I hate being sick

So my awesome break...wrecked. The morning after my last post I woke up with a throat pain that made me want to throw up, except I knew that would make it hurt worse. This developed in to a nasty cold but I thought it was a cold and nothing more.

Yeah, I was wrong about that.

By the next day I was coughing up phlegm and mucus and such and I had a fever, and a really sore throat. So I got myself a ride down to the hospital (Thanks to Rosie!) and got checked out. 101 fever, dehydrated and just miserable. They put me on a fluid IV (I hate needles so that was an adventure in itself) and then X-rayed me. They also gave me medicine to tank the fever. Diagnosis: Viral bronchitis. Prescribed me a lot of soup, sleep and cough medicine.

Currently I'm still coping with a painful cough, fever (not as high though) and congestion, the throat pain is gone minus soreness from the coughing, but mostly I've stopped coughing things up and am back to eating non-soup foods!

Should be back in business this weekend.

I'm on break

Hence the weird hours.

Alright, got me some new equipment to be hooking up soon. For starters a nice shiny new NETGEAR router to relieve Godzilla of the network management role so I can have my primary workhorse back. Also finally got a nice Logitech S510 Cordless Desktop for Gojira. Though I think I'm going to reconfigure the Micron back to QWERTY for use as my games keyboard, and use the S510 on Godzilla with Dvorak. I can touch type it well enough for now and it will only get better as my only option. Of course that means getting pfSense to let go of Godzillas boot sequence, so, Ubuntu disc and GRUB reinstallation hopefully is all I need.

Alrighty, back to work...

Grapefruit?!?

Brian: I'm sick of people always fondling my grapefruit!!

Thoughts

I just spent some time in the lab and I thought I'd make a record of it.

Accomplishments include: I identified all the pins and their wires. Interestingly enough several of them had duplicates, two wires on same pin and two wires were apparantly NC. I think all those anomalies are related to the Centronics half of the connector, which is no longer present as I lopped it off. :)

Soon enough I can start soldering the electrical connections to the display.

Osillyscope!

It works, my oscilloscope that is. Brought it down to the lab and got a refresher course on using oscilloscopes from a friend while testing mine out. Hooked it up to the DC power supply as well as the function generator. Not only did it work but it was near perfect. My friend also showed me how to adjust the calibrations on it, so that is good.

Cresting the hill

This week has been crazy. Three exam week, one was Monday, one is at 3pm today (I'm taking a break before it to relax... yeah right) and one tomorrow evening. Plus homework and and a project to do. And everything was due today! After today's exam I get to go down to the lab and demonstrate my project to the professor, and then I have a bit of personal work to do in the lab. Should be done by 5pm. I am officially declaring that my over the hill time, it's all downhill from there. Tomorrow's exam is programming, C++ and I am not worried about it, so I can actually relax tonight, watch some TV maybe. I'm a bit nervous about my Statistics exam coming up but I studied all the material, did all the practice stuff and just wrote every formula I'd ever used on my formula sheet. It's not hard, I am more worried about making a stupid math error on my integrals or something.

After this I should be able to get my oscilloscope working in the lab, then I'm going to order probes of my own and start working on my character LCD attached to a computer project thing...

This weekend is technically a break and as such I have no class Monday or Tuesday, should be nice to relax but most people are leaving and I'm not, so I'll have to fend for myself on both entertainment and food. Ah well, it could be worse, and I'm sure I'll find something to do. House marathon or something. Plus I want to get the ball rolling on a bigger project and this weekend is the perfect time to do so.

Oh and I'm an idiot and left my multimeter at home...

But once the scope is working it won't make much of a difference and the only thing I need a meter for is resistance and continuity. A battery and an LED do the continuity and if I really need resistance I can use color bands or something.

That's all for now. I'm gonna start to get my stuff together for class.

Its not Photoshop'd!

The room was crowded so we installed more RAM in the wall. Allen did the "installation" with a well placed throw. Once installed we felt like we had more room to spread out and worked faster!

