "Lego", repeat three times :-).

It was cooking with gas!! you can make it "say" things through a built-in speaker. It has touch, light, sound and distance sensors. It keeps track of distances traveled by the wheels so that you can accurately program it for certain actions. I ended up having to jack up the end of it a little to make sure my robot could make it over the carpet terrain of the living room. The software that comes with it allows for some cool branching and programming statements. I'm no where close to a walking robot yet, but I like the rolling one I've got now. Here it is... My First Robot!



My work will be done with the robot once it can chase the cats around the house effectively!! :-)