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[ Home | Blogs | Events | Robots | Humans | Projects | About | Account ]Name: Jim Brown
Member since: 2001-03-01 04:33:02
Last Login: 2009-06-26 04:45:30
Homepage: http://www.swirlingbrain.net
Notes: Hi. I'm The Swirling Brain. I tinker with robots, work on rolling ball sculptures, and I love to program. I come here to robotics.net since an old DPRG friend of mine runs his site. I've always enjoyed his company.
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I bought a 1TB hard drive this weekend. It was a Segate SATA 7200rpm with 32mb cache. I had $105 of birthday money and guess how much it cost? Yep, $105. I could have probably gotten a better deal on slickdeals.net but I got it Friday and was able to play with it all this weekend. The best thing was, I was able to install it, transfer everything from my old drive and boot up and go all without any grief. It’s really weird that any sort of computer maintenance heart surgery like that would go off without a hitch. I must have done something wrong! That easy going right there was worth the extra money I paid. I figured XP would complain that it was on a different drive but it didn’t and seems to be running happy on the new drive. I’m happy about that!
Anyway, I had a pleasant productive weekend.
Recently, I made a Video on How to make a Rolling Ball Sculpture. I really didn't think I'd sell many of them and neigther did my wife. Shockingly I've already sold 6 of them! woohoo! While making it, my wife sort of make it hard on me to make the video and hasn't really helped me much on it. However, now that it's been selling I guess she sees dollar signs! For me it was really the fun of the whole process, from the vision, to doing, to filming, to video editing, to creating a dvd, to listing on ebay, and eventually selling. For her, it's all about the money. women.
One of the electronics projects I was working on before my hard drive crashed a few months ago was a computer that controlled the elevator for a rolling ball scultpure. It was kind of cool because it had a clock in it where it could be set to automatically drop a ball every hour or so. I had built a pic scheduler rtos and it was working pretty well, and I had done some neato things for it. But, when the hard drive crashed of course I didn't have any backup. Well, my brain swirled one day and I thought, I still have that program in the chip that I burned. I could suck out the chip's brains and then disassemble my code and basically recreate the source. I could then finish the changes I wanted to make to the program and the build the computerized rolling ball sculpture. That would save me tons of work from building the program again from scratch (which I wasn't wanting to do). So, perhaps someday, I'll try to suck the code out. My only dread is that I hope I didn't put a code lock on the chip or I won't be able to suck out the code.
At my job they sort of have left me to my own devices. I'm working on a program that involves ai. It's sort of interesting. Unfortunately, I can't give any details but at least to me it's really cool so you'll just have to take my word for it. :-( Anyway, it's weird that the company hasn't really checked on my progress and sort of has forgotten about me. I'm sort of glad because hopefully when they do check on me again, I'll have something really cool to show. Like many programming jobs, it takes a while before some cool behavior emerges (emergent behavior!). Anyway, I like my employer and it seems like they like me and my work. So, especially with all of the people losing their jobs, I'm just hoping my job holds out too.
I'm really liking the new First Baptist Church in Garland we're going to. I really like our Sunday School Class also. We already have many good friends. Well, the teacher will be out this Sunday so he asked me to cover for him! So for this Easter Sunday I'll get to teach.
This Sunday is also my Birthday. We're sort of short on funds so I told my wife to cool it on spending for my birthday. We'll probably seem Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D at the IMAX for my Birthday going out film. The movies I'd like to see (but are not out yet) are: Terminator Salvation, Star Trek, Transformers, Xmen Origins and Asto Boy and I can't really think of much else. It's weird how the sci-fi and robot stuff has really bubbled up to the top this year.
25 Mar 2009 (updated 25 Mar 2009 at 03:12 UTC) »
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