Goodbye Winter

Two days left!

:P :P :P

Peter

Assualt

I thought I was safe
My fortress was complete
Free inside my uber keep
Yeah, but you know what? They all say that...

I thought I understood myself
My hardened steel exterior
Any weapon against me is inferior
Yeah, but you know what? They all say that...

Peter

All Purpose Cleaner

So I just mopped the floors with "All Purpose Cleaner (With Ammonia)." Now there is a bold claim. All purpose.

Now I am no doofus. I am sick, which does, admittedly, increase my Normalised Doofus Score (NDS). But don't expect me to be representing any old country at the Olympics in the doofus event.

Okay, so given that I'm a rather poor doofus, I reason that it shouldn't matter to buyers if all purpose cleaner has ammonia or not. Either the ammonia will make the cleaner unsuitable for some kinds of applications, in which case it would be wrong to say it's still all purpose, or all purpose cleaner without ammonia is just as good as all purpose cleaner without ammonia.

Yes, this is all a pointless waste of breath. Or finger tip skin, as the case may be. Oh you should see the serrated edges of my keyboard keys. Ever five words is another ten minutes worth of band-aids on my fingers!

-----------

So my rock and roll sister got to go to a rock concert. :)

Grace and peace,
Peter

A Sleeping Dream

I had to laugh out loud to myself this morning when I remembered this part of my dream and I thought about it a bit. Let me explain:

In the dream I was at a musical composition workshop. I think psychologically it was based on the Nelson Composers' workshop. And it was in part of the workshop where everyone sat in a room and people took turns coming up the front and presenting something or other.

My former digital music lecturer was presenting. He wasn't presenting anything directly musically related though. He had a remote controlled electric toy car thing. I couldn't quite tell if it was a bicycle or what. I think it was kinda a bicycle, but in the dream it didn't have trouble with balance, and it had this little wood shelf below it where the battery rested.

It would drive and when my lecturer would press the go forward button or level, whatever it was, the car thing would shoot forward a little too fast. But he had a lot of fun driving it around and the guys who were organising the conference seemed really interested. I remember in the dream thinking about the sound it made. I was thinking something like "Well, it's sort of musical, because it makes sound."

My lecturer was driving it around and stuff and having a lot of fun. See he had built this thing, so it was totally his baby. Eventually he drove it into an adjacent room and the conference organiser guys followed him.

For some reason I was standing up the front. And the people in the audience were getting bored! They wanted to talk about musical composition and here was this guy with a remote controlled bike! A young woman in the front even said something like "Well, this isn't really music" or something to that effect. I tried to smooth things over by suggesting that the people interested in the remote controlled car thing could keep going and meanwhile someone else could start presenting to the main group.

The funny thing is, I'd never think the musical composition guru people would ever brand something as "not music."

It was so obviously not really musically related, but for some insane reason, my former digital music lecturer had built it and was presenting it like it was a new kind of scale tuning!

Peter

A Waking Dream

So I got new guitar DSP software. So so so sweet. Line6 Gearbox!

Three mad Diezel emulations, excellent pitch shiftifies, distortion pedal emulations and much more that I haven't even explored yet. Tons of amp emulations, include bass amps and all kinds of rad stuff.

The Diezel amp sound is so sick. Like the unknown gluten intolerance days. Just sound, vomit and anger.

I'm still having trouble getting the drivers for the little boxy hardware thing working, but that's peanuts compared to the DSP cheese cake.

On a scale of 1 to Rock and Roll, this goes to 11.

I'm thrilled.

I'll have to write some rad songs that take advantage of my new ranges of guitar sound now. Probably the coolest part will be using multiple instances for individual parts of the processing so I can add in other stuff in between to create extreme sounds that will take over the world.

Hear that?

I'm gonna take over the world. And now I am ready to enact stage 3 of my dastardly plan.

Rock on over and out,
Peter

UHF Amplifier Design Calcs

The math works => me happy.
The math works => me go home early.
The math works => stress decreases.

This is the part of the blog post where I would normally draw a connection between mathematics and human relationships, between Smith charts and getting dates.

But really, I'd rather just rock out and \m/ and \m/_ and all that!

void row_low(uint8_t col){
  if (col < 4) {
    DDRC |= (1 << col);
    PORTC &= ~(1 << col);
  }
  else if (col == 4) {
    DDRA |= 0x10;
    PORTA &= ~(0x10);
  }
}

This is rock and roll,
Peter

Happy

So project inspection is done. Equals happy!

