Day: September 4, 2007

Just in time for his birthday (He is eleven today, he will be twelve tomorrow), Christian has gotten his hovercraft up and running!  Here it is.  ¡Buen provecho!

What a great three-day weekend.  We had to make major revisions on the hovercraft, but it worked like a champ.  We took some great videos of both the making of the hovercraft and of Christian riding it down the street, but ran into some technical glitches when we tried to put them up on YouTube.  As soon as we get that all worked out, we will send out an email and post links to where Christian is planning to put the videos on his blog.  It was WAY fun.  We need to find a way to mount the leaf blower on the hovercraft because Christian just holds it now.  Then we need to attach a rope to it so we can pull it around.  After that all works out, we are planning to go ahead and get a kit to put together.

The rest of the weekend was pretty cool, too.  Yesterday afternoon, we stopped at what looked like a Burger-King or some other fast food restaurant made over to be a fast food North Carolina barbeque joint.  When we went in, it was very clean.  Lorena ordered barbeque chicken and I ordered broasted chicken.  Both of them were great.  The lady that served us told us we missed out because their specialty was barbeque pork.  We are looking forward to getting back there to try it very soon.  It is just a single store barbeque place in Apex named Dixie Belle.  I hope they turn into a chain someday.  We would especially like to take Trisha, Bryan, and Mr. Bone there when they come to visit us.  We even might take the Waldos if they are not too snooty from eating all that New York City food!

On another hopeful note, after my inspirational morning at the Holly Springs Public Library, I spent the afternoon working on getting a bunch of vision code up and going in Linux on my laptop.  I had never quite figured out how to program very well in the Linux environment, so I finally took the bull by the horns and just hammered away at it until I got it.  It is going GREAT now.  I think I need one more session like that to be more effective with the debugger, but I am on my way now.  I got my main buffer and filter class going along with the ability to load and save images.  The next big step is to add a GTK+ GUI to the thing and I will be off and running.