Archive for January, 2009
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
Flu Bugs and Arduino Instructables
In my previous post I mentioned fighting a winter bug. Looks like it’s a flu bug. Great… The good news is that I did get a flu shot and think it has kept it shorter and milder. I hope to be back at work tomorrow. I don’t like taking sick days, and they always leave [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Geekery, Uncategorized by Kevin
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
General Update
Ugh. Winter bug. Trying to fight it off, but it’s slowing me down.
Be that as it may, I’ve been really busy, so I’m getting too far out of date not to post, so here’s a series of bullets:
1) It SNOWED! Yeah. We had (drumroll, please)… TWO inches. Enough to stay home and enjoy it with [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by Kevin
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
Good Luck, Mr. President
The end of the Bush Era. 8 years of America being very un-American. 8 years of mistakes, screw-ups and errors.
In a few minutes the presidency transfers to Barack Obama. President Bush has left him a phenomenal mess to clean up. Good luck, Mr. Obama.
Of course, a country is not made great [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by Kevin
Monday, January 12th, 2009
Arduino Test Project Success
Tonight (after a frustating couple of days fighting a bug and then a back injury) I met with a little success: my first Arduino test project!
I’ve been following the Arduino tutorials of Lady Ada, so I decided to modify the test program provided with the dev kit as well as the circuit. It’s not much, [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Kevin
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
Homework Helper
Who would want to have to do their math without a little help? Hmmm?
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by Kevin
Monday, January 5th, 2009
It Came!
My Arduino…
Before long I’ll be making myself into Iron Man!
OK — in case you didn’t know, the Arduino board allows for a variety of analog and digital inputs and outputs and features a programmable controller to act upon the signals it receives. The chip is programmable via a built-in USB port with a FREE programming [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Geekery by Kevin
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
CFL’s: Sylvania vs. Bright Effects
My reading lamp in our living room has a 3-way CFL bulb in it, but it recently died. Since CFL’s are still just catching on in spite of the fact that they work great and save a fortune in electricity, I still find that selection can be limited. The bulb I had in the lamp [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by Kevin
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
100+ Weeks of Living with a Spending Plan
Wow. According to our records we’ve now been following a weekly spending plan for over 100 weeks.
Today we reviewed 2008 and set up our 2009 budget. It’s truly astounding just how much you can accomplish just one step and one week at a time — and how easy it can become once you [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Kevin
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
Building my Toolkit
Over the past few years my toolkit for electronics projects has gone way downhill. Now that I’m doing more projects again I realized just how tough it is to do anything with a dilapidated kit. I’ve started the long process of bringing my toolset back up to snuff. As I wrote a few days back, [...]
