This week.

Posted on by kylar

Some weeks seem to fly by, and some drag. This is one where it feels like today should be saturday. I have that otherworldly feeling like I’m at work on a weekend and time is dragging by.

Saturday I played hockey, and had quite a game.. scored the only goal, got ejected (along with 3 others), our team totaled 4 ejections, 3 misconduct penalties and a suspension, over 40 penalty minutes, and it all happened with 4 seconds left.

== LATER ==
I started writing this a couple days ago and it’s been sitting open in my browser… and it’s driving me nuts. Every day is dragging and dragging.

Gaak!

Surreality

Posted on by kylar

So if someone is delusional or something, do they spend their lives wandering through surreality? is that a word? Damn, I hope so.

Anyways, I had two really surreal experiences this weekend:

About 3 weeks ago I had gone in with Kelly and the fam to get our Passports, but we couldn’t find my birth cert, proving once again, that I was a man without a country. So they put my application on hold. Anyways, while moving stuff around this weekend, we found it, and I went in on monday to get mine finished. Afterwards, I was leaving the office and I was struck by a really spacey feeling, and a voice in the back of my head, saying something like this:

“Why do you need a PASSPORT? That’s for GROWN-UPS! You’re never going anywhere! And if you do, your PARENTS will take you! You’re acting awfully GROWN UP! You’re just a KID! And you’re acting like an ADULT! In about 2 minutes all those adults are going to point at you and someone is going to get you in TROUBLE! You better get on your bike and ride home!”

And the second time was just this morning – I was walking over to Caffe Mac for lunch, and as I came out of IL6 into the quad, I was suddenly struck by ‘fan-boy’ type moment.. like “OMG! This is Apple! And you’re walking around! Where the Mac comes from! Someone’s going to catch you, and you’re gonna get in TROUBLE!”

Then I realized that I *actually* worked there.

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COMMENT
AUTHOR: lani [Visitor]
URL: http://www.myspace.com/kahealanim
DATE: 07/11/2006 01:31:16 PM
you guys are ridiculous. I just don’t see what the fuss is about all this mac stuff. PC’s are soooo much better. Mine only crashed once yesterday! Haha!
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COMMENT
AUTHOR: Kevin [Visitor]
DATE: 07/05/2006 02:51:48 PM
Just to add to the whole surrealness of that ‘fan-boy’ moment, the building you walked through, IL6 is where most of the Mac hardware guys work. So maybe you were picking up on some sort of “this is where a Mac begins its life,” vibe in that building.
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Subliminal..

Posted on by kylar
  1. That :: This
  2. Fishbowl :: Two Lost Souls
  3. Church :: Change is… Good?
  4. All about :: Me
  5. Fist :: Of Death
  6. Tagline :: Coming, Summer 2006
  7. Agree :: to Disagree
  8. Leak :: Air
  9. Jessica :: Simpson (Gawd, the media has infiltrated my life)
  10. Superman :: Sucked

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*Real* engineering.

Posted on by kylar

OK – for all you people out there who do software and consider yourselves ‘engineers’ (and this includes me here) – you’re all frauds. Some day real soon someone is going to realize what a huge prank we’ve pulled on the whole industry and our bosses’ bosses’ boss is going to fire the whole department, screeching “I CAN GET AN INTERN TO DO WHAT THE WHOLE DEPARTMENT DOES!”. And He’ll be right. I’m not sure how we managed to get people to believe that software is ‘real’ engineering – but let me tell you – the jig is up!

Now people who do EE and Hardware stuff – that’s REAL engineering. Here’s my ‘hardware’ story for the week.

Tuesday night my wife goes out with her friends to the movies. I put the kids to bed and decide to watch a little TV – but, Oh No. She has Tivo recording Gilmore Girls. That’s shot. Then I start thinking about some of the ‘someday’ projects that I have percolating and figure I can donate a couple hours to one or more. I look up and see the arcade game in my living room and think “Yeah! The MAME!” so I get on the ball. I decide to take apart an old PS/2 keyboard and work out the keymappings on the controller so I can hook it up to the control panel (Joysticks, etc). I take it apart and realize that it’s 2 sheets of plastic (Mylar?) with varying webs of stuff that attach to the controller card and that the mask of two terminals shorts two leads to the controller card, making a key press. The controller card has 28 leads, the first 8 to one sheet of mylar, the last 20 to the second. so I write a little list of keys on a piece of paper, number the first 8 leads 0-7, and the second 20 leads A-T and start trying to trace the intersections. An hour later I’ve done maybe 3. I head out to the garage and boot up a linux box, plug in the controller card to the PS/2 port and start shorting leads on the card with a piece of wire while in gnotepad to see what they produce. in 45 minutes I’ve mapped about 45 keys, well more than the 20 I need (4 per joystick x2, 4 buttons per joystick (x2), 1p, 2p, coin-1, coin-2) and consider myself done. Now I need to go to radio shack and get some electronics stuff to wire it all up.

For once, I felt like a ‘real’ engineer.

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COMMENT
AUTHOR: Jason [Visitor]
DATE: 06/29/2006 02:23:28 PM
Dude! Seriously, don’t take apart your Neo Geo. You can get empty arcade machine casings on Craigslist for like $20-$30. Plus, you are probably better off swiping a cheap monitor at Goodwill and popping it into the machine since 1. its replaceable and 2. it can be plugged into a normal computer without wicked rewiring.
If you ever wan’t to get rid of the Neo Geo I’ll take it off your hands.
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