here’s life

Well, it appears that I have now paid off one of my student loans—I’m about halfway done now!  It is cool that I have a job that allows me to chuck large amounts of cash at getting rid of these financial annoyances.  I could have done it faster, if I had cared enough about it, and less about other things. Now I have more to concentrate on my remaining loans. Or, I could buy a nice car.

In other news, this evening I pumped about 120mA of current through one little infrared LED.  The good news is that it didn’t burn out. The bad news is that my current set up with a piece of glass did not light up satisfactorily when I touched the back of the glass.  I could get a tiny crescent of a glow when I took a digital still of the glass—but that could have been ambient reflecting off my thumbs.  The IR filters I have seem to work pretty good—I just don’t have enough light!  Maybe I should have gotten hundred of the little LED’s, instead of just 16.  Maybe I should just forget the IR thing, and go with visible light—a fluorescent tube or two, and some aluminum foil and tape.

Well, it is that time again: bedtime, and I haven’t eaten supper. I don’t think.  I did put some chicken and potatoes in a crockpot. I should dump in some spices. oooh, maybe some onions if I have them.  I had Chiquadillas(tm) for supper last night. While the idea isn’t mine, the name is original.  It’s like chicken quesadillas, only you use unhatched chicks. Pronounced like chickadee.

So, I am not quite insane yet, but if I take a picture with a digital camera through an IR filter, I get some cool images. Sort of like normal pictures, but pinkish, and trees are bright. Check it out!

In other news, I had a great weekend with Fjord at his parents’, along with Bubbles, Dex and Grey. We cut branches out of locust trees, the type that has all these pokey things, and poison ivy climbing up them. And I got to drive an old Allis-Chalmers D17—that lever is a hi-low shifter, not a hand clutch.
Fjord told us all about his work at Wycliffe this summer. He showed us the program he worked on, and some of it’s cool features he made. It is a well designed program–and even though I don’t know linguistics, it was interesting and helpful. FieldWorks does it’s job like a program should.

Today I spent a good bit of time walking out in the shop. I find that I can find out a lot more by talking to the mechanics, and looking at the parts, than digging through the part numbers on my computer. Really, the two strategies are complementary.

I got a new tire for Cecil yesterday–now I’m not running on a donut anymore, but a tire slightly wider than the others. For better traction, since it is on the tire with out a brake.
I am also looking for a new car. I’m sort of hesitant to replace Cecil—who knows if my next car will actually start everytime. Will it be as totally failure resistant as my current one?

And here are some more pictures—notice how the rainbow shows up moved over, and you can see a second one that you can’t see in the visible light picture.

So, I get back this evening, and my apartment smells like stale tobacco smoke. I’ve had this problem a couple days ago, but then it was just my kitchen, so I figured maybe I had something rotting somewhere. But, this time it was pretty clear. How is it getting in? The hall wasn’t that bad, so it’s not coming in under the door. The windows were closed. My AC was on (which is uncharacturistic). Maybe my house doesn’t need much AC because air/smoke flows from my neighbor’s houses. I don’t know, but it is annoying.

This evening there was a special youth group meeting at church, and they invited the “college” group I am a part of to take part in it. Basically, they were graduating the seniors, and welcoming the new 6th graders into the youth group. We were there because they were handing the seniors over to us–well, after taking out the ones leaving for college in a couple days/weeks, there were only a couple. But it was cool. And afterwards we played Ultimate in the falling darkness.

I am once again realizing that I need to make some changes in my life/environment, because I can—the world is full of options, so there is no reason to live like you are trapped in a particular subworld, where everyone is helpless, and powerlessly struggles to keep insanity at bay, and so their lives become unmanagable. Reminds me of the song:

Love must go both ways
But now the only way was me
So I must leave before I fall
Into your twisted misery.

So, even though all my complaints are subjective and qualitative rather than quantitative, there is such a thing as good vs. not-so-good, even when you can’t really write out when non-perfect becomes unreasonably unsatifactory. In the past, I have figured that problems are just my imagination, or my perspective, unless I could show distinctive, definable reasons that showed it bad against an absolute, not just rating less than 7 on a scale from 3 to 15.

Maybe, I instead should try looking at it from the perspective of the one I am weighing.

Today I had a discussion with a guy at work about following the crowd. It started out with him saying that Toyota was the second largest automaker in the world, so Toyotas must be the best value for the money. It’s the “so many people can’t be wrong, Donkey-Donkey” idea. I tried to explain that often the masses are steered by less stellar ideals than finding the best car. That advertising has a big influence. That just because most people think something is a good idea, doesn’t mean it is—I can’t vouch for their motives and criterion. Couldn’t get through to him. And I couldn’t think of anything that the masses did, that he would think was stupid too. He contended that if you are walking one way, and everyone else is running the other way, you should think about turning around.
Actually he is right, the majority often gets it at least sort of right. Maybe I have these illusions that by staying from the beaten path, I will get non-mediocre results. Maybe I need to not just pretend to be different from the everyone demographic, but actually be different. Although I do have a good start. Oh, well.

This evening I peeled about 5 medium-to-small potatoes, schredded them with a grater, and fried them up with some oil. I figured that I could eat what I had left over for lunch the next day. Some grated cheese topped it off. Then I ate it all. It was good with some spices.

My FTIR project is coming along slowly. I’ve got a piece of glass behind me with a few LED’s stuck to it. The webcam was having trouble picking up the light from them. Maybe once I get the infrared filter the camera will work better. Fjord pretty much has the software done. When I touch the glass and allow the light to excape, the webcam will pick up the spots, and his program will find them, and move the cursor on my screen to the location mapped by my finger. With other light sources I have gotten my cursor to move by moving a light, or bright piece of paper. Mostly we are waiting on me getting this hardware built. I got the idea from these guys. I think I need to adjust the current to the LED’s so they are brighter.

I removed the part of my car that was making the whine/roar. The front tire now has a shimmy, and when I run my hand over it, there is a depression down the middle of the tread in one area. Good thing I’ve got a spare donut.

Well, seems like most people are sleeping at this point in the day/night cycle, so I think I will too.