Loyal Reader Number Twenty-Two
Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twenty-Two displaying the “project” he and Loyal Reader Number One have been working on. Photo courtesy of LRN22 via his MacBook and Photo Booth.
Explanations may be in order. First, as you can see over there on the right, we have yet another new Loyal Reader! The Amazing Unstoppable Morrowlife Juggernaut rolls on. Welcome, LRN22. Today’s your Very Special Morrowlife Day.
I still owe Very Special Days to Loyal Readers Numbers Twenty and Twenty-One. Stay tuned for those.
And baby picture lovers can take heart – I got several exceptionally cute pictures of Loyal Reader Number Twelve today. They’ll be featured in this space Real Soon Now.
A few words about the “project.” As a highly-valued member of a cross-country team, LRN22 has an obligation to run for a certain period of time each day, with evidence of this activity recorded by his personal heart monitor. Presumably, the results of this daily monitoring will be submitted to a coach-like individual at some point as evidence of ongoing devotion to the sport. He and LRN1 got to wondering whether it might be theoretically possible to somehow make the heart monitor believe its owner was working up a sweat out on the highways and byways, when in fact he was relaxing in the comfort of his own home while a computer-based device generated realistically-simulated heart rate data for the monitor to record. Just as a Technical Demonstration, they hooked up the monitor to our Arduino, wrote some software blending multiple sine waves (I think they should have thrown some random data on top of the blended sine waves, but nobody asked me), and took some Scientific Measurements. I’m sure they’re not actually using this ingenious device for fraudulent purposes, of course.
Anyway. Drove to work today. It took two hours to get there, but only about 1:10 to get back. How can this be? Easy, I left work at about 8:00 this evening. Got a lot done, but it made for a long day. Which went by incredibly quickly because I was so busy. But I’m tired tonight.
I got a great idea for a new video game tonight. Tell me what you think: Blimp Racing. Two players (with two separately licensed copies of the game, of course) would go head-to-head to see who could travel from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California the fastest. Wind currents would hold your blimp back for hours at a time. Frequent landings for food, candy and gum, restroom breaks, and changes of clothing would break up the nonstop action. Some shorter races would finish in as little as a week! We could have a really accurate simulation mode as well, for those aspiring blimp pilots. You could take off from Akron, Ohio, travel a thousand miles to the site of the Super Bowl, and hover overhead, displaying advertising slogans and filming a bird’s-eye view of the game. Wow!
I’m also considering America’s Cup sailboat racing as a follow-on game. I think I’ve invented a whole new video game sub-genre. The Loyal Readers are calling it “Boring Sports.” I’m going to start coding immediately. Gardenville Software employees, get to work!
So I’m going to cut this short. There’s so much to blog about, but my pillow calls out to me. Besides, the internet connection is scarily slow tonight, so I ought not to press my luck. See you tomorrow.