morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve showing off her neat little stocking cap. She looks a little pensive there. Also very cute.

There was no Thursday post. I got too busy playing with my new Arduino. When it got here the other day, I thought I couldn’t use it until I found/bought a 9-volt DC power supply. It turns out that it can get its power either from an external power supply or directly from the USB connector. After I got home from work, I plugged it in, uploaded the “blinking LED” program, and watched its glorious blinkishness. Very cool. I’m hoping to try some of the more advanced tutorials this weekend.

Which promises to be extremely busy. We’re going to decorate the house tomorrow, and I personally need to put away a bunch of stuff before that happens. I also need to check my library books for overdueness, do a little car cleaning (the Suburban’s floor mats are disgusting and the Sable is too dirty for words) (although it will probably rain tomorrow, thus getting me out of both the car cleaning and any lawn mowing that needs to be done), check the pool water, prepare a Sunday School lesson, and do a multitude of other things that I can’t remember right now but that are detailed in my gadget’s to-do list.

I unpacked and installed my new Logitech S530 cordless keyboard and mouse tonight. As my more astute Loyal Readers know already, my very cool Apple keyboard wasn’t working any more – the keys would stick at random, which is not conducive to Serious Writing. That just might explain my blog, huh? Anyway, the new one is very comfortable, has great key action, and has a bunch of little configurable buttons that open the web browser, open email, open iTunes, open iPhoto, open Spotlight, turn the sound up and down, navigate back and forth on web pages, and power down the system. The mouse has three buttons, a scroll wheel that goes up, down, and sideways, web page forward and back buttons, and volume controls. It feels pretty comfortable in the hand. They’re both white and brushed aluminum (well, brushed aluminum-looking plastic anyway) and go perfectly with my Mac Mini. And the cordlessness is totally cool. I really like them. Highly recommended for the Mac-loving Loyal Readers. I’m sure there’s a Windows version as well for my PC-loving Loyal Readers. If you’re in the market, check it out.

Well, it’s late, so I’ll quit. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you on Monday.

Here’s the view of Loyal Reader Number Twelve most often seen these days. That girl can eat! She’s a little bit bigger and a little bit cuter every day.

I don’t think anybody will notice I’ve had to use the Wonders of Blogger to get this posted on Wednesday – no comments for a couple of days hints at less than the usual level of Loyal Readership. I had my normal Wednesday evening correlation meeting, which means I was home pretty late tonight. Couple that with the arrival of my Arduino and it was a busy afternoon/evening.

So, there will be actual content on Thursday. In the meantime, I’m soliciting suggestions for interesting (and achievable) applications for a microcontroller for my first real Arduino project (after the tutorials are done). What would be cool?

Some of my ideas:
– Build a line-following robot and then add computer control to it
– Port the FreeRTOS to the Arduino platform
– Umm, I’m thinking

Okay, I think it’s clear I need ideas. Help me, Loyal Readers! You’re my only hope.

See you on Thursday.

Here’s a shot of some random ride in Tomorrowland, courtesy of Loyal Reader Number One. Very futuristic. Loyal Reader Number Two tells me LRN1 liked the ride because it reminded him of Myst. I can see why.

For my guitar-loving Loyal Readers, here’s an interesting video I found out there on the interweb:

Now that’s some good pickin’.

No time for a long post today. My Loyal Readers are invited to tell about the Christmas traditions they’re looking forward to, as mentioned in yesterday’s post.

Otherwise, it’s already late and I need to go to bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s an old church we visited when we took a tour of Valley Forge a few months back. Sorry about the fuzziness – it was pretty dark in there and I wanted to get the effect of the stained glass. Also, I didn’t have a tripod with me. Also, I don’t plan to start carrying a tripod. So I guess my Loyal Readers will just have to accept the occasional fuzziness.

No post on Friday – we were incredibly busy with the family in Las Vegas. It doesn’t look like any of the Loyal Readers really missed it, though. We’re back in the Secret Undisclosed Location now, so posting will get back to its normal high quality and frequency.

What a great weekend! We went to the Las Vegas temple for Loyal Readers Numbers Three and Fifteen’s sealing. It went very well and was definitely worth the wait (although I personally could have waited a much shorter time!). Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve came to Las Vegas too, along with LRN15’s mom, sister, and grandparents. We had a great time together.

Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two and I finally got to go to the Pinball Hall of Fame on Friday night. It was a lot of fun! As advertised, it was absolutely crammed with pinball machines new and old, and (essentially) all of them worked perfectly. I got to meet the owner of the place and mentioned that I had read about it in Make Magazine. He hadn’t seen the article yet, so I told him it said the machines were kept in great condition and when one even so much as had a lightbulb burn out, one of his numerous volunteers would rush out and fix it. He told me he’s the one who fixes everything, and when he does manage to get a volunteer, they spend all their time sitting around doing nothing. So much for Accuracy in Journalism. I still love Make, though.

We got home pretty late last night and started our normal lives back up. We had been away from home long enough to be glad to be back. A small correction, though – LRN2 stayed in Sugarloaf with LRN4. LRN5, LRN12, and he got here this evening. LRN4’s going a little stir crazy there in the mountains, so she’s here for the holidays. We’re delighted to have both she and my sweet little LRN12 for a few weeks.

They had a little bit of excitement on their trip. They had a blowout somewhere in the middle of nowhere a few hours south of here. They changed the tire themselves and then went about a quarter mile further and located a tire store at the next exit. They bought a new tire there and pushed on further north.

We made our Traditional Annual Christmas Season Calendar at Home Evening tonight. There are lots of things on the calendar, including our standards like putting up Christmas decorations, sending Christmas cards, watching Christmas movies, looking at Christmas lights, baking Christmas cookies, and going to a museum on Christmas Eve (actually, it’ll be the 23rd this year, since Christmas Eve is on Sunday). We’ve added a couple of changes this year – we’re going to have a Firefly marathon on the 26th and go to Chinatown and other strategic points in San Francisco on the 27th.

What Christmas traditions are my Loyal Readers looking forward to this year?

Well, that’s enough blathering for one day. See you tomorrow.

I’m not sure whether this guy is a Disneyland cast member or just a weird guest. Either way, he kind of creeps me out.

It’ll have to be a short post tonight, since it’s getting close to 11:00 PM. We got back a little bit ago from the Drifters/Coasters/Platters concert at the Sahara hotel. It was a lot of fun! As I may have mentioned, our quasi-relative Barry Singer is part of the show’s management and he offered us complimentary tickets. We sat right by the stage and had a nice time. I don’t know whether any of the performers were actually in the Drifters/Coasters/Platters back in the day, but they were entertaining and we enjoyed hearing a lot of the oldies. Loyal Reader Number Two was the youngest person at the show, so they gave him a free autographed CD, which was really nice. We shook a few hands and generally enjoyed ourselves. Oh, and it wasn’t too loud either. I guess they knew they were playing to a slightly Older Crowd and they kept it mellow.

We didn’t get to the Pinball Hall of Fame today – or anywhere else other than the concert. The boys spent the day working on school, so nobody was free. I guess we might make it tomorrow, but things are going to start getting busy then, so I don’t know. Maybe Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two and I will sneak over there sometime.

I spent a good part of the afternoon working on my brother-in-law’s computers. His laptop had a partially-installed copy of an anti-virus program, which was causing all kinds of havoc. I struggled for quite a while to figure out how to remove it. Its installer would neither remove it nor install a new copy of itself over it. Its second-chance installer did the same thing – can’t remove, can’t install. Its last-chance remover program wouldn’t work because it complained of a missing file. I tried removing files and registry entries by hand, but it still wouldn’t go away. Finally, it occurred to me to just stick another copy of the missing last-chance file into the program’s main folder. I did it, and it worked! Suddenly, MSN Messenger, the anti-spyware program, and a few other things started working again. I’m in the middle of installing and updating an earlier version of the anti-virus program, which ought to actually work. Recommendation to my Loyal Readers: stay away from PC-Cillin 2007 for the time being.

Now I have to get the desktop machine to clean up its file directory table, which keeps getting corrupted, possibly because of a bad sector in an inopportune location. It keeps making me run CHKDSK on it, which seems to clear it up, but it comes right back the next time I boot the machine. We may have to put in a new disk, since a couple of other people have already tried reinstalling the system and the corruption just keeps coming back. I’ll try reinstalling again, of course, but I don’t have much hope for that. The trouble, of course, is that computer manufacturers don’t include a system disk – this machine just has a few Ghost images on its hard disk. When the disk goes belly-up, you’re pretty much out of luck. Maybe I can use one of those programs that makes an exact copy of the original disk onto the new one. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I have such a program at home and can probably download it from the internet if necessary. A plan! That’s just crazy enough that it might . . . get us all killed!

Well, I’m off to bed. See you tomorrow.