Starring Tommy Lee Jones
Okay, okay. Really it’s Saddam Hussein who we aparently finally captured yesterday. I think he looks like Jones though.
I don’t really have anything to say about his capture. Hooray, I guess. I hope the war’s over now.
Depending on your level of geekyness that title either just sent you into a childhood memory induced siezure or you are scratching your head.
This morning my brother asked me if I remembered a 6 wheeled programmable toy from childhood and I immediatly freaked out. Big Trak was the coolest toy I remember having as a kid and after spending a few minutes reminiscing about it and looking at information on the web I think I might have a lot to thank Milton Bradley for.
Big Trak was a 6 wheeled tank shaped robot available starting in 1979. I had a 24 key keypad on it’s back that you used to program the toy to move around. You could enter up to 16 instructions such as move forward or backwards, turn right or left, pause, and fire into memory and then press GO and the Big Trak would execute your program. The controls and the premise were simple, but the implications were pretty enormous.
I think now that Big Trak might have been my introduction to programming. I remember spending hours and hours programming the Big Trak to do exactly what I wanted and I remember feeling limited about the 16 instruction limitation.
I don’t know how long I got to play with the Big Trak, but I do remember when it broke. I eventually wore the keypad out and not all the buttons would function. My Dad and I tried to repair it by installing 24 little red push button switches from Radio Shack, but neither of us knew anything about digital electronics and couldn’t figure out how the keypad had less outputs than 25. All I knew then was that 24 inputs should equal 24 outputs. I can still see the unfinished keypad sitting on the workbench in the basement in our house in Mantua.
Soon after that we got our first home computer; an Apple IIc. That was where programming blossomed into a lifelong addiction for me but I think that I have Big Trak to thank for getting me started.
The iPod article finally got published in the KC Star and I appear at the end with some choice quotes. Pretty cool! 🙂
Check out:
Page 1 and
Page 2 which is where my quotes are.
These images are pretty large, so be warned 🙂
Update:
I found the article on their site.
And here
George Bush is a miserable failure.
From the sign in front of the church down the street:
“Tithe if you love Jesus. Anyone can honk.”
Last night I attempted to clone Frambozen which is a great new beer from New Belgium brewing company. It’s a brown ale with raspberrys added, kinda sour with an almost overpowering aroma of raspberrys. Very good! You can get a six pack in a decent liquor store, and you should because it won’t be around for long.
I won’t know how my attempt turned out for another 5-6 weeks, but so far it looks promising. It smells great and the fermentation is going like a rocket this morning. I’ll let you know how it tastes when it’s ready.
As you can see up there ^^ and from Eric’s comment down there vv, I added a little comment thingy to the site. Eric wrote yesterday asking when I was going to add comments and it sounded like a good idea, so I did 🙂
So, have fun. And be nice.
Yep, that’s a search bar down there. Silly, isn’t it? Over the last few days I have been doing a lot of work with MySQL and I was so impressed with their full text search feature that I wanted to play with it some more.
Now I have search.
If you haven’t looked at MySQL in a while, you would be well advised to do so. The little database that could has really grown up and it’s sporting some pretty impressive features these days. Replication, partitioning, transactions, full text search on large text columns and quite a bit more. There is a still a bit of a disjointed feel to some parts, but they seem to be cleaning those up quickly. For instance, full text search only works on MyISAM tables (which is the default for MySQL) but transactions only work on InnoDB tables. Little things like that can cause some gotchas, but in general MySQL is looking really good.
Um. That’s all.
The other day I was driving along and I noticed my Check Engine light was on in my truck. Sad days indeed! The check engine light (or Malfunction Indicator Lamp as we in the know call it) is used to let the driver know that any one of thousands of things is going wrong with your car and you should take it to the shop and give them a blank check. Being the do it myself kinda guy that I am I didn’t WANT to take it to the shop and give them a blank check so I started reading. I soon found out that since 1996 every car sold in the United States is required to support a diagnostics specification called OBD II. Additionally, the OBD II port is standard and must be within 3 feet of the steering wheel inside the driver area.
A little more reading led me to learn that there are 3 protocols supported in OBD (with more being added now and then) and that my Ford Ranger supported SAE J1850. Alas! That sounds familiar indeed. That’s the same protocol that Ford uses to talk to their CD changers and I have been working on a project to speak it! Unfortunatly that project is not done and I was in a hurry to get my truck happy again.
I did some research and found you can have a OBD II code scanner for anywhere from $49 through several thousand. There is one interface available that I found that will do all the available protocols and talk to your PC via a serial port for $88 which had I the time would definitly have been my choice but instead I ran down to O’Reilly Auto Parts and picked up the one they sold for $150.
My impulsiveness is a crutch 🙁
Anyway, $150 later and my car is trying to tell me P0401 Exhaust Gas Recirculation Flow Insufficient Detected. Sounds like something to be ignored to me. I erased that sonofabitch and the Check Engine light went off. If it comes back on I’ll worry about it but for now I have reduced my stress.
There is a long story about why I own a Ford truck when I HATE Ford trucks, but I’m not going to get into it. Suffice to say I think domestic cars are all shit and I would not own one if I didn’t have to. My opinion is that they break down too often, and are just unreliable. This brings me to why I am willing to spend $150 on something that I could have had a mechanic check out. I fully expect that my Ford truck will show me it’s bad side again in the future and instead of paying (at least!) $50 each time it does for the mechanic to tell me what is wrong I’d rather just have the power. It also appeals to the unstoppable geek in me to be able to see what my car is doing all the time, and what is making it sad.
So anyway, yea, if your car’s check engine light comes on and you don’t want to take it to a mechanic just to find out that it’s some part you can replace for $10, grab an “OBD II Code Scanner” from your local auto parts store and give it a shot. This one looks really nice and shows a lot more than what mine is able to, but requires a laptop. Of course, if you are reading this you are probably a friend of mine and you are welcome to use mine 🙂
Okay, it’s not the popular opinion but I thought this movie completely kicked ass. I enjoyed all but the last few minutes as much as I enjoyed the first Matrix.
SPOILER BUT NOT REALLY:
I was dissapointed with the very ending, but it fits. It works. I just felt a little empty about it.
Anyway, go see it. It’s good eatin.
