It's such a long time I don't know where to start.
I've turned off the Twitter re-posting. It's fair to say the frequency of my LJ posts isn't going to get much higher, but those who are going to be on Twitter are on Twitter now, and you can
follow me there.
I'm still living in Dandenong. It's still cheap, and I've just finished using two lawn mower tanks worth of petrol mowing the lawn. It got a bit wild out there and the leopard was getting ballsy. I might still be here next year. The plan currently is to find a place with Jen, but it's not set in stone yet. If that doesn't work it'd make sense to try to find a smaller, cheaper place as Little Miss has got a PhD scholarship and so will be moving closer in to the city.
Life is really just too busy these days for me to find the time to chronicle it. That's a good thing. A steady, interesting 9-5 job is also something I'm grateful for. I must have been incredibly lucky to fall into it given how hard some damn good engineers I went to uni with have found it to find a job.
Work brings interesting new projects, constant change and reasonable challenge. Not to mention having enough money that I no longer have to think about it before getting petrol or lunch. I enjoyed being a student, but I enjoy not being abjectly poor much more.
A few months ago I upgraded my laptop from a PowerBook G4 12" to a MacBook Pro 15". The PowerBook G4 was one fo the best computers Apple ever produced. It lasted me nearly 6 years, with around 2 hours of battery life in the original battery left at the end. It stood up to constant, daily use at uni then at work.
There's still no replacement in Apple's line up for it - Apple later brought out the MacBook Air which was meant to fill the same niche, but it's not nearly as full of features or even as small as the PowerBook G4.
The MacBook Pro has been an extraordinary disappointment. The keyboard is not as good as the PowerBook. The trackpad click is tough, shallow and uneven. There's still no solution to the aluminium pitting problem.
It came with 10.6. Until 10.6.2 it didn't work with Viewsonic monitors (including the one I have on my desk at work) and support is still pretty shit. I've lost a screw out the bottom. The hinge is too loose and the screen falls closed on you if you're using the laptop on your back and have it propped it up on your knees.
I had a harddrive fail after a couple of months. I've seen more kernel panics since getting this machine than I saw in years of using the PowerBook. Right now it freezes randomly - sometimes three or four times a day, sometimes not once in three or four days. Nothing shows up in the logs, it just comes to a screeching halt. It doesn't matter what programmes I'm running, what temperature it is or what I have plugged in.
I once saw the screen flickering
just like this, so I'm thinking there's something wrong with the power section. It hasn't done it again, though.
This morning Mail decided my archives were corrupt and now refuses to open. I don't really want to switch to something like Thunderbird because I use it at work and it kinda sucks.
So this one has been a real lemon. There are a few nice things about it - it being much faster than the PowerBook is a plus, and the backlit keyboard and LED-backlit display are nice. (I went with the matte screen after seeing Little Miss's glossy MacBook.
Christmas presents are mostly sorted. I'm happy with what little miss and I got dad, the other ones are what they are.
We've done the Livingston side already. Christmas day will be at Ballarat, and Boxing say will be in Sunshine.
I went to Robot Wars back in October. That was awesome fun. Most of the robots were featherweight, which is up to 13 and a bit kilograms. They were almost all using motors from electric drills, mostly because they're cheap and they're easy to replace when they shred themselves.
The rules of robot wars are basically that kinetic weapons are the go. (bash, smash, whip, flip.) There was one robot that shot fire (butane) but it was spectacularly unsuccessful.
It's definitely something that's on my to-do-list. The robot design would be quite basic, but my plan is to use an intelligent control system with some sort of feedback from the wheels so that I can spin and move at the same time. With the robots there, they'd sit there spinning, waiting for the opponent to run into them, and it wasn't terribly interesting to watch.
It's also an excuse to play with ARM chips. The one we quoted on fell through. I've got another project coming up early next year that will be either the XMega or an ARM Cortex M3. (They want an international-markets, multi-axis, fully CNC version of
this, which we do the electronics for. I'm leaning toward the ARM because Atmel, in their glorious wisdom, still haven't put engineers on getting the open source tools working with the chips.
I really don't understand why semiconductor companies aren't getting it: make your tools as easy to use as possible and engineers will use your chips. That's how Microchip got out early with the PICs, that's how Atmel took over (because you could use GCC to write code) and I'm fairly sure it's why the FPGAs are still not taking off.
So I have a project for which I'm sitting on the brink of choosing what silicon to use. The volume for the Australian version has been pretty good and is growing rapidly. The Rolls Royce international, do-anything version will hopefully take off to even higher volume. I can use the XMegas, which has the advantage that we've already got one board mostly working with them at work, but I'd have to use Windows as avrdude can't program them. Or, I could use ARM, which is a bit of a big unknown because we haven't used them at all, but at least I'd be able to use my laptop. (And the chip has hardware divide, which is damn nice to have when you're doing CNC mathematics.)
Back in October I ordered
one of these which still hasn't arrived. (Well, they apparently shipped them a week ago) That will let me prototype the big project up and discover any big problems standing in the way. If all goes well, then that's the chip I'll be using in this project.
So I have at least a motor driver project lined up for playing with ARM chips, and probably another project for work.
Of the movies I've seen recently, I enjoyed: 9, Bound (1996), The Ramen Girl, I Sell The Dead, Zombieland, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Moon. I'd cal the following overrated and worth avoiding: 2012, Up.
I'm posting because I'm on holidays. Jen and I are planning to go to Canberra, though this plan isn't terribly planned yet.
Stay safe and cool for the summer, folks. The roads remain full of morons and there seems to be absolutely no functioning enforcement out there.
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cheerful
busy
calm
cheerful
awake
hopeful
busy
:awwface:
chipper
tired
drained