This should help remove any stereotypes any of you might have that gay people are more sensative or more intelligent.
Okay, I’m sorry, that was way out of line. But hell, it’s my journal, if I’m not allowed to be a asshole here, where am I allowed to be a asshole, eh?
S.
Yes, I know, you all want to know about the soap opera that is my life. Well, today, we’re going to get a little more literal with the soap part than usual, because it’s time for my useless invention of the month.
Here’s the idea. Take your typical bath/shower valve assembly. Now remove it. Replace the two valves with two spring-loaded voice-coil style actuators (i.e. the more current you put into them, the wider they open, when all current is removed, they default closed). Add manual valves to ajust the close-stop (for the old fashoned or for bathing in a power failure]
Now add a microcontroller and DC power supply. [since there’s going to be water around, we don’t really want a AC-operated device. Also, pot everything just to be sure]
Add some buttons, like:
Flow:
OFF
DOWN
UP
MAX
AUTO-FILL
Temp:
UP
DOWN
Preset:
1
2
3
4
SHOWER/BATH
BATH-UNTIL-HOT
Add a optical sensor that tells the widget when the tub is full, so it can automatically turn off.
Now, you can all probably visualize where this is going. You set your flow and temp once, and store it in a preset. Then, in the morning, you just whack that preset button. Whala, a shower that is the perfect temp. Even if someone flushes the toilet during your shower, the computer automatically ajusts to keep the shower temp the same (though the flow rate may massively decrease). With ‘BATH-UNTIL-HOT’ pushed, the unit flows water to the bath spigot until the water is up to your temp, then turns on the shower. No more uncertainty about shower temp in the morning, no more fiddling with valves..
The whole widget could probably be made for about $100 in parts, and be made reliable enough to last 50+ years. [Don’t forget the clamping zener and the MOV on the input to the power supply!]
We did mention that this device will only save you about 10 seconds a day and is more or less totally useless, right?
Thank you, drive through.
S.
SO I’ve seen about the five millionth pop under ad asking if I have hidden porn files on my computer. No, thank you, the porn on my computer is well labelled and stuck in a drawer called ‘porn’ in a logical place on the network where just about anyone who knew me at all could find it.
No, seriously, why would you care if you had hidden porn on your computer? Unless you were running out of disk space, that is..
I can come up with two conclusions.
1) The paranoid sheer conclusion: Bush et al are about to make net porn illegal. The day afterwords, the cops will storm the houses of all suspected of having porn, and bust them.
Hrm. That doesn’t make any sense
2) The christian god has decreed that you’re going to hell if you have hidden porn that you didn’t know about on your computer.
Aside from the fact that I’ve not seen anything in the bible that suggests the christian god could give one shit one way or another over whether you have naked pictures of other people [as long as you don’t covet them ;-)], this does rather sound like his methodology. Has just the right nuttiness level to it.
Life is misery. Any time you get ahead in happiness, look out, the payback’s gonna be a bitch. I mean, it’s rigged this way. Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?
My SO contends that no one will mourn the human race when it’s gone in a puff of greasy smoke, which will be, if all signs and portents are right, in about a year, give or take. [That’s how long it’ll take this whole iraq thing to boil up to nuclear proportions].
My ghost will mourn it.
I so don’t have anything worth saying right now. I’m just writing because it seems more painless to write than not to write. And I’m waiting for the mac+cheese to finish cooking, and I already changed the porch light.
Trick or treat.
it’s hard to rely on my good intentions
when my head’s full of things that i can’t mention
seems i usually get things right
but i can’t understand what i did last night
it’s hard to rely on my own good senses
when i miss so much that requires attention
have to laugh at myself sometimes
and i can see that i’m not blind
there’s little relief
give us reprieve
for all the things i’ve left behind
i’m positive that i’m not blind
i’m not afraid things won’t get better
but it feels like this has gone on forever
you have to cry with your own blue tears
have to laugh with your own good cheer
it’s hard to rely on my good intentions
when my head’s full of things that i can’t mention
seems i usually get things right
but i can’t understand what i did last night
there’s little relief
give us reprieve
imagining the world outside
i’m positive that i’m not blind
i can’t be hard on you
’cause you know i’ve been there too
learned a lot of things from you
but life gives little relief
give us reprieve
and when everyone is cold as ice
i clinch my fists and close my eyes
imagining the world outside
but i can see that i’m not blind
apparently today the liberals are driving msn:
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2072061
S.
