December 2002 Archives

It's the simple idiotic moments in my life that I usually enjoy the most. I lent my 4runner to a friend of mine over the weekend so got a green honda civic to drive as needed. I didn't end up using it, it just sat in my driveway all weekend. So this morning I was to go and swap the civic back for my 4runner on the way to work. I woke up late so was in kind of a hurry and ran out the door to find that the civic was completely frosted over. Ice scraper still in my 4runner I had to figure out how to get this car the 6 blocks to exchange it with my vehicle. Wipers don't clear the frost. I figure I can roll down the window and drive like a dog. Windows won't roll down.

The doors opens though.

So there I am, frosty cold morning, driving down a road with all four sides of a car completely frosted over, holding the driver side door open, leaning out and driving by what I can manage to see in the crack between the door and the car frame.

I'm about two blocks from where I need to switch out my car when the absurdity of the situation hits me and have a nice chuckle while icy wind blasts against my forehead (I still have a headache). It's a good thing the streets weren't crowded that early, I made some wide swinging turns :)

Random Update: Out of pure boredom I did a google search for Kraken and found out I'm 113 out of 115,000 results. Ha, take that you loser 114,887 other mildy kraken related sites :)

My little hit counter passed 2000 the other day, I thought it was kind of cool, it's been climbing a little faster than I had expected. I went to look at the log files (I do every now and then) and noticed that that counter isn't terribly accurate. Namely, it missed the 857 hits to my Duffman costume page from various sites who happened to discover it around the 12th of december (madville.com and crackbaby.com were the two biggest contributors). Though I guess that's all they really looked at so whatever.

And then I realized it's pretty damn cool that my little project was found (lord knows how) and that that many people thought it sounded cool enough to take a look. I don't know if anyone else will churn out a costume, but it was more fun for me to make than really worry about providing detailed steps for others to duplicate.

Come to think of it though, if duffman could pull that many people, once the WOPR is done I may actually get the slashdotting I (sort of) want :)

I brought home a spare old dev kit case - from back when they were just regular computers spray painted silver - to use as parts for the WOPR. Basically I needed the slide out motherboard tray, power supply, some of the mounting hardware and the connection cables for things like the power button and hard drive light. Last night I went to go clip off the connection cables to find that they had already been clipped and were missing.

Fate, it would seem, is not without a sense of humor

I don't remember what movie that was from, but the quote sprang instantly to mind. About a 10 months ago when I started preping to cram a computer into a modern Xbox case I was wiring the front panel so the eject and power buttons worked. At that time I needed the same connection cables I needed now so went down to the lab and clipped the cables out of a random case. I knew the case would then be useless as an actual PC enclosure, but they were just sitting in a heap and I figured they were headed for the shredder. So 10 months, a 100 day break, 2 lab moves and several re-stackings of the heap later and I manage to bring home the one case I had neutered.

I'd laugh if I didn't need those dang cables.

It kind of sucks, I want to post a couple of things I'm working on up here but can't. Namely two of the things I'm working on are gifts for people who may happen to visit this page before christmas and the third thing has such a high probability of me not completing it I don't really want to post it yet. But what the hell, we'll talk about that one.

Aimme, John, Tiff and Myself were talking about Wargames for whatever reason and I decided it would be kind of cool to build a case that looked like the WOPR ("wopper wopper", don't ask). Talking it through with my boss we figured out a fiberglass shell would probably be the easiest route to getting the most interior space without having to scale the model up so large it would take up a whole room. So that's designed in theory. It also has to have blinking lights. I've got the control circuit designed, half of it soldered onto a circuit board and the other half still on the prototype board and it seems to be working just as I'd like it too. So now i need to carve the foam positive mold and lay some fiberglass (hard but not too hard), and figure out how to solder 750 small LEDs into appropriately random patterns so that the WOPR will blink and chitter slowly when my computer is idle and more rapidly as it becomes taxed (I've got the software written to control the board, I just need to wire the lights).

I guess it's actually comming along pretty well, the soldering is going to be tedious but not terribly hard, the real deal breaker will be carving the foam positive mold. If I can pull it off, and get enough pictures along the way, I'll put it all up here and hope for my first Slashdotting :)