My heavy metal sister is throwing up her rawkfist to the sky and like, awesomeness.

I'm watching The Dark Knight tonight. Should be reasonably awesome.

Peter

Dan Wentz, MDFMK and Nine Inch Nails Collaborate

So dreamed that the GAME03 MIDI music by Dan Wentz from the game Descent II actually had a vocal track embedded in it somehow, and the vocal track was from "Torpedoes" by MDFMK, but in the dream it was a Nine Inch Nails song with Trent Reznor singing!

I had opened up the file in SONAR and I was looking at it and listening to it in amazement.

Yes, the title is sensationalist. It's only in my dreams! :( But wouldn't it be cool!?

The song came about because this space pilot (who was Trent Reznor) was in this big spacecraft that had landed on a hostile world. He was surrounded by a massive robot army (like in Star Wars Episode II) and he was fighting them. Then he jettisoned this huge part of the right side of his craft and it flew into the robots and exploded, destroying some of them. Then he fired off this torpedo-like section of his craft, which he was in, and started firing lasers at the robots. I think this is where the song came in, and I could kinda see Trent Reznor in his craft singing it. At this point, the robots realised the prophecy that this pilot was going to defeat them (even though they had a massive advantage by the numbers and aparent position, since they had him surrounded). So all the robots suddenly left and then Trent Reznor was left in his spacecraft sitting there in the middle of this Calvin and Hobbs-esque desert scene with bits of metallic rubble scattered here and there.

Then mysteriously his torpedo-like craft turned into the front of a huge truck which was red. You know those things that usually carry a big load, and the whole combo has 18 wheels and stuff? It was the cab of one of those, so it did look kinda dumb. And he started driving to the right, going to a depot or something like that. I couldn't quite tell.

Then my mind started thinking: wait, he's not supposed to be in a truck, that's dumb, he's supposed to have this torpedo-escape pod from his spaceship. Things stopped behaving normally in the dream and my mind started rejecting it.

I woke up because it was so cool!

Peter

Personal Helicopter

Okay, so I had this dream that I had a personal helicopter. It was like a bar that I held above my head which went back and had a propeller on the back of it.

I could run and jump up onto the roof of a building. It took some practice and sometimes it was a bit hard to use.

Then I flew high over the city.

Peter

Gotta Keep Typing

Coding is fun but it can be a lot of work. It's just that there aren't as many interruptions as when you're working with hardware. You also have the benefit of testing right away.

Hmmm.

I love it when it works! That's just the biggest buzz ever.

Peter

Choice

Choices can be bad. They have a downside.

If you don't have choice, then you won't get regret. So avoid choice and you avoid regret. Maybe?

Peter

Stack Overrun

Embedded programming is like creating a little world in a chip. It's a world where things work as you dictate. It's a power trip in some ways.

But when you start getting stack overrun it's like the fabric of reality in that world starts tearing at the seams. Things just happen. And insanity, or at least dumb silent stupidity is guaranteed.

It's really a nightmare for every young EE to experience. Fortunately for me, I had a classmate who could point me in the right memory-saving direction.

Imagine that you learned something one day that overwrote your remembering your own name. It would be like this:
"Hi, what's your name?"
"tiary qualification (electronics or software engineering). NV]HI #**S_FE{"
"Huh? You okay?"

For a second I thought I was doomed.

Aaa, but that's the fun of it isn't it? Man over machine.

Peter

Laundry

Jaffas
Guitar picks
Cold rain that doesn't stop for days
Sharpies that are too small
Songs that no one can understand
The water that condenses on windows
Jars
Vaseline
A length of PVC pipe
Love, oh, blessed love
Mechanical pencils that don't have enough lead
Old guitar strings
Bass drum hits on 1, 2, 3 and 4
30 push ups a day

Peter

Exactly

He asked me, "So who are you?"
I said "I don't know."
And what he heard was "I don't know."
But what I meant was "I don't know exactly."

She asked me, "So what makes you come alive?"
I said "I don't know."
And what she heard was "I don't know."
But what I meant was "I don't know exactly."

They asked me "So where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
"In a silver mirror," I said.
And what they heard was "I don't know."
But what I meant was "I don't know exactly."

I asked myself "What's should I do now?"
And I said to myself in the most introspective way:
"Lift your eyes upward, myself. See the heavens and the hills.
They are bigger than me, myself. But I have a friend who is bigger still."
But what I meant was "I don't know exactly."

Peter