Never been one to let the carrier drop

Eureka. Well, okay, so that’s a little bit of overkill, but I’m feeling pretty good about today’s mk3 progress. Collisions work. Timeouts work. Transmission and reception work.

Yes, I’m building the seven layer model, one layer at a time. I’m feeling pretty damn guruish. I’ve made it past layer one [the hardware] and layer two [MAC, etc]. Let’s see if I can survive layer 3 [line protocol, though OSI calls it something else. I swear OSI is the most confusing system I’ve ever seen – there are _much_ better ways to describe what happens on a network than they use]

Anyway, today was a very good day on the bench.. found a few potential glitches in the network circuit, made them be unglitched [I had too large a bleed resistor on the tank cap, and needed a resistor before the diode as well as the one after it – the new schematic is at evtech.org

Listening to Southern Cross [Crosby, Stills, Nash, Et Al, but I’m listening to Jimmy Buffet do it live. May the powers that be bless peer-to-peer, because it is here and it is NOT going away.

[Notice to the powers that be: Try hard enough to shut us down and we will build our own internet out of microwave links. And don’t doubt me, because I’ll be the first to publish designs. Freedom is coming and you can’t stop it, so better get ready!]

[Notice to those who think of downloading from Grokster as ‘stealing’: We will pay the artists what the labels pay the artists now. It will work out. We’re simply voting that we don’t like music labels, that’s all.. ]

[look, I want to be a professional musician and I _love_ Grokster/Napster/et al. Finally, we can transmit for free what we want the world to hear.]

I need more time. I have so many things that need built, but limited finances before I must find a job. I’ve still got a few months of ‘hang time’, though. And there’s always the hope that the control board for the PFC-20 will do well.

Listening to George Michael’s ‘Freedom’. Great song.

Really hope Dave comes over again. Must put basement back togeather. Must also get more sleep. Lack of sleep = bad idea. But there’s so much to do.

Well, a lot of things on my mind but I doubt if many of them will make it out to paper. I guess this is my first journal entry – so I ought to try to be a little bit interesting. But I probebly won’t be..

Watched Moulin Rouge tonight. Wonderful movie. The juxtiposition of modern songs into the 19th century whorehouse and theatre never failed to get a laugh. Such a bright, happy movie, but so tragic a ending.

It was definately a kindness for the writers to warn us ahead of time that the heroine was going to die. Although it still rather did yank one’s emotions around. Very Le Misish of the author. What is it with the french and sad endings?

Still, I like it when hollywood throws us a sad ending from time to time. Makes you appriciate the happy ones more.

The mk3 project continues to roll along – finally got a entire packet to spray out – then promptly broke things again by re-enabling timeout0. Shit.

[I’m thinking that maybe the blanking packet isn’t resetting the timer. Or maybe none of the packets are resetting the timer. But I’m also thinking that right now I’m so tired I don’t care.

The collision detection code definately works. [It works so well it keeps detecting collisions when there aren’t any. Well, okay, so this is mostly my fault]

I have this cryptic message on my whiteboard – ‘Surface charge after light tap w/ reg = diffusion!’. Something I wrote while I was rather under the influence, I’m afraid, so it may take me a while to figure out exactly what I was getting at. But I’m sure it was brilliant – or something..

Still intruiged by Farnsworth’s work on fusion. Need to get around to doing more research on this, but Farnsworth made [no joke] a small fusion reactor in a vac tube. [see fusor.net]. Of course, he never achived overunity, and many have said overunity isn’t possible – but it is clear from the hundreds of people working on it that you can in fact make your own fusion reactor in your backyard. Now tell me _that’s_ not a mad scientist project.

I have this funny vision of firing a fusor with high frequency high voltage AC [50kV @ 10khz or something like that] and setting up some kind of resonant reaction. But obviously, more research needed. So what else is new.

Bush continues to find new and exotic ways to annoy me. Some day we will have a president I can live with .. but don’t hold your breath.

I’d really like to see a female take the reins for a while, just to see how one would do – thus far, in 200 years we’ve had 0 female presidents. It’s not that I’ve got anything against men, but frankly, not that many of the male presidents we’ve had have done a very good job.

I do enjoy watching people’s reactions when I tell them I’m on Osama’s side. [Not that I really am, of course – killing that many innocent people is deplorable, and the guy’s got a lot of other undesirable attributes – but, really, it appears that the only way to get the US’s attention is by knocking down a building or two. Actually, erase and correct, apparently even knocking down a building or two isn’t enough to get our attention. Else we would have learned something from the Unibomber – or at the very least, learned something from this latest debacle]

One does have to ask why we didn’t blow up Utah.

Seriously, this whole war on terrorism makes me just _sick_. There was a ad on the Oscars ‘If you buy illegal drugs, you helped fund terrorism’. No, if you pay taxes you help fund terrorism. Remember who trained Osama?

[For those of you who haven’t yet checked out bob harris’s commentary on this whole debacle, there’s a link to it off my homepage, go, read, be enlightened]

Okay, moving onward.. the electric vehicle continues to do it’s thing – it’s kind of funny, it’s getting to where I just expect that when I get in it, it will take me wherever I’m going. So far [knock on wood] it hasn’t broken down once. But I do need to do a bunch of little things on it – not the least of which is replacing the springs.

A friend came over the other day and jammed with me.. ahh, that felt good. Been entirely too long. Hopefully he’ll drop by again later this month and we’ll do a little recording, lay a few tracks down and commit them to mp3. Good stuff.

I guess that’s about all I have to say for now, I despritely need sleep and I don’t think I could say anything interesting or cool if my life depended on it – just not a interesting or cool guy. 😉

hasta.