October 2007

Yes, I carved an Apple logo into a pumpkin. I am that big of a nerd.

Well, I’ve been playing with MacOSX Leopard for just about 48 hours now, and I have to say that the experience has been nothing but excellent. While I won’t say it is as jam-packed with mind-blowing features as they’d like you to think, I will agree that it is defininately a worthwhile upgrade and the best operating system I’ve had the pleasure of using. And that’s saying a lot from a guy who still obsesses over BeOS.

Overall, I’m very happy with the upgrade. More details after the jump.

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This week I finally received my Arduino Starter Pack from Adafruit. The Arduino is an awesome, Open Source, easy to use platform for getting started in embedded programming. It uses the ATMega168 AVR processor, and there are a bunch of great Open Source toolkits for programming and working with the platform. Very fun.

One of the great things about the AdaFruit starter pack is that it comes with the ProtoShield, an easy daughter-board for prototyping. The ProtoShield also comes with two extra LEDs and a spare button you can wire up to use in your projects. They’re great to use as built-in status LEDs or mode buttons.

But there is no documentation anywhere on how to use them. Poking around at the board and looking at the schematic, I eventually figured out that there were just a couple spare holes on the board that you can use to access them. But they don’t lead to any of the onboard headers, so they’re hard to use.

Fortunately I had a left over three-position header from the kit, so I wired it up with jumpers on the underside of the board.

Its ugly, but it works. Now I can just run jumpers to my breadboard to take advantage of them.

Hopefully somebody else will find this useful.

I’ve been building up a good collection of awesome local micro-brews to try out, so I’m going to make a regular feature of my “beer reviews”. Stick with me, since I’m hardly a veteran beer taster, and I’ll be kind of learning as I go.

Deschutes “Hop Trip” Pale Ale is a special-edition brew from their Bond Street series. A “Fresh Hop Pale Ale”, it is brewed with “wet” Willamette Valley hops, freshly picked and added immediately to the boil.

The resulting beer is hoppier than a normal pale ale, and the fresh hop character really shows through in the final brew, yielding a beer with a bit more “guts” than an normal IPA. Those hops are balanced with malty sweet caramel flavors to make a well-rounded, very drinkable beer. The kind of beer that makes me wish I’d bought more than one bottle of it, since the chances of me finding another bottle of this limited-edition brew next time I go back to the store aren’t good.

Overall, I’d give it an 8.5 out of 10 on my still very immature beer rating scale.

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So, I thought I was really bright a few days ago at Fred Meyer, picking up supplies to fix stuff around my apartment. A flapper valve for my running toilet, some gaskets for a dripping faucet, and a can of “Plumb Away” to clear out a slow-running bathroom sink.

Little did I know what I was getting myself into…

Of course I followed the instructions. I filled the sink with water, covered the backup drain with a wet rag, and pushed downwards on the can as if it were a plunger to force my pesky plug out of my plumbing.

And then my world exploded.

I live in an older apartment building. Older as in probably about 60-70 years old. Which means I have about 50-60 years of crud built up in my plumbing. All that crud, with the exception of the crud actually clogging the sink, chose exactly that moment to leave my plumbing. And exit promptly all over my bathroom.

As it seems, the extra large backup drain of my sink also provided an extra large exit for said crud, all of which promptly forced its way out past my carefully placed rag, and all over my bathroom. Covering my sink, my shower, my walls, and even myself. No innocent bystanders were spared.

The results? I was left with:

• A bathroom covered in crap that was older than me
• A sink fully of lemony fresh fizzy water
• A drain that is still completely plugged

And, while wiser for the experience, I’m still $9 poorer, and I still don’t have a completely working sink.