Foot soup
Here’s a nice steaming pot of cow foot soup, AKA caldo de pata. Looks yummy. Apparently, it’s pretty popular stuff down in Central America. Part of my famous Guatemala series.
It’s Monday evening and home evening is over. Tonight’s activity was swimming and jacuzzifying. It was another extremely hot day today, so the pool’s temperature was pretty nice. Not quite ready to just walk into, but almost. It’s supposed to be warmer than usual tonight and hot again tomorrow, so it ought to be good then too. I’ll be at a scouting meeting, though, so no swimming for me. Sure wish I could enjoy my house a bit more.
Nothing much happened over the weekend. In fact, I really can’t remember much of anything other than stake conference on Saturday and Sunday. The Sunday session was very nice – I came away uplifted. Worked more on the Arduino project. The hardware has been declared done once again, after I messed around with the card holder’s power supply, trying to get its voltage within specs. When I did, it stopped working. Raised it up above specs again and it’s working fine. Leave well enough alone, even if I can’t explain it.
Got a start on the software too. Didn’t get way far, but it’s well under way. I think I can have it working right with about another hour’s worth of work, and have it cleaned up and ready to publish with another hour after that. Should be able to get it done and published on the weekend. Then I’m really struggling with whether to design a PCB or leave that until later and start working on the navigator, which promises to be quite a software challenge itself. It occurred to me this evening that it would be really cool as a low-cost but less-accurate direct replacement for a GPS receiver. I don’t know if that’s really feasible, though.
LRN2 has a couple of interesting projects he’s started working on. First, he got out our Casio keyboard and has started composing something. I’ve only heard the random note or two, but I’ll be very interested in hearing the completed project. I ordered a Midi cable this evening so he can tie the keyboard in to Garage Band on his Mac, greatly expanding the creative possibilities. The cable was quite reasonably priced – about five bucks, including shipping. I’m sorry I haven’t gotten one before.
LRN2’s second project is a web comic. He’s still pretty much learning the computer-based tools he wants to use, so he hasn’t even started drawing yet. I don’t really think he has his idea for the comic yet either, but there may be something working its way to the surface. I think he really has a gift for that sort of thing. He’s still trying to figure out where to publish it. I suggested actually creating a Zine, but I think he has his heart set on web-only publishing. We looked briefly at Google Sites, but he has the impression those sites are limited to fairly static pages, aimed at things like clubs and organizations. He wants something more like Drupal, WordPress, or Blogger for ease of publishing. I’ve started leaning pretty heavily towards WordPress myself, and I think they have free hosting (a must at this point), so I’ll probably encourage him to set up a site with them. We could always use spinfo.info for that, or even buy a new domain and host it on my service. Still, why not use a free site instead? Decisions, decisions.
Nothing much else to report. LRN1’s letter came this afternoon. He’s doing well and learning to be humble. He sent pictures of cow foot soup their landlady made for them, including the above shot. Doesn’t look too appetizing, frankly, but the natives love the stuff. LRN1 says he could only eat about three spoonfuls before he was done.
And I’ll leave you with this exciting new job opportunity from the Morrowlife employment agency: Metallica-listening monkey! LRN3 might be especially interested in this one.
See you tomorrow.
June 29th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
I think LRN2 has a basic story line for his web comic, but as you say, I don’t think he has actually written any of it yet.