Well, well, well: guess who’s MCM team got a finalist designation! Meaning that we were in the top 1% of the MCM teams; unfortunately, I think that the lack of graphics in my section might have contributed to our failure to attain outstanding (right, so I’ll stop with the self-blame and try to maintain a better self-view). But at any rate, I’m pretty stoked about the whole high-percentage thing, and we’re gonna have a quick little celebration. Additionally, I spent a fair amount of time in the machine shop, possibly the first time I’ve put in time on a Monday, and I don’t see anything that’s stopping me from doing so the rest of the days of the week. Life is pretty good.

Well, except for homework, an exam, and a big paper. Those are a bit less happy; also, the fact that I’ve made about zero headway into the BAP problem, anim3, and the app app are somewhat depressing. Also, I only have 2 REU’s left to hear back from: cross the fingers and sacrifice the pigs! It’s gonna be a couple nail-biting days/weeks.

So, I utterly fail at keeping my blog up to date over the time period when I had a decent amount of time. My break mostly consisted of either hacking on the bottleneck assignment problem solver (I’ve transitioned to a C++ based one from Python), trying to get my newly minted academic application system framework to a version 0.1, sleeping, and slacking off. The time off was nice, but I need more of it without the drop in productivity that comes with going home.

In other news, I’ll be trying to clear out my old draft posts, update my zenphoto to include various reprap photos (soldered up 12 opto endstops yesterday: just need to pump out some 46 aluminum parts in a month), and finish this E/M take home test. I’ll be around.

Well!

Today, I’ve touched on cython, python profiling, and numpy. Guess who’s wrangling with number intensive code? I’m still working on the bap problem, although I’ve gotten it speedier: not quite speedy enough, though. The guys from 40 years ago are probably still beating me. Hopefully, I have time to write this up so everyone is a bit less confused, although this is unlikely.

Things to do:

• Homework up the wazzoo!
• Reprap research: round out what we need in terms of electronics, and what we need, period.

So why haven’t I been updating? I like to think that the MCM has irrevocably killed my schedule, but it really ain’t that: life’s just catching up to me over and over again. It’s really annoying. I’ve had viral gastroenteritis (using the power of google, you too can self-diagnose when things go horribly wrong with yourself!), otherwise known as stomach flu, for the last few days, and that just killed my productivity on Wednesday. Shoopdoowap, so that just means I stay up for a night or two. I’m over it now, thought, so that’s one good thing.

Another good thing is the fact that we’ve finally cut our first aluminum reprap part. I finally found an extended period of time when one of the profs and I were both relatively free, and whacked out a z-axis bracket.  It is very rewarding, since I’ve been trying very hard to get to this moment for more than 2 weeks (maybe more like 4). First tutorial in the metal shop was enlightening. If I can help it, we’ll whack out parts at a faster rate. I might have to wake up earlier to do so consistently, which might be an very difficult thing to do. But nonetheless, an exciting moment in the history of UPS’s reprap project.

And one bad thing to wrap up the first half of my Friday: well, I’ve gotten my first D on a math test in a very long time, dare I say ever? Really, if I can’t do math, then I might as well get myself a lobotomy or something. The cloud cover is made of mile-thick lead while the sun is going supernova, I think is a very apt description of these things.

The MCM went alright. We better do well, or we’re gonna have a disowned team mate.

More later tonight.

Okay, so friday, right. First, I edited an arduino program so that it should read a frequency from a spinning thing-a-ma-jig (look, I’m really tired for some reason), and adjust the power delivered to the motor that spins the thing-a-ma-jig with PWM. It depends on if we can get something to switch fast enough; transistor, maybe. And since we’re using a breadboard arduino to make sure our dev board doesn’t die, that’s where the breadboard comes from.

We’re out of TP, and my roomie left for home for the weekend. Yeah, gonna have to go scrounge some up somewhere.

I spent some 2 hours (really? only?) soldering up my minty-amp, which proved to be a tedious failure: trying to bridge tiny distances with short wires is amazingly frustrating: I hereby renounce my cavalier attitude towards laying stuff on perfboard. To put it lightly, I’m not very happy with myself.

Milestone: one tube of solder almost gone! Have something like 10cm left.

Finally, there will be no friday update next week: I’ll be in the thick of the MCM, so my life will be somewhat chaotic. Go me.

Yeah, I’m tired. Have a story, I’m not gonna buffer anymore.

