11.23.2004

Hey all. Sorry I haven't updated in a while. A lot is happening, although I feel like not much is going on. Anyway, here is the lowdown on current events:

Heliopolis Project: The documentary is picking up momentum as I now have a tentative deadline for the initial cut. I was also privelidged to attend a lunch and site inspection with many people involved in the construction and operation of the Bracewell Observatory, including Professor Bracewell himself. I shot footage during the inspection, and there is also a still gallery online, although it is automatically generated and admittedly pretty crappy (but the photos themselves are nice).

Bike (The Ralston/101 Overcross Movie): As many of you know, we completed out final cut about a week ago and sumbitted the final product to the city of belmont. The response we recieved was strange- even though this was presented as a contest, they now want us to combine our movie with another person's movie and shoot new footage to merge them together. The way this is being proposed is total bullshit, and I'd like to discuss some alternatives with the city. I talked to Mrs. Chun (the Film & Video teacher) about it today, and she was less than cooperative, to say the least.

My Homepage (EDS v3.0): I had stopped working on this for a time, but I picked it up again today. My recent changes include tidying up the XHTML and optimizing the style sheet for Mozilla Firefox. I also started toying with page icons.

Project Aqua: I've decided to join the Project Aqua team as a dialogue writer. This is a student collaboration to create an RPG in the Java language.

Liquid Strike III: We are hoping to film this week (possibly on thursday or friday, as they are days off).

That sums up the important stuff.
Peace out.

11.05.2004

We were not observing the proper formalities when using the computer system, as demonstrated properly here.
Blinking Little Lights
Tonight was pretty interesting for me and muller, as I fired up my PDP-8/m for the first time. It was given to me in 2001 by my friend Mike Fox, who is also a friend of the family. I never had the chance to use it, but muller has been badgering me to let him use it to aid his conquest of machine code (assembly). I figured what the hell, and before I knew it we were ready to finally turn the old girl on.

The fan inside it must be massive! As it roared to life, I could have sworn it was preparing to take off. My dad had to troubleshoot it for a little bit, but as it turns out we only needed to start it up with all of the toggle switches off. Taped on top of the box was a short test program called a "worm". It was written out in octal (base-8), which is even more low-level than assembly. Robert entered the program in binary (base-2). This took a while because he would have to set the memory address, flip in the instruction set, and then deposit the instructions into the memory address before moving on to the next instruction.

It didn't quite work at first, but after we fiddled with it some more and switched the dial to display the accumulator, there it was! A worm travelling across the readout. It may not sound very exciting, but seeing that was a real accomplishment. Robert later modified the code to create a "christmas lights" effect, and I changed it to look sort of like a marquee.

Tonight I've really gotten to understand the inner concept of a computer. Hopefully I can learn some Assembly along with robert and we can experiment some more on my newly operational system.

11.03.2004

So, Kerry conceded. I guess that's that.

11.02.2004

Viagra for Voters!
So, it looks like the election is gonna be pretty close. There have been thousands of reports from democratic voters in Florida stating that they had trouble selecting their candidate, and that Bush appeared on their confirmation screen instead of kerry. Big fucking surprise there.

There's gonna be a stink about this one, for sure. I hope that in the many elections to come, it won't take a goddamned month for the supreme court to appoint the next president. Hopefully this time round, we'll abolish the electoral college while we're at it.