So it’s been a weekend of ups and downs for me, it started with a very big down when I found some scum bag has stolen my bike. Friday, intending on taking a ride, I wandered down to the garage (which is supposed to be residents only and is behind an access controlled door) and discovered my bike was not where I left it.
Indeed there was no sign it had ever been there, since I left it chained up to a bike stand rooted in concrete this was a bit of a surprise. I spent a few minutes doing a rather pointless search but more because I was fuming than any expectation of finding the thing. So I’m down one bike. The frame was engraved with a security number which may give me some chance of getting the machine back but still I’m not overly optimistic.
I duly reported it to the people that run this building and filed a report with the JLA in this case represented by the San Jose Police Department. For non emergency stuff like this you can even report it online which I suppose saved me the hassle of a trip to the cop shop. So now I wait and see if the thing shows up and in what condition, and at some point if it doesn’t show up I’ll have to call it quits and buy a new bike. This sort of thing is where crime mostly seems to hit the majority of us some poor minority get the really bad stuff but for the majority it’s an annoyance the loss of some material thing and a load of hassle. It’s happened to me three times now once was when my car was stolen, the second was when someone stuck a screwdriver through my car door, and now this thing with the bike. In each case it’s an annoyance nothing that can’t be fixed but costly and time consuming.
So I was not in a terribly good mood for Saturday, luckily I had something fun booked in the shape of an Arduino course. Well two courses in fact both down at Techshop part 1 where we built an Arduino board and part 2 where we learned to program it and hook it in to all sorts of hardware.
The Arduino for those who haven’t heard of it is an open hardware and software microcontroller platform based on the atmel ATMega micro controller (I believe mine is an atmega 328p) there are many many variants that people have come up with all with slightly different advantages or disadvantages all sharing the same software environment. The board we used was designed by modern devices and plugs in to some breadboard for easy prototyping as well as a little USB board for programming and indeed power from a host machine.
It was a pretty fun course I got to play around with an Arduino drive a load of LED’s and even a little micro servo using the analogue to digital converter on the Arduino to read a potentiometer and drive a servo’s position using that value. All the goodies were part of the course fee and the guy teaching it was pretty helpful. I had a few screwups on the soldering side of things mainly due to not reading the instructions but he helped me rectify them and get a working board. In the software part of the course I was probably the most capable programmer there and I basically did my own thing. The Arduino programming language is a C variant and very easy to pick up it has libraries for controlling servos that pretty much work out of the box as well as steppers and serial stuff.
The teacher said they plan to run some more robotics themed arduino classes in future which sounds like a lot of fun and something I might well sign up for.
Been playing this oldish game called Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. It was a very early source engine game that was released about the same time as Half life 2. It was buggy as hell but had tremendous breadth in it’s options for play style. The studio that made it were shutdown almost immediately after it’s release but some enterprising folks went about fixing and restoring the game. It’s still a lot of fun to play today though requires some black magic to get going and in proper resolutions. The family of vampire you pick greatly affects how you play some have very drastic effects on the game world I’ve picked a malkavian who are bonkers so all my dialog options are half mad poetry. Other classes are hideous to look at so have to hide from people but this gives them great stealth skills. Anyway it’s a nice revisit to a fun game with some rough edges that even the community patchers have barely blunted.
Sunday I went to see Despicable Me which was a lot of fun a good light hearted comedy presented in 3d naturally. I noticed a lot of trailers have an “also available in 2d” on them which I imagine the subtext being “Also available in 2d but only losers see this in anything less than 3 dimensions”.
Anyway I also decided to book in to see a concert the radio station I listen to in the traffic jam that takes me to work is a classic rock station and that coupled with nostalgia had me booking tickets to see 8o’s power house and back to the future legend Huey Lewis and the news. Not sure how that will turn out but the concert is at a winery so I can always just get wasted.
