I recently acquired an Egg-Bot from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. After lots of playing around, I figured out that AutoTrace does an extremely good job at creating drawings for the Egg-Bot from line-art when using the --centerline flag. I then quickly found a popular xkcd frame and printed it on a golf ball.

The results are quite good, if I do say so myself.

At last post I had lost and found again several hundred? thousand? photographs that I was sure to have lost forever. I have those back now, but many other things have changed. Time for an unordered list of them. I may be a bit more personal than usual on this as well.

• I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelors of Science in Engineering Physics.
• My trusty iMac G4 got hit by lightning through the phone cord, the computer still works, but several ports are inoperable and there is the distinct smell of burnt electronics coming from the inside.
• I purchased a 27″ quad-core i7 iMac, my first foray into Intel Macs.
• I started working at the most amazing job in the world. (Can I talk about it? The blog is already non-anonymous. Maybe in the future when I get more brave.)
• I’ve begun to pick up a few more hobbies, namely electronics and robotics.
• I met a local group of similarly minded mad scientists and began to attend their weekly meetings.
• …and lots more I haven’t listed.

</snl>

Again, my blog has become extremely neglected, so let me start at the beggining… or at least somewhere in the middle of where I left off last time.

You may notice that my last entry was in 2008, about an event that happened in 2007. I had fully intended to continue with the items in my Updating My Blog post, but due to circumstances unbeknownst to me the hard drive containing all the pictures that I wanted to post became completely unresponsive. After that, there was no reason to write a post about a bunch of pictures I no longer had.

However…

Flash forward a few months and I actually call the company that made my hard drive to try and get a replacement. I went through all the symptoms and got back this message:

Michael,

The symptoms you’re describing are usually a problem with the power supply cable, rather than the drive itself.

As it is a worthwhile troubleshooting step, and I can also tell by your serial that you are within warranty, I will send one to you at no charge.

They ship Federal Express ground, and should be with you in approximately 3-5 business days.

I plugged in the new power cable, turned the Hard Drive on and low and behold, he was right! I had all my photos back! I did learn an important lesson about a proper backup; The backup isn’t the only place you store important things, even if you are starved for disk space.

And so begins the story of the past two years…

Each year, a group known as The Habitants du Theatiki organizes a reenactment of life around the time of The French and Indian War called The Gathering on the Theatiki. It’s quite an extraordinary event to visit. I just happen to be lucky enough to have The Theatiki (also known as the Kankakee River) run nearby where I live.

This year, I went on the woods walk for the first time. We were quickly ambushed by the French and their allies and had to flee from the ensuing battle between while guarded by our British and Scottish escorts.

I took a few photos of this event so you can see some of the highlights of the tip. If you live anywhere close to the Kankakee, IL area, I would highly recommend taking part of your weekend during the summer to visit the Gathering on the Theatiki. While you are there be sure to get some sassafras root beer and kettle corn, they sure to be some of the highlights of your trip.

• Theatiki 2007
• Chicago 2007
• Vacation 2007: Michigan & Canada
• Breaking my SuperDrive
• Magnolia pictures
• Chicago 2008
• WALL·E
• R-Place, Hornbaker’s

I still have a lot to update on this blog. More content is forthcoming.

After the event is over, I’ll be sure to write up more.

Here it is converted it into binary:

00001001 11111001 00010001 00000010 10011101 01110100 11100011 01011011 11011000 01000001 01010110 11000101 01100011 01010110 10001000 11000000


Here’s the digests, if you recognize it better as a checksum:

MD2: e38373bf7b9b55e8741f89a406ee4fd8
MD4: 93188a4835ccb6db5d2001fc8973a0f6
MD5: cfddca0b93558c11cd6d2a7023a544bf
CRC 8, ccitt, 16, 32 : 63, 71af, 5306, e1eb9ec1

SHA1: d5e400bcea3b00105ca0db2425f5db0196040c
RIPEMD-160:
3d6eae05 f335ba2f ff3c2982 1ba3b918 349e0166
SHA2-256:
48c4fa0ab4a60b95dec10e22762c0ec0
d765527fd413c91c4eb66682a03f4a11
SHA2-384:
0d6b326900b3acfdc6c942d76e5b98a2
492e1799315e808ae90dc0c5ae2d3ef1
23039953d167bebaea3af56311323c9a
SHA2-512:
716de4ce3344bb3b1a280de18551c488
bc6009e4a6c0af7fbf187a880be61012
9b379bf4e82c35681e8ff91befd19fd3
81a84eb49b21d779670cd2c556a301dc


Is anyone looking for a lost number?

I finally took the time to stitch my photos into a panograph using Hugin. Hugin automates the whole panograph making process by using external tools to find control points, adjust the images and then stitches them together.

Due to prodding by local MacWarrior Chad Weider I’ve also created a QuickTime VR of the mountains, enjoy.

(Note to self, do not edit posts in Newt’s Cape.)

I just installed a LaTeX in WordPress Plugin, and now have the ability to enter formulas inline in the blog.