25 Oct 2001 rupert   » (Journeyer)

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.

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