Friend: i haven't been this bored in a long time... hellllp

Me: write a story

you know thats not very helpful

well try something artsy fartsy with it you know something different

Tangy sea air, wafting lemon pie, musty cardboard

what is that even supposed to mean

hell if i know just take a world and run with it to somewhere youve never been before

well i gotta do homework

Light breeze, chill air with a slight bite, spongy chair, feather weight pencil, sticky eraser cruft,

homework can wait sometimes we just need to escape out of reality and have some time to ourselves

but we have to deal with our problems in reality just look at how screwed up the world is trying to seek escape into some contrived world wont help anyone

and that is where you are wrong

Filtered surf, muted grandfather clock in the living room, breeze through tall grass, distant birds clawing for a meal, percussion of bare toe on wood floor

screw this i cant finish my essay im going to go watch some tv

but you can watch tv anytime now a blank page calls to you to fill it with something anything

but i dont even know where to begin and the only thing i can think of is a direct rip off of my favorite show

the important thing is to create versus consumption its cheesy but writing is the one thing they teach us that we can easily create with

Yellowed mid-afternoon sun, two dark frames splashed against baby blue walls, ajar door leading to hushed interior, ebullient billowing drapes, congested room brimmed with empty boxes, limitless sky,

so how do you

So, random blog post to gather up my ideas and dump core.

Idea #1: Originally, lengths were measured with some arbitrary standard: then, we defined a meter as a millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator, since any sufficiently advanced civilization after us could redetermine what a meter was from the definition. However, once we leave Earth, that standard ceases to be useful. So, we shoehorned the definition of a meter into some fraction of the distance light in a vacuum travels in a second. Better, but no sane person would remember what fraction it was exactly.

Hence, I propose a unit of length split into billionths of the distance light in a vacuum covers in a second (which is another arbitrary unit, but we have to take these things on one at a time). It would come out to be around a foot, which would suit the Americans pretty well: it’d just be a tiny bit shorter. Unfortunately, we would be leaving out all the aliens that developed counting systems in other bases (10 actually is a pretty good number to base off of: it’s small enough to grasp with unhacked minds, but not small enough to be useless at making large numbers). Well, by the time we know they’re out there, we’d probably want to be using something else.

Idea #2: We should get biohacking started, and quickly: once we can reroute orgasms to intellectual activities, we could probably bootstrap ourselves pretty quickly without need for a singularity. Hehe.

Okay, so I have absolutely nothing to show for this Friday. I hung out with friends, and didn’t do anything productive other than burning bootloaders into 2 ATmega168 chips. And, I wrote a new story!

Friend: is reminded again that "to be lonely and to be by yourself is not the same thing."

Me: Ghosts, that's what they were. Machines dressed and taught to imitate a culture. Sure, they dressed like they were attending a high-class social function, and they spewed words in semi-comprehensible phrases, but they never actually said anything intelligent, no matter how one coaxed them. That wouldn't have been so surprising, but the fact that the palace never seemed to end suggested something deeper at work. One moment dozing over a paper: the next, waking up in a red dress with hair put up, slouched in a easy chair next to the hor'devours, facing the endless rooms full of partiers. It took only an hour to figure out that none of them were of any help; another six to steal a watch from a portly gentleman exchanging drivel with the rail-thin lady, another twelve to give up hope that this was a dream. Another ten hours to fall onto a couch, exhausted, and what seemed like 5 seconds to find a shadow of a man leaning over me, a blink to find him dissolved. After that, every day was filled with wandering and fits of half-sleep, evading the shadows that came with REM. It took a few weeks until I resorted to attacking the walls with a stout butterknife, finding ordinary plaster and wood beneath the gilded facade before the shadows were all around, whispering about something before they again dissolved. A warning? Perhaps. Would doing something drastic again change *something*? Perhaps. But there was still hope that something would change, and while that still held, doing something at all dangerous could have negative effects. I was wearing away at the edge I was on, though, several weeks having been spent in a silent, furtive walk through the murmuring crowds looking for something, anything. Now, it was again time to find a couch or chair and get some rest. Wait, that man over there isn't talking to _anyone_... looks solid enough. Maybe I'll walk over and punch him.

Edit: story needed status update that it came from.

So, quick status report before I sleep. I haven’t been getting enough sleep, so I’m kind of wiped out right now.  My day went like this: school, talk to professor, eat, school, work on next iteration of coilgun, break an ott light, eat greasy food, go to a concert, made a smoothie, and tried to hack a quickie robot before realizing that I am an idiot and have no place on this earth. So.

School was fine: day on which nothing is due, which is good. Talking to a professor, I now have a smaller chance of being rejected outright by USC. Next iteration of the coilgun will have multiple stages, and we almost have it all set up, but the charging system we’re using seems to have broken over winter break. However, we got the arduino-controlled firing system working, and have a separate 328 chip on a breadboard acting as our arduino, since we fried our last one. Great fun. There were more than a few instances in which I had an LED plugged in the wrong way, so I had no idea it was working.

