OK, I have a brand spanking new MacBook Pro from work and it’s dying to have stuff stuck on it. I’m calling for sticker donations or trades. If you want to trade, let me know what you have and you’re welcome to pick through my pile of Jinx stickers. Here’s some of the ones that I have: (If you don’t have any to trade and want some of the ones I have, you’re welcome to some too :)

“stop laughing, computers are cool now.”
“u r teh suck!!!!1!1!oneone”
“my team sucks”
“w00t”
“Gamer.”
“hacker.”
“Frag the weak, hurdle the dead.”
“Live in your world, get pwned in mine.”
“Talk Nerdy To Me”
“Music Pirate”
“Your Skill In Reading has improved by 1 point.”
“I Steal Music Off The Internet.”
“Got Root?”
“My Other Sword Is Vorpal”
“I’m L33t. (Ask My Mom If you don’t believe me.)”
“STFU”
“I Read Your Email”
“Robots Need Hugs Too”
“Human (underneath a barcode)”
“I’m not a geek! (I’m a level 12 paladin!)”
“all your base are belong to us”
“Everytime you download music, God Kills a Kitten.”

plus more!

My new cube resident Merlin. He’s an NSFish. (Betta V0.2)

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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