P.S. This really isn't Photoshop'd. I promise.

Insomniac Ravings

It seems I always get my greatest insights while being completely unable to sleep and listening to the hum of the CPU fans.

I've been sick the last few days, nasty stomach aches and cramps, and an overwhelming desire to eject everything I eat from my stomach. Plus now my throat is starting to ache with each swallow. Seems like more Chicken Noodle is on the way. Ah well, such is life.

The problem therein is that I hate sitting around doing nothing, but lately due to these problems that's been mostly what's going on and it's really starting to get at me. I'm starting to realize the nights I spend anywhere but my room are quickly becoming my favorites. Maybe I'll go impose on Brian and be sick in his apartment with Poker all weekend :)

Maybe... probably not.

And as usual in my crazy late night/early morning thoughts, I've had another idea, simple enough that it just might work out to be a tidy weekend project. I really need one of those, if I don't hit some kind of home run soon I'm liable to go off the wall nuts!

That is all for now. :)

Please use other seating...

Seat fail at the place I am at...

It's.....

Peanut butter jelly time!

Nice view...

Brian and I were crossing the bridge in to town to get Dinner and I took this nice shot with the BlackBerry. Looks pretty cool.
Now, food!

Just wow.

Saw this thing the Wal-Mart yesterday evening. Awesome.

Autographed!

My friend Sam, the Ninja, drew this on my whiteboard then she signed it. Whoo

Summer Ending and School Starting

So my summer ended on a high note with a trip to Disney World with Matt, my dad and my brother. The trip was definitely worth the long, delayed, stressful flight down there. The hotel we stayed at alone was awesome. Along with the room they gave us free park hoppers and free transportation to all the parks.
We hit EPCOT, Magic Kingdom and MGM (or Disney Hollywood Studios I guess now) and made to just about every ride. Matt got me on Space Mountain, Mission Space, Thunder Mountain, all of which were so cool, definitely going on them again if I end up going next year. We even had one night when it was just the two of us, we went out to a really nice steak house for dinner and went walking in Downtown Disney, it was really romantic and sweet <3. The only bad part was my shoes...they hurt like a bitch, I swear I'm gonna burn them if I have to wear them again....anyway, we went to the Boardwalk one night before we left and met up with one of Matt's friends named Mike. He was really cool, the three of us hung out, got some treats and walked up and down for awhile. The whole trip was amazing, it was great to spend some time together before the both of us went away to school.
The only down side to the trip was on the way home. In the airport while we were going through security Matt lost his camera, it is now presumably in the hands of some random tourist who picked it up off the ground and kept it, seeing how security didn't have it and never found it. We lost some really nice pictures that he didn't get a chance to upload, o well. The flight home was definitely not as bad as the one there, but I was sad that the trip was over already.
Now school has officially started and I've gotten past the first two weeks. Not a lot of work just yet, just some project and reading for a computer class. Honestly, some of you who read and post on this site would look at the textbook I got for this class and not know whether to laugh or just cry at how wrong it is. There is actually a chapter with a section that teaches you where the start button is......you think I'm kidding? I'm dead serious. I got through about 2 chapters and read about 3 or 4 wrong definitions and whole pages about the difference between programs and folders or files, how a mouse and pointer work, how to open a document, and other stuff I learned when I was five before I decided that this class was bullshit. Now I'm off to re-send the project again, because apparently I can't have spaces in the document title, but need them in the title of the email *sigh* I'm really getting the feeling that this is gonna be my pain-in-the-ass class of the year. 'Till next time, see ya.

Ka-Ching!

Poker is rapidly becoming my new favorite past time. I'm rolling in the chips after a very nice hand. By the way, there are only a handful left with the other four guys playing.

Wal-Mart promotes War?!

But only watered down PC war with no violence. Its like War Lite, or Diet War.

Does anyone actually like this game??

Load balancing...?

Here is Greg balancing a dual-bander antenna on his head. Not quite the textbook definition of load balancing....