[Does anyone have any idea what msn’s bias is? It seems very inconsistant..]
I have somehow crashed my body’s sleep schedule. I keep hoping it will reset, but at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be inclined to.
In other news..
The mainstream media reports the peace rally we attended in Seattle at 5k people. Indymedia reports it at 10k. My estimation was about 8k. It’s hard to tell.. but it’s obvious that a lot of people felt strongly enough about not going to war that they got out of their houses and marched.
One can only hope that there will continue to be more and more feeling.
It was interesting.. at times, I caught a little bit of a PLUR vibe, rave style. Which I guess is not that suprising, since the P stands for peace, and that’s what we were out there talking about.
Well, at least the mainstream media noticed us at all. Maybe when we get a hundred thousand people it’ll be a major news event.
Or maybe not.
I continue to be confused about where I want to be, what I want to do, etc, etc.
*) Call geico, get them to send proof of insurance for Sep 15
*) Finish keyword updates to evparts
*) Do order form upgrades to evparts
*) Find Joe’s paperwork
*) Call colo facility, fax them my paperwork and Joe’s
*) Call dynamic, explain what the holdup is on my IP addr shift, do
IP addr shift for reachmenow
*) Do DNS shift for brenda
*) Update qm to have a browse function
*) Charge scooter
*) Finish NTP install on scott’s servers
*) Install apache/resin on scott’s servers
since everyone else is doing the ‘random facts about me’ section, I thought I’d try and make up my own
*) I was born in Heidelburg, Germany, and grew up on the east coast, in New York and Northern Virginia
*) My favorite places in the world are southern California and Athens, Greece
*) My least favorite place in the world is nothern Virginia
*) I hold a deeper-than-logic conviction that I am not worthwhile. However, I still try to sell myself to the world. This leads to interesting and sometimes amusing contridictions
*) I spend a lot of my time meeting new people online. I have very few RL friends. It’s possible and even likely that I’m not good at meeting people RL – after all, my best conversation starter at a club recently was (to a guy wearing a Atari shirt) ‘8 bit computers rule’. He looked at me *very* strangely.
*) I play three instruments, and attempt to write music, and design and build electric vehicle subsystems.
*) Once I read most of the children’s section of a library in a summer
*) My favorite trance DJ is Paul Van Dyk
*) I have a tendancy to start projects before I’m finished with other ones, but I usually do finish what I start, eventually. Sometimes it can take several years, however.
*) I have been on 4 antidepressents, 2 anti-psychotics, and 1 ADD-‘fixer’ in my life. None of them had effects I liked.
*) My drug of choice is marajuana. I beleive strongly that it should be legalized, but am not exactly sure how it is spelled.
*) In general, my spelling is abysmal
*) I’ve hurt too many people. This is not intentional, and bothers me greatly.
*) I hate losing people, and ask almost everyone who I care about a lot to remember me.
*) I wish I was not human quite often
I probably should take another stab at that list when I’m not quite so depressed, methinks.
S.
How Emotional Are You?
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Strangely, I don’t feel balanced. I don’t know what I feel. I don’t feel like talking to anyone, going anywhere, doing anything, or indeed living.
I’ll get over it.
S.
For months, Greg E. and others have been telling me about the wonders of ‘trillian’, the multi-network IM client. I’ve steadfastly resisted using it, for no apparently good reason..
However, ICQ has been getting buggier and buggier. For a long time, I’ve had to close incoming messages as soon as they come in because if too many of them popped up at once, it’d take ICQ down with it. And more recently, the ‘uh-oh’ has developed a tendancy to do something strange to my sound driver, leaving me without sound. [Just a touch annoying]. Then there’s this whole click on a URL and watch every explorer window on the system crash, one at a time thing..
So finally, after a particularly hairy kaboom [that took about a hour’s work with it] I decided to take the plunge, and installed Trillian.
Wow. Software that works. Not only is trillian more visually appealing, it doesn’t seem to have any tendancy to crash my computer in any way. I can click on links with no fear, leave ten chat windows open, and it hasn’t bollxied up my sound card once.
Cool stuff.