Birthdays
It seems that October is a particularly popular month for
birthdays. Happy birthday to all of my fellow Advogatoers -
-- criswell,TheCorruptor,
deekayen,dto,ion who share
the month with me :-) I turned 22 yesterday. Time really
flies. It was only yesterday that I was in 7th grade! My
folks had me over for an unofficial birthday dinner, and
cooked up some barbequeued salmon, which was great. The
big official dinner is Friday, and there should be a lot
more friends and family showing up. I just wish Oliver (my
brother) could make it, but he's stationed down with the
Army in Texas, and won't be back until December. My dad
gave me some ties for my birthday, and a free visit to a
financial planner.
Hacking
At a bit of a standstill right now. I'm still in the
process of unpacking everything in my new place. I've been
working more on the configuration manager (PrefMgr) on my
alice car-computing application, however. And trying to
work out how to make the Sphinx speech recognition module
go through esound happily, rather than directly
grabbing /dev/dsp as O_RDONLY. I also made some additions
to mwsynth, my Python app that uses the pronounciation
feature of the Merriam Webster dictionary to synthesize
speech. It's now got an interactive shell interface, and
includes the option to use either male or female speech
(which mostly works, but it seems that MW hasn't gotten
every word spoken by both a male and a female, so
occasionally it deviates).
My neighbour up the street has a working 802.11 node. If I
set up a second node, I think we can get fairly good
coverage for the whole area, since both houses are on a
hill, and have excellent LOS in all directions. Thinking
about using an Orinco OR-1000 that a fellow on the BAWUG
list is offering for sale.
Mechanica
My car is having coolant system problems. There's a leak
somewhere, since both the radiator and coolant well seem to
lose fluid over a 24 hour period. The temp gauge keeps on
spiking, and the water in the coolant well seems to
actually get hot and boil. Time to have it looked at
professionally, I think. Possibly a gasket or a water
pump, both which I'm told are expensive.