Well Well

We are going to another wedding this weekend, and sure enough I am getting all worked up about it.  By worked up, I mean that I’m not wanting to go again.  I have to go back and remind myself of the previous weddings and how much fun they are…but it doesn’t help much until I actually get there.

At least Kim and Amber will both be there.  That should be plenty of talk-power to keep any type of focus off of me. 

I don’t think we have anything else planned.  I think I’m going to try to build a TV Remote this weekend, as I finally got an IR emitter.  Most of the other parts for the other projects I want to do haven’t arrived.  So since I really want to build something, I’ve decided this is what I would build.

I recommend everyone read this: 

http://www.violentacres.com/archives/59

It’s a blog about how the worst thing to happen to our society is the phrase “The Customer is Always Right.”  It talks about how it has given people permission to treat any customer service representative with less respect than they would a dog.  It also talks about how people that witness these rude people are basically adding to the problem every time they don’t stand up for the people taking the verbal abuse.

Why do we let the sorry people of our society get away with treating others as sub-human?  I’ve certainly been to the point of wanting to yell at a cashier; at Wal-Mart for the past 3 times I’ve gone there.  They have sorry attitudes, and are incredibly rude…but my resolution is to just not go back, not to yell at them.

Another weekend, another blog post.  This weekend was pretty slow.  On Friday we went to Ed’s house and had hamburgers.  I made a delicious apple pie (Kim helped some…by peeling the apples, cutting them up, mixing up the sugar and spices and stuff, putting it all into the pan, putting it in the oven, putting the top on it, and taking it out of the oven…but I did everything else).

The plan was to get on top of our roof to watch the fireworks from Lone Star park after that, but the thought of that was plain terrifying when I got to thinking how clumsy Kimberly and Amber can be.  It turns out for the best anyways…we watched fireworks on TV, and then went to bed, and a little later heard the fireworks at the park going off.  We would have been up on the roof for a very long time waiting.

Saturday, I mowed and replaced a water sprinkler that I ran over.  I must have missed a week mowing or something because it was really long, and really hard (TWSS).

Then Sunday was pretty uneventful as well.  All in all, it was a really long weekend.  The kind that you don’t mind going back to work after.

Oh yeah, Kimberly started a little blog thing.  The address is at http://kimberly.unklan.com/ — this link should appear to the left as well.

Last night I had an awful time trying to get the 12V-24V Radio Shack motor working via a motor controller.  I think I actually fried one of my ICs in the process.  But, I slept on it, and figured that I was just trying to send too much voltage/current through the chips.  So today after work I went to the Shack and bought some higher current transistors.

The good news is that I got the motor to operate correctly and vary its speed accordingly.  This made me start thinking of ways to see how much thrust was being generated by the motor.  In the end I tie-strapped a screwdriver to the motor, and then held it extremely loosely in my hand and turned it on at full speed. 

The bad news is that it didn’t lift the screwdriver.  At this point, I don’t want to buy a hobby motor, much less 4 of them (since they are like $30 for the cheapest one).

I believe I am going to tentatively move on to building robots.  I found a good guide online that will teach ya to build your first simple robot.  You can make it a couple of different ways.  One of them you can make it go to where light is (it has two light sensors on each side of it, and you program it to find which side is brighter and turn towards it until they are equi-bright).  Another one has a range finder and will go until it senses an obstacle, and then turn slightly, and continue.

I also want to start building spy stuff.  Not really because I want to spy on anyone, but because they all seem like the easiest things to build.  I’ve seen a really simple way to build a USB keylogger where you just plug it in to someone’s computer and it presents itself as a keyboard and collects all the typed data.  Then you can open notepad, and type some command that it is watching for, and it will type out everything that was entered.

I wanted to build a universal remote control, but I have since lost interest.  I spent one whole night figuring out how to decode remote control signals.  Once I figured that out, I lost the interest in actually making the remote (and it seems like people have a hard time finding good IR emitters that go more than 10 feet).  I probably will make my robot have an IR sensor though.

And then at some point I probably need to figure out how to use radio waves to transmit information.  I’m sure I can come up with some project for that.