here's life

This weekend was dedicated to visiting my family and catching up on everyone's life. The party started at 1:am when we were picked up from the airport by my sister and brother-in-law, but the pig was already roasting when I left Atlanta. Thursday the cousins played the traditional CTF in the big blue room -- complete with grass, woods and spikey plants. That worked up a good appetite for the late afternoon meal. Turkey, and a whole roast pig, and mashed potatoes and dressing et. al, were consumed in great quantities.
After dinner was cleared away, we had a "white elephant" gift exchange. We drew numbers and then picked wrapped gifts in that order. I was pretty close to the end, because I drew -- you guessed it -- 41. I ended up with a Hebrew-English dictionary. I think the cousin that got a mouse and Ubuntu disk set will find it useful.
The rest of the weekend was pretty relaxing. An afternoon at the beach was spent digging enormous, strategically placed holes and harassing whoever sat in the old wheelchair we brought along. As people left, things quieted down until finally I left Monday afternoon, and flew back, waiting for hours in Atlanta while they busily delayed flights.
Here are some pictures that seemed to be taken while I was there.


More Pictures

It is cold here now.

Here is me with some glow sticks

With a flash, the light trails are gone.

Sharp, spastic movements show up differently.

I am not sure what this is, but it may have been run through a filter or something.

Is this me? Probably not, I usually had green as well.
Time for bed, and then work, and then clean up my house.
There are more pics at this (not mine) myspace page

Last night I went to a PraiseRave at church. There was lights and music and some non-LU approved activities. But self-destructive, anti-social behavior was kept to a minimum. We had about a hundred people there between 9pm and 2am. The half dozen DJ's did a good job, as well as the light guy who volunteered his time and swivelly, flashy and swirlly lights. The video projection was better than I thought at first. They had some stuff sort of like electric sheep, but without the variety and beauty. Next time, I'll be ready.
There were glow sticks on strings and glow sticks in hand, people dancing and people standing around watching. It seems that the key characteristic of this type of dancing is you move your hands around, one hand following the other. Interestingly, that doesn't change if you are holding glow sticks, or even glow sticks on strings. The swirling figure-eights of light come from the same movements as those without.
At first I stood around, but then I got some sticks and string and experimented with that for a while. I had a shift at the entrance table, about the time the Red Bull kicked in, so I sat with glowstick between my fingers and moved my hands in patterned, spastic movements for about an hour, somewhat mimicking the movements of the swiveling lights. I don't think I was doing it right because someone said it looked like I was on speed, which (as I understand) is not rave-material.
Later in the night I decided to just go ahead and make a fool of myself, so I tried the whole dancing thing. It was pretty fun. And even when I tried to do it "right" I was lousy, but nobody minded. You could do whatever you wanted, and that was cool. No one chiding people because they aren't staying in line or doing it proper.
After it was over and the lights came up, I wandered about in a daze, helping clean up and make it ready for church. Then some of us went to IHOP, and then I went home, falling into bed about 6am. I made it to second service a bit late.
I was fun, and I am glad that I was able to participate, and, yes it brings back memories of days gone by. But I look forward to next time.

Well, another full, but uneventful, week.
This evening, instead of going bowling with people from work, I went and helped set up for a Rave at my church. We put up some big black-light can lights, and moved stuff around. It was fun, I got to run around and carry tables and stuff. Part way through the evening, me and another guy went to Cici's and picked up some donated pizza's. Cici's is pretty cool and friendly.
I tried my hand at twirling glo-sticks around on strings. I am not sure if I look cool or clumsy, but it is a fun exercise in angular momentum.
They have a projector shining on a wall, and it looks like they will mostly be showing christian music videos on it. Pretty big and cool, especially with video mixer doing neat stuff. It seems to me (the great repository of information on Raves) that electric sheep would be a cool addition to the visual effects. I would have suggested it, but the video mixer doesn't have vga input, just RCA and something called "Super" but wasn't s-video, despite it's apparent similarity. How hard is it to get the RCA out on my video card to work?

