Silence Like the Wind Overtakes Me

I've done some things in the last couple of weeks that don't really call for a post of their own so here's a bulleted list.

• Installed custom firmware on my PSP.  I can now play all kinds of oldschool emulators including NES, Atari, and Sega Genesis, as well as some cool homebrew games that are floating around the interweb.
• Improved the Soda Bottle Rocket Launcher.  It's still in the design process but it's a lot of fun to fire off a few two-liters at the end of a cook-out.
• Learned some web design stuff.  This is part of an on going project, or projects I guess.  When I can't sleep I play video games or learn CSS, Java, and Flash.  Dropdown menus were this weeks achievement. 

I guess that's it.  Pretty boring really.  Hopefully I'll have something more interesting to report next time. 

  

In summer I can taste the salt in the sea

 A few weeks ago (I need to be more punctual with my posting) my son and I flew kites.  It sounds so active to say "flew kites" when all we really did was "held string".  He had fun for like five minutes and then I had to figure out how to make it more exciting.  We kept adding more and more string to his Spiderman kite to see how high it would go.  At some point he moved on to the sandbox and I kept adding string for my own amusement.  Kites are pretty boring.

  I tied Spiderman to a chair and started cleaning the garage, checking in every so often.  Like a supervillan caught monologuing I forgot that Spiderman, read: wind, is unpredictable.  Luckily my sidekick The Tree kept Spiderman from getting away.  Wrapping 100 yards of string back onto a spool is quite a bit more boring than watching a kite sail in the clouds. 

I Think It's Going To Be A Long, Long Time

About two weeks ago we had a spontaneous grill-out with my sister-in-law and her three girls.  I was feeling rather productive and a moment of inspiration struck while taking out the recycling.  About 20 minutes later we were launching soda bottle rockets.

My first few attempts worked but not really how I expected.  I took a bike inner tube,  just happened to have a flat one laying around, cut off the stem and wrapped it with a strip of the inner tube to make a cork which I shoved into a 2 liter about half full of water.  The idea, as I understood it, was that you pump air into the bottle until the water starts spraying out the stem.  What happened was I pumped air in until the cork shot out and the bottle flew off randomly.  It was cool, and the kids loved it, but finding the cork was difficult a few times.

Back into the shop I went to get some PVC, I've got a lot laying around, and a larger piece of inner tube.  I took the cork I made earlier and rewrapped it to fit into the PVC.  I also wrapped a piece of inner tube around the pipe to form a seal with the mouth of the bottle.  This worked much better.  The bottle flew straighter and I could aim it a little bit.  The only problem is that the resulting spray completely soaked me.

The next time we work on this I'm going to add a release to control when the bottle launches and a couple bends in the pipe so I don't get soaked.  Maybe fins and a nose cone on the bottle.  And explosives.  Fire makes everything awesomer.

Regress

Six weeks.  Wow.

Well, the synth I was working on is on hold indefinitely.  The oscillators sound awesome but the chips i have for the gates and filters are wrong.  I'll have to come up with some more projects before placing any kind of order.

I've also been trying to learn some more web design type stuff.  

I need to start giving myself deadlines for these things.

But how do I reward myself for meeting goals?

Progress

Lots of soldering to do hopefully tomorrow.

Pop Goes the Vocals

My wife and I have different tastes in music but every once in a while we agree to a ridiculous extent. The Postal Service is one example. So for Valentine's Day I thought I would record myself playing guitar and signing a few songs for her. But after two days and thirty-some takes I realized pretty pop vocals are definitely not my thing. Also, my guitar playing is lacking. As are my recording skills.

Anyway, here's a shot at 'Such Great Heights' I'm not entirely ashamed of.

Thanks to STV for lending me some equipment and slapping me with a "if you're gonna go for it you should at least try to do it right".

All Your Failure Are Belong To Us

I have no iterest in baring my soul to strangers, or close friends, on the internet, so I will attempt to make this short. In the last year I have had far too much time to think. All that thinking has sort of come to a head over the last couple of weeks and is starting to manifest.

This year is the year that I begin to own failure.

I have wasted too much time and energy on things that went nowhere because I would rather browse the web than risk failing, and in doing so I was letting failure own me. So no more unfinished projects or vague attempts at mediocrity.

Failure is no longer something I will fear. If I let the fear of failure stop me from doing the things I want to do than failure owns me. If I try and fail that failure is mine.

I own failure.