Finally got around to creating and posting a library I made for the Arduino and SparkFun SerLCD based LCD screen.

I posted the library and instructions here.

joy.

I’ve been working on an imaging project on the online store for a few months now, and tonight it was released.

Check out the nifty new image gallery. The front end is the tip of the iceberg, since we modified our internal way of managing product images. We’re now shooting as many of our third party products in-house as possible. This will give the site a more consistent look.

Don’t forget to zoom in!

Here’s a great talk(iTunes) from the TED conference about some nifty uses of the Wii controller. I’ve seen some of his work before on YouTube, but I hadn’t seen the head tracking demo, which allows a 2d surface to behave in a 3D manner.

This is going to be the next big thing in gaming, since games started rendering 3D scenes.

Wow this blog is really falling by the wayside. These days I’m doing more of the 2.0 thing with Facebook and Twitter. I’ll try and get those integrated into the blog soon.

I did two things this weekend that I thought I’d never do again.

• I bought a black car
• I bought another VW

Spontaneous doesn’t really fully describe this. Recklessly spontaneous? Sure. That gives me the chest tightening guilt I’m looking for, so I’ll move on.

The BMW, while a very nice car in it’s own right, was falling apart. After it’s first ‘minor’ tuning up, I realized it was no bargain. Plus, the cold, rainy weather that we’ve been having this year revealed the whole HVAC system wasn’t working right. If replacing the shocks costs $500, how much would it cost to tear the dash apart and fix the heating system?

So, Saturday found us at a VW dealership. A few people at work had recently bought VWs, and Apple employees gets ‘preferred partner pricing’. So I was curious, and thought I’d see what the new cars were like. Before I knew it, I was in love, and haggling for a good price.

So, I’m the owner of a black VW EOS. Come down sometime and I’ll take you for a ride.

(Tamara says I can drive it, too)

We’re sorry that we didn’t get Christmas cards sent out this year. We did order a set of cards, but unfortunately the order didn’t arrive. Or perhaps I should say that a box with a big Apple logo did arrive at our doorstep, and someone probably thought it was an iPod.

Next year, I’ll get them delivered to the office…

Well, there have been fewer entries this year than any year in the past. There are a few reasons for this.

First, I haven’t really been doing much. My routine these days consists of going to work or vegging out in front of the television, with a couple of things here and there to keep my mind from completely turning to mush. Really nothing to talk about.

Second, it hasn’t been a very good year, work wise. There was an event around mid year that completely got my back up about working in the US. I guess I’ve been pretty naive about the politics and power structure about where I work, and I finally got a big dose of reality. And now I’m really quite scared, considering any wrong move now could cost me quite a bit.

This has really shut me down, and I do resent it quite a bit. However, sometimes you just have to ride these things out and let them get behind you before things get better. So I’ve been quite paranoid about broadcasting anything for fear of judgement and retribution. I second guess any topic I may want to write about, wondering how it could be used against me in the future. But that feeling is passing and perhaps I’ll be writing more in the new year.

By the way, happy new year.

Felt my first earthquake! 5.6 magnitude just north of San Jose. Only a couple of seconds, but we could feel it roll underneath us and the house creaked.

It’s taken 3 days to get a working copy of Leopard (OS X 10.5) installed on my laptop.  I made the initial mistake of accepting all the default options, instead of opting for the ‘Archive and Install’ method of installing.  This meant my first experience with Leopard was with it’s spinning beach ball, as the finder was attempting to mount disks on the desktop.  Nothing I could do could save it.

I tried re-installing with archive and install, but the beach ball was still there.  I then took an old external disk and installed it there, and everything went fine.  I migrated all of my user info and applications to that disk for safe keeping.  But I wanted to back up my entire disk… just in case. So, I purchased a 750GB external FW800 drive to accomplish the task (plus it’ll make a great backup disk).  

I tried copying the entire internal drive to the external drive.  Click, drag, walk away.  Well, that stalled out before it copied over a single file, so I wasted a few hours there.  Then I tried creating a tarball of the drive.  Type, return, walk away.  That failed at about the 98% mark.

I finally got things copied by individually selecting folders and copying them.  Another 2 hours go by.

Finally, I installed Leopard in the internal disk as a clean install.  I loaded up my user info from the external drive install, and now here I am. 

So, the moral of the story:  If you install a new Operating System, select the option to install it as cleanly as possible. 

The host for this blog is under threat of being burned down.  His house is in San Diego, and there’s a fire a few miles to the east of him.

I really wish him all the best and that the winds die down and spare his house.  Blogs are easy to rebuild, houses aren’t.

UPDATE:

It looks like Joe’s house is out of danger. Two fires threatened and neither caused damage.