The Swirling Brain is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Jim Brown
Member since: 2001-03-01 04:33:02
Last Login: 2010-09-04 12:43:29

Homepage: http://www.rollingballsculpture.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.

Projects

Lead Developer on Peripheral Chip
Lead Developer on 5x7 LED Matrix Driver
Lead Developer on CF Walker

Articles Posted by The Swirling Brain

Robot Rewind - Weird Robot Articles of the Past Year or So 1 Feb 2009 at 06:09 UTC
Citroen's C4 Dancing Robot ad is "Staying Alive!" 19 Oct 2008 at 20:23 UTC
Robo-Q Tomy's Tiny Toy Walking Robots 12 Oct 2008 at 03:34 UTC
$100K Loebner Prize Turing Test This Sunday 11 Oct 2008 at 03:40 UTC
Freaky Looking Robot Girl Repliee R-1 10 Oct 2008 at 02:50 UTC
Terminator Salvation 17 Jul 2008 at 12:20 UTC
Humans Are Smarter than Robots! 15 Jul 2008 at 17:11 UTC
Top Ten Weird yet Cool Robot Stories in the Past Year 9 Jul 2008 at 00:48 UTC
Robotic Jurassic Park - Restless Planet 26 Dec 2007 at 16:46 UTC
T4! Christian Bale will be John Conner 2 Dec 2007 at 12:14 UTC

Complete list of articles by The Swirling Brain

Recent blog entries by The Swirling Brain

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16 Aug 2010 »

Made a new Rolling Ball Sculpture. You can see it on ebay or on my youtube channel (the newest one in the upper right).

31 Jul 2010 »

Potato chip grabbing hand = useless cybernetics!

21 May 2010 »

It's time again for the Great Strides Walk to Cure CF. Please help out if you can.

Last week I worked on upgrading the Missionary Baptist Association of Texas website. It's now on Drupal and I'm pretty happy with how it came out. My hope is that it's now easy enough to update content that Bro. Reed, who doesn't know html or web coding should now be able to update the site. If not, it'll at least be easier on me on his newphew Justin. I think the site looks much better and less dated now.

I worked on playing with Open GL 3d code engine for my Android Phone. I love my android phone. The 3d code still has a problem with image textures. I can't figure it out. Most everything else I want is working, though. When I have time I'll try to figure it out. My phone has Cyanogenmod 5.0.7-Test5 loaded on it. It's a version of Android 2.1 for the MyTouch 3G phone. It's sweet! I really like having version 2.1 over 1.6 of the Android OS. It's much better. Cyanogenmod for 2.1 is just about as fast if not faster than the 1.6 also.

Roger gave me a payment for the yGED program. Thanks Roger. It was very unexpected because he already paid me for that. It was a pleasant surprise!

I've been churning out a Rolling Ball Sculpture about 1 or 2 a month. This last month a sculpture went really cheap. I was disappointed about that. After that though, so far I've had four different people email me asking if I had anything for sale. I don't do commissioned work anymore and and I don't have anything for sale but I'm working on it. Anyway, I'm not sure if they emailed me because they hope to get a sculpture for cheap too or that they really just want a sculpture? Anyway, I'm working on a 19" wall hanging sculpture with at least two tracks. I won't start the bidding at 99 cents, I'll start it for about $150 or so. I guess we'll find out if these would-be bidders are serious or not. ;-)

I'm becoming the Regex King. Wow, my brain hurts. Regexes are probably ok for one liners but when you have to make a regex that's about a paragraph long. It's very painful and I don't think it should be used anymore. Now imagine a regex that's about one or two pages. Yeah. ugg. It's torture. I've learned a lot, though.

I've learned that once you work somewhere at least 3 years that people rely on you probably more than they should. To the point where even on weekends, the middle of the night and on vacations you get the weirdest calls about something that's extremely important and has to be handled right now along with other tasks that also have to be handled right now. Like these calls couldn't wait until 8am? These are tasks they couldn't warn you about a month previous when it wasn't an urgency. Now that it's five minutes from being due and they need something done that will take at least a week to do. And, guess who's the only one they want to do it? Yep, it looks a lot like me? Guess who gets the credit for it not getting done on time? Yep, that person looks a lot like me too. Yep, I've been trying to push back and ask ahead of time if something needs to be done soon and remind them how many days something takes and how much work it is and how I had working late and on evenings like they get to go home on time but I don't. Guess what still happens? I guess I have that "Kick me" type note permanently tattooed to my forehead or something. Yesterday, I was back sitting at my desk trying to figure out how I can get something done right away, after being grilled and handed my tail on a plate for not having something done right away and in the special way they need or want it done, in which another guy and myself are just helping out on this other project because the original guy didn't do his job on time in the first place. So while I'm sitting there trying to figure out how to be more efficient, another team plops down a bunch of work and says that they need it done right away. Now this is already after I have a couple of other tasks on on the backburner and on hold already. So to recap, I have a couple of other tasks on hold that need to be done right away, I'm getting yelled at for not getting something done right away that another guy should have done but didn't and being told I need to step it up, and then while I'm trying to engineer how to handle that and step it up I get interrupted with more work handed to me. OK, so after that I go to talk to the guy about the project that I get stopped in the hallway and asked to be thinking about yet another new project that needs a bunch of work done right away. Like no foolin? Really? I mean, really? No wait, freakin really? Yes, really! So, that's also besides what I'm already doing that in all of my multitude of "spare cycles" I'm supposed to be also now doing a bunch of other stuff? No, like really? Anyway, I got to go because I think I'm due for another meeting to be told that I'm not getting enough done. I wonder why?