This evening I went to a thanksgiving dinner my church was having. It was fun, and there was a lot of good food. I cooked some too, but I think I played my cards right, because I brought a good bit of it home. Lunches....mmm.
Between the cooking and the dinner I went over to some friend's house and watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was pretty good, for a remake. Similar, but with better graphics, and modernized characters, compared to the 1971 version. Being darker, the new version could fit the book (which I have not read) better.

I need some hinges and a sewing machine. I am kluging together another piece of furniture.

This evening I came upon a website about Bigfoot. It seemed a bit crazy at first (after all, bigfoot doesn't exist) but after reading several intelligent articles and reports, it didn't seem so far-fetched. There have been three credible reports in my county, over the last 30 years. Do you think there is such a thing as a large, rare, wood ape in North America? When they used the term "wood ape" it suddenly wasn't as exciting or crazy sounding, just uncommon. Have you personally seen any number of birds and small furry creatures that people tell you exist? Well, maybe, if you have been Birding lately. So, before you lump Sasquatch together with UFO's and honest politicians, realize that it is just a big furry critter that people don't see very often. You could go on an expedition and try to find one. Or, just go hiking and enjoy something that is easy to find, and probably more helpful -- fresh air and sunshine.

Here are some pictures of my niece.

Today I work I was called out to the shop on an interesting mission. We had a problem item from our customer in Seattle, that said we put some parts on the tail together wrong. Me and another guy looked at the horizontal stabilizer where it is built -- a five minute scooter ride away.
What we currently build and what the drawings said seemed to match quite well, so there was no longer a problem. Then he told me what was going on: Up in Seattle someone had damaged it, and so they wrote up a problem, and had us send them some parts to repair it, while making it look like we had messed up. I didn't realize that sort of thing happened, but I guess I have a lot to learn.
What do we do? We say there isn't a problem anymore, and charge Seattle for it. The annoying thing is that we have to make sure that everything is right, and we are doing things correctly -- and it makes a big difference if someone hit it with a forklift after we sent it off, or is one of our people isn't putting the right parts in the right place, every time. The structure is pretty critical -- not as critical as the flight software, (with metal it is easier to see that something isn't going to fit, and over-building is more effective) but the FAA makes sure that we have a system to get everything checked and fixed. But sometimes, people use that system to shift blame, making things more inefficient.

It seems this story should have a moral, so here it is: "Ethix are important. Blaming someone else can really make things hard if they look back at their past and fix the future."

I have not done much on the home front lately. I did get my wireless network working --- my table is networked using two WRT54G's. Per Pebble's suggestion, I started Electric sheep on the table. Due to memory restrictions (64MB) It runs really slow and the hard drive runs pretty constantly.
Thanks to a donation by J5, there are more cards in the ceiling library, including a 486 mobile. While we are talking about hardware, I have a printer/copier/scanner that a guy from work gave me -- some of the printer nozzles are plugged it seems. Now I just need to get it working with TWAIN, so I can print stuff.





The other evening I went over to the house of a guy from work and tried to get his net to work. He had a cable modem that he wanted connect to his laptop. No net jack on the laptop, and Windows ME's New Hardware Wizard would hang when trying to install the USB drivers to connect to the cable modem that way. He had a nifty wireless router and PCMCIA card, but I had the same trouble with it's drivers as well. (plus, the router had a wrong, and broken, power supply) Was I right in suggesting that he reinstall windows? Is there a better way to make stuff work that doesn't?

I wonder if I am going bald. My hair is everywhere, screaming malnutrition, or maybe my brain is taking it's wear. Will stress or poor eating habits cause one's hair to fall out?

And on that note, I will go to bed.

rest of photo, I'll hide this post

Here are some pictures of the computerized table system. The mouse is under the saucer, but is really annoying to use. But, it works and I can click the buttons. The keyboard is handy until I get everything mousified. But, what do I run on it?






It seems to mostly be a proof of concept sort of device.








But I do have an extra optical mouse now, so I might redo the input system. Plus I have another wireless router that I could use to get this table beyond the limits of my (short) network wires