Tong Family Blog: Haiku for Windows – I saw these years ago and they cracked me up then. May be apocryphal but still hilarious. My favorite:

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Tonight’s Halloween lesson. If you apply 60 PSI to a steel cylinder with a cross section of ~7 square inches, with the intent of opening and closing a coffin; and if you build the coffin out of cheap-ass plywood with wood glue and light screws and with some soft pine fittings to anchor the cylinder at either end, what happens? Well basically your coffin explodes.

Tonight’s excercise was coffin plan B – reconstruct coffin, have the pneumatic cylinder push off ground at one end and against the coffin lid at the other end, allowing that end to float freely against the lid.

Oh this was on top of my lesson sunday night which was “What happens if you apply 120v AC to a 24v DC solenoid valve?” Well the solenoid works for a little while…then it magically isn’t a solenoid any more. Good thing my solenoid valves came in a gang package of 7 – two to burn out, one to break a fitting in, leaving 4 that actually work!

Via John Lam, a paper from Rob Pike at Bell Labs (PDF).

Great site with fire status – Incident Control. Talking to L – athletic activities canceled; a fine ash falling like snow; fine ash in all the rooms; everyone issued SARS masks. Crazy.

Tried to fire up all my halloween props last night. Lots of setup errors – the lightning strobe fired when i turned on my tombstone uplights; the tombstone uplights lit when I tried to fire the doghouse fog machine; the doghouse fog machine didn’t ever fire.

After much head scratching I determined that I had some bit errors in the DIP switches controlling DMX settings on the various devices. The doghouse address was off by 2 suggesting that the 2nd switch is shorted, and i never could get the strobe to respond to any programmed address so i turned all the switches off and it responds to its default address, 1. Not surprising that the gear is suffering from 4 years of wet fall weather here. I may need to replace a few items next year.

As of this moment tho, all lighting and effects are functioning – tombstone uplights; haunted tree; several banks of lightning effect lights and strobes; my four fog systems; and my two solenoids for animating my casket.

Also did a lot of pneumatic debugging today. My exploding cauldron is working nicely; my coffin animation is working. I had to take down my air cannon tho – it was WAY too powerful for my intended effect, I would have been driving everyone out of the yard. I need to rethink its use for next year.

Kim Mathers ordered to wear electronic tether; missed court date on drug charges

Remember, no decision is still a decision – wow do I see this one every day. And this post on Passion as a competitive advantage – great guidance for organizations large and small.

I’m a bit delayed in testing all my setup since we had 5” of rain in one day on Monday. Yesterday was a lot clearer tho and I tested my whole yard fog system for the first time this season. Normal amount of leaks, got those all fixed, and it worked great! Filled my yard, the street, and the neighbor’s yard. Cars stopping, neighbor came over to chat, definitely this is always a highlight of our haunting. With blue filters put on all our yard lights, this fog alone creates a very eerie feeling.

Broadband Home Report: Home Networking Realities

Been very busy with my pneumatic cylinders, solenoids, compressors, and the control electronics for all the above. finally this AM i got my coffin to open under computer control! happy but tired.

Some things I learned/relearned along the way:

• Assembling pneumatic circuits and electrical circuits is NOT like building a spreadsheet in Excel. You can’t just start whacking parts together. You actually have to pay attention to load requirements, total system capacity, etc. And connector types! If you just try to whack things together, prepare yourself for lots of wasted parts and lots of unnecessary trips to various suppliers. Planning is essential.
• Don’t try to finesse pneumatic and electrical loads – use bigger components so that you don’t have to worry about whether you met the amperage requirement or not. Better to have 5x oversupply than to come up 15% short.
• KISS. When you have multiple solutions available, use the simple one. It may be attractive (and more elegant) to figure out how to build an electrical circuit that decodes DMX512 signals, converts them to 10V analog signals with sufficient amperage to control a solenoid. But it is a lot easier just to hook the solenoid up to AC and to switch the AC on and off under computer control, there are many widely available solutions to turn AC on and off.

Anyway my coffin is reliably opening and closing in a scary erratic way, should be fun on Halloween night.

I love my new Siemens SL56. After screwing around with camera phones for a while and being unhappy with them (because they take crappy pictures, it is hard to do anything useful with the pictures, and the extra functionality just gums up the interface of the phone), I dropped back to a device that just tries to be a good phone. And this is a good phone – the user interface is the best I have used for a while. Easy assignment of speed dial numbers; speed dial can work for phone calls or websites; one button keyboard lock; good functionality even when closed. And fits anywhere. I don’t find the small keyboard to be a problem. Cnet review, Howard Chui review, user reviews up on PhoneScoop.

Not going to be posting much here. heads down on halloween. struggling last night with interfacing pneumatic valves to my dmx control system. tried a gilderfluke part to convert dmx input to analog output but it seems quite finicky about dmx input. Looking at maybe using a Dove Systems MTX-DE8 8 Channel DMX to Analog Decoder which is maybe where I should have started in the first place, since I have a lot of Dove dimmers and they have been rock solid for me. The good folks at PNTA are helping me sort it all out – great folks for gear here in town.

Seven New Grand Challenges for Computer Science

Wi-Fi Networking News: More Wi-Fi for RVers – well this is exciting news.

At the risk of offending RVers: What do U-of-Michigan grads and tornados have in common?

Sooner or later, they both end up in a trailer park.