14 Apr 2010 (updated 14 Apr 2010 at 17:08 UTC) »

I had my 45th birthday! Sounds old, doesn't it? But I still think I'm mentally young. Probably immature is more the right word. My body is another story, but oh well.

Before my birthday, I got a free Droid phone and a free Sprint 3G/4G USB device from Google! Woohoo! It was because I created an Android app, had enough downloads, and enough stars that they considered me a worthy Android developer! Little do they know, right! My app is a speedometer that uses the GPS and time difference between samples to calculate the current speed. It displays in analog and digital. No big deal, right? But it got me a phone! Woohoo!

I played with the Droid phone and wanted to keep it but it doesn't work with my T-Mobile. Droid is CDMA and meant for Verizon and T-Mobile is GSM. So the simcard don't fit. :-( Boo! I got the wifi going and surfed the net a little. Wow that phone is fast. The screen is bigger. Oh, how I wanted to keep it. Well, since I can't really use it for phone, I feel it's not really enough to keep it just to try developing on it since I already have the other phone for that.

The 4G dongle I got was for Sprint only. That seemed weird that the phone was for Verizon and the dongle for Sprint, but oh well. So I can't really use the phone or the dongle. They were nice gifts though and worth a lot! Thanks Google! Really!

So anyway, I sold the Droid phone and the 4G dongle on ebay. The phone went for $350 and the dongle went for $142. After the hefty ebay and paypal fees I probably ended up with $390 or so.

For my birthday I spent that money on a laptop! That should be coming soon. I figure I can do my android development on it so the gift might still be a nice developer type thing. I got some additional money for my birthday from my family. So I also bought a refurbished Xbox 360 off ebay. So those were my two big birthday presents, a laptop and an xbox 360!

My daughter and I play the old xbox and we love halo 2. We played through the campaign again recently and did it in less than a week. So we really wanted the xbox 360 so we could get halo 3. Oh, we can't wait until we get it!

The refurbished xbox came with halo3 and gears of war. I also bought guitar hero world tour that comes with guitar, drums, and mic. Bethany already said that wasn't the one to get because of the drum layout. Oh well.

At ROSS (discount store) they had a Halo Warthog RC car. Since we like halo so much, Natalie just had to have it. I helped her buy it. We've been wearing it out around the living room the last few days. Now she has it like a trophie displayed on her shelf right next to the my little ponies and littlest petshop pets. How messed up is that? ;-)

For my birthday we went to Denney's and got a free breakfast. Then we went and saw "How to train your dragon" in IMAX experience 3D. It wasn't the huge wraparound IMAX, just the downgraded cheaper imax. The movie was great! We really enjoyed it. I recommend it. We then went to Mr. Gattis which was the first place I ever had a job when I was 15 years old. Then we went to a Video store and bought two xbox 360 games: Bioshock, and Halo Wars. We went to ROSS and bought the Warthog RC for Natalie. Then we went to Chilis and ate with my Parents. It was a really good day!

I can't wait to get all my stuff I have on order. Perhaps we will check out xbox live at some point.

I've been working some more on another android app. I've been trying to figure out the opengl stuff and writing my own graphics engine which is quite a challenge. I Started out writing my own. I got pretty far. I could draw faces, and shapes, and the world, and I was able to get textures on faces, and music going. But there was so much left to do. Then I found someone else had already written a nice graphics engine. I took it and tried to update it to how I wanted it. There's all sorts of quirkly stuff with android's opengl. I think it's mostly because of the limited amount of memory allocated to it really makes it limited. Complex models seem to be right out. Large textures seem to be out, and any asset filename with underscores seems to make it go wacky, so no underscores. You can't load too big an mp3 for music or it'll freak out. Etc, etc. So it looks like I'm limited to really little games. I figure I'll put data up on my website and have the game download assets periodically. That will add to lag but at least it'll give me a little room here and there. Anyway, I've blown a lot of time on that. It's a love/hate to be learning new stuff sometimes. OpenGL is quite a steep challenge too. Anyway, I got the graphics engine doing some stuff now and it's starting to look acceptable so probably now I can try make something. I'm looking forward to it.

11 Feb 2010 »

It's snowing here in Texas! I'm stuck here at work and I wish I could go outside and make a snow dalek!

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