I’m not really happy with the way this one came out, but that’s what you get for 30 minutes, and when you write the ending line first. Anyways, it’s time to try and get a reasonable amount of sleep.

Status: i'm super bored so ask me something

Who are you?

It had been a few hours since I found her sitting at the table, after which I took the chair across from her, after which I sat, sizing her up, trying to categorize her as friend or foe. All this before trying to just ask: you couldn't be too cautious here.

No answer. Not even a visible or audible response of any sort: her eyes refuse to track me as I shift my weight.

Hello?

I wave my hand to catch her attention, the one that isn't occupied with clutching my katana. I picked it up a few days ago, or what felt like a few days: it was hard to tell when it was always dark, and there weren't any clocks to consult. It wasn't like I was a good swordsman, but the shotgun was out of rounds, and I had done a bit of fencing. Plus, it got me through some troubles, which was the true test of a weapon.

Dropping my hand, I permit a quick sigh and look around: no monsters from the dark trying to sneak up on me while I try to find if this one is friend or foe. True, I hadn't met any friends yet in the void, but one never knows. Laying my hand on the table, I drum my fingers.

Her head snaps up, suddenly meeting my gaze.

I freeze, waiting for a manical lunge or for any portention of an impending attack. It was a hard place, the void. Always had to be on your guard.

... Hello?

No response.

I give a small tap with my pinky.

She breaks her gaze away, towards my hand.

Well then.

I tap out .... . ._.. ._.. ___.

She widens her eyes, as if she recognizes the message within.

I'm not surprised she only understands morse code: strange things have happened in this godless void. And god knows I've had enough time to encounter them...

I taps out a query: are you a friend?

She smiles, and then opens her mouth:

Of course.

I immediately know the voice. Of course she would be here: she had been the only one with enough power to bind me into this void. The only one with enough sway over his world. In retrospect, it should have been clear. Of course she was her. She was

No more questions. I challenge you to battle.

I’ve been getting too much sleep.

Sounds strange, no?

Well, once you know that I’ve been sleeping through half the day (little less than 12 hours), then it’s not quite so strange. I’m sleeping way too much, and if I was getting 4 more hours of wakefulness into the day for a nice balance of 16/8, then I would probably be much more productive. I probably wouldn’t be as sleepy, and damn, 4 hours is a long time, especially once you multiply it over 2+ weeks.

The only reason this is a problem is because my REU is fast approaching (1.5 weeks): ignoring my lack of housing, I also need to prep for the project, which means reading a lot of material. When you consider that a large chunk of my day is taken up with overhead, those 4 hours could increase my productivity dramatically. Now, figuring out how to change my sleeping habits is going to be difficult, but man, does it need to happen.

Okay, time for me to stop screwing around with facebook, wordpress, and whatever other social networking sites I’m hanging around and to work. Fun.

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.