I'm gonna be in a book!

A bit of a story...

I've been following Hanzi Smatter since it's been around.

At the end of December, Tian (the owner of the site) posted up this notice.

I have a tattoo with an "interesting" back-story (I'm "fish ball soup"), so I contacted the author behind the book project and...

Kip wrote me today to say that I made it in! woohoo!

NEW TOY ALERT!

Okay, I just couldn't wait... I bought meself a Nokia N800:

(click for a larger pic)

Full info here on Nokia's page:
http://www.nokiausa.com/N800

I'd been following the Nokia 770 for quite a while, and sometime in
November word leaked out that this was coming. CompUSA started selling them
a couple of days before their official release and... the rest is history!

It's a gorgeous device. It's just a joy to use.

Lotso babble and more links from ThoughtFix's site:

http://thoughtfix.blogspot.com/

And if you're interested, then CompUSA has them for the $399 suggested
retail, or there's an eBay vendor selling them for less:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170068872331

My Oldest is getting Older

My oldest (22yo) just popped into IM to say that she wanted to chat.

So, I called her...

She said she had two stories to tell me, and the first one helps explain
the second.

{hmm... okay...}

(insert My Girl talking really fast...)
"SoIMetThisBoyAndHesReallyCoolAndHesReallyNiceToMeAndWeveBeenGoingOutFor
AWhileAndIReallyLikeHimAndWereMovingInTogetherAfterSchool!"

(then she slows down but continues with barely taking a breath...)
"And he's so cool that I just got back from getting the new tattoo he
bought me!"

Oh, alright... I'll keep her. :)

Truck news...

Well, I'm going a bit against what I said I would do, but ... it's gonna be
so cool!

A buddy from Vancouver has been working on speed parts for the 3.4L
engines. I'm gonna be The First to run his valves and custom grind
camshaft. This means the engine will inhale deeper and for longer. That
means being able to get more fuel in the cylinder when I want to {insert
foot to the floor here} but no _additional_ consumption during normal driving.

Tapered valves, high duration cams, port & polished...

Kickin'!

Update on the LIFE front

ref: http://midiwall.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-fun.html

I got the STK500 programmer on Friday, and the MIT Life boards shipped on
the 8th. Anthony and I will run them stock at first to see what's up then
start modifying code. Figure on pics and videos to show up at some point.

WOOHOO!

And in other news...

The engine in my truck is being rebuilt. I drive a 96 4Runner with a whole
bunch of mods on it. I burned a valve at 160k, drove it another 3500 miles,
and finally tore it down this weekend. I could get away with just a valve
job, but I plan to drive this thing until it falls out from under me, so
the right thing to do is to just rebuild it.

This is what the inside of "the bad" head looks like. Note the chip missing
from the valve (top right on the leftmost cylinder), and the lack of
porcelain around the plugs in the first two cylinders.
http://midiwall.com/4Runner/pics/20061202_Rebuild_04.jpg

I should have it back in 2-3 weeks.

shhhh... don't tell the boss

There's a new feature in the firmware - you can now remote control a player
via telnet. The display is echoed to the remote user ("\033[4A" "\033[J"
BABY!) and all the front panel keys are mapped.

Kickin'!

More fun...

A buddy here at work and I have a plan for "a few" of these:

http://dropoutdesign.com/life.html

I ordered up 5 of them today as a trial run. I'll have the source code for the firmware a bit later today, and I have the dev environment installed and running.
hee-tee.