We have lots of things to do this weekend. I send the Lorena and the kids off to see their Oregon grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends for a couple of weeks. I will join them for a few days in the middle of that. We have lots of stuff to do to get ready for the trip, but this should also be a big project weekend as we are having a big meeting at NCSU today to decide exactly what it is we are trying to accomplish with our project. I am hoping to set up a lab in the bonus room to program our Arduino controllers to control stepper/servo motors, turn lights on/off, and generally get Christian and our buddy Jeff going on robotic programming. That means I will have to work my way through a bunch of boxes in the garage to find motors, relays, opto-racks, power supplies and all that stuff. We have the workings of a new project. I think I might have Christian do a programmed fountain/fish barrel like one we had when we were in Oregon. Also we are going to do the first big Betty Blonde t-shirt giveaway and, hopefully, go to the Holly Springs Public Library. It should be a great weekend.
Month: August 2009
Running hurts. 😛 After the shoulder-swimming thing, I started running a little. It’s not fun at all. Sometimes I feel like I can run forever without any problems. Other times it takes me four steps before I start cramping up. My legs always hurt afterwards. I’m terrible at pacing myself. It hurts more to jog than to run. I can’t go more than a mile and a half without having to walk. My throat starts burning because of how I breathe. Short of slowing down to a walk, NOTHING will make the cramps go away. It gets super boring after the first three laps. The music selection at the Y does not help with the boredom. I sweat like a pig. RUNNING STINKS!!!!
Swimming is the ultimate sport. A good swim feels like slicing through warm, soft butter. All my sweat is washed away. It’s relaxing and repetitive and refreshing. It doesn’t jar my bones every time I move. I usually get a killer workout. It’s not as boring and I don’t know why. I don’t cramp up. Breathing is easy and controlled. I know how to pace myself in the water. It never hurts as much as running. Also, being underwater is so much cooler than running around a short track eight million times. Swimming is just plain awesome. I would do it every single day if I could. However, our Y doesn’t have an indoor pool yet and I’m still staying off of my shoulder and I’m going to need to do something all winter long and I hit a plateau on the elliptical and the elliptical is boring anyway and running is something that you can do competitively which I like and sometimes when I’m running it feels like I’m running super fast on a cloud and I could run forever and that feeling is really, really good, almost as good as swimming like butter. So running it is.
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The Big Betty Blonde t-shirt giveaway is this weekend!! So sign up with your extra e-mails, cross your fingers and anxiously await the results! 🙂
This is what Troy, Christian, and I have been working on at the Ag Engineering department at NCSU. It is really coming along nicely now. It looks like our buddy, Jeff, is going to join us on the project. He has a mechanical engineering degree from Virginia Tech and will work on the robotic elements of the project. We are hoping to get together this weekend to plan this out and go through some of the programming issues. We identified the Arduino board as the embedded robotic controller we want to use. It costs less than $40 new, but Jeff one-upped me and bought one from a buddy for $20. He has already started programming it. I really need to get a little bit more organized with Christian’s programming project, too. Jeff is going to write the program to control the pump, some lights, and a motor to move one set of lights on a track. I think I will have Christian start looking at the possibility of using an Arduino board to read the results from one of the competing sensors. That way, if two people are learning the same technology, they can help each other and there is some redundancy of knowledge.
Yesterday, the kids spent most of the day out of the house for piano and guitar lessons. After that, Lorena took Christian over to work on Charlene and Steve’s computer. When I got home, no one was there. that was a good thing because I got what has been going around so I programmed as long as I could then went to bed. I know this is all not that interesting–I tell myself I am saving up writing energy for when the school year starts. Hopefully, though, I will have some good pictures of the Oregon trip between now and then.
This weekend, the kids and I will do the drawing for our first t-shirt give-away. We will input the number of subscribers to our email list at random.org. We will then let the random number generator pick a number and send an email to the winner asking what size t-shirt they need and where we should ship it. Although it is not necessary for the winner to do so, we will ask them for permission to post their name and, if possible, send us a picture of them in the t-shirt to post on our “winners” page. That’s it. We will do it again next month.
On another note, I have always thought that I could eventually start a business with some of the code that I write for learning and to help with a number of projects. I am rethinking that idea a little right now. There are two programs I would like to write just to give away. The reality is that I have already written the bulk of both of them. The first is the BleAx comic strip panel aggregator/uploader. Really, I would like to convert that from Python to C++ and add a little more functionality first. I might have Christian help me with that. The other is a speed camera program to measure the speed of vehicles that travel past a house with the help of either a webcam or a security camera. I will keep you posted on my efforts.
With so much stuff going on, I do not have too much time to write, so I thought this would be an opportune time to put up an image of the finished cat tower! I selected this image with the system up and running in user mode.