After we found out that we were hungry as heck and needed to eat, my fellow hacker left, and since I couldn’t figure out how the ott stand was screwing with wall power, I just plugged the bulb directly into the wall. Of course that was a bad idea, and now everyone should know that while the stand doesn’t screw with the voltage, it almost definitely tamps down the current available, probably through the inductor-looking thing. Fortunately, it did not blow up, which was my realistic worst-case scenario fear. It does have a crack in it, and who knows what’s in the lamp, so I might wake up tomorrow morning as some horribly mutated thing. If that happens, I recommend ceasing all attempts to hack such lamps; don’t worry about me, I’ll have done it FOR SCIENCE. Right.

Since that lamp is gone, I’ll probably have to mash up a system of LEDs to aleviate my current lighting situation. Maybe. LEDs can be not so great for lighting, so I guess I’ll try it and see how it turns out.

Friday cafeteria food has a theme of greasiness, which is unfortunate. I’m already pretty unhealthy, which I will have to rectify. Talked to fellow humans, and saw a pianist play some pieces I have not heard before. He was pretty good, but not quick kick-ass.

After the concert, I tried to stick together a very simple robot. It’s a differential drive, that derives obstacle avoidance through 2 dpst switches that switch the polarity of the motor when switched. It’s pretty simple in theory, and should’ve been simple in practice, but I have no working robot that can scuttle around and keep me happy. After 1.5 hours of working on that, I decided to switch to my pre-amp, but I looked at the schematics, the bottom of my perf-board, and now I’m here to tell you all that I need more solder. I’ll have to find if there’s a radioshack nearby.

Basically, nothing got done. Some groundwork got laid, but I have nothing to show. Yet. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next week. Yet.

At long last, I’ve upgraded wordpress: it was surprisingly painless, since I’d finally figured out how to smooth the process. Well, I’m going to be upgrading much more often now.

Also, I’ve taken to writing stories on-the-fly for various posts on Facebook. I’m thinking about posting them here for posterity, so here’s the first one.

Friend status update: can't concentrate! :(

Me: having to exact revenge does wonders for focus. of course, it might not cause you to focus on what you want, but that's a small detail

Friend: what?

Me: Your entire extended family dies in a series of accidents at the optometrist's office: you later learn that a cabal of optometrists has decided your family would play a key role in alleviating the need for optometrists, by eventually expressing genes that could be used to engineer 20/20 eyesight in everyone, thus putting them out of business (Iknow, I'm not good at bio bs). After learning this, a gang of optometrists burst in with overpowered lasik machines and try to kill you too. You immediately go into hiding, building a new identity, tirelessly working to become a martial artist and study that which you hate, optometry, in order to infiltrate the ranks of the optometrists and destroy them from within. You get a degree in optometry in half a year. You slowly move from office to office, an intern at first, then an accepted optometrist, but only during the day: at night, you study and prepare for the final showdown, fighting disgraced optometrists to test yourself. You don't need sleep; the desire for revenge is too strong within you. You befriend an intern, but he accidentally finds about your pogrom, and you have to lasik him in the back. The police are closing in, but the cabal finally convenes... for the final time. You lock the door behind you, and run: the police are close behind, but they are no match for a properly planned escape route and corrective eye surgeries timed to fail catastrophically at this exact moment. Eventually, you are alone on a roof, sirens fading into the distance, watching the sun rise... what do you do now?

Good things: I’m done (kind of, depending on whether I’ll apply tweaks to the final or before) with the animatric for anim3, I hacked a light (more on this, perhaps tomorrow), and I found another webcomic (dresdencodak.com, filled with all sorts of cool art, interesting stories, and thinking material. It’s a wonder I hadn’t found it sooner. However, the update rate is horrendous, although I suppose he has to do other things for a living scratch that, he does it for a living. Also, I’ll have to remedy the ‘cute girls as avatar’ syndrome that seems to overrun every webcomic I see, someday). I also may have a lead on that mystery component in the ott light stand, and parts are arriving. Yay!

Food for thought: having stayed out for New Years (playing Mario Kart and guitar hero, in addition to hanging out), I started driving home at around 2:30 AM. It was a pretty miserable night: not only did I have to watch out for drunks, the heavens decided to piss all over the place. It’s amazing I only passed on accident. I wonder what people think when they pass an accident, how close my thoughts are to the norm. Anyways, I’m pretty tired, so I’ll close here.