Killer Tofu – Page 21

Hey remember blogs?

Not like blogs today, but ramblings about the incessant nonsense of everyday life. I’m sure this happens, but it has been largely supplanted by major blogs posting about one topic with ads every which-a-way. Well, tonight isn’t about that. No, tonight is about the incessant nonsense of my everyday life. Why? Because I pay $9.99 every month for the privilege of bombarding you with such banal garbage.

To start things off right, I spilled pasta everywhere. Not just somewhere, but everywhere. Why even mention such a trivial non-issue? I might point you to the previous paragraph or title of this post, but no, this serves a higher purpose. This serve to illustrate how my move has been so far. Yes, my move has been spilled pasta. Melodramatic, sure, but apt nonetheless.

If you don’t know, which at this point anyone actually reading this should, I recently up and moved myself to Denver, Colorado. Land of opportunity. Rocky mountain high. Not my favorite place to be right now.

I am writing this post on the floor of my nearly empty apartment. You see, dear heart, the moving company I hired to move my precious, albeit mostly frivolous things, has delayed the reuniting of stuff and man five times now. So much so that I am looking into litigation.

I know this seems incredibly insignificant and first-world-problemy, but its true. I am pretty miserable right now. It’s probably terrible to admit with the opportunities afforded to me, but I miss my friends and family. I’ve been incredibly homesick and I know there is little I can do at this very moment. I never really thought I’d get this way. I’ve been fairly independent my whole life, but somehow I let feelings in over the years, and now those feels are wreaking havoc. I don’t know who bright idea it was to let people actually affect your life in meaningful ways, but I need to write a letter to my congressman/woman.

In a bout of coincidence All of the Sudden I Miss Everyone by Explosions in the Sky is playing.

I know this is a lot of complaining, and there are things in life that are MUCH worse than what is happening to a white 20-something male with a good job who moved somewhere new. I get that. I really do. But right now I’m not enjoying life. It’s a slog, and it can’t be this way.

In the totality of life all this will seems an imperceptible annoyance, but for right now it sucks. It sucks pretty hard.

While I’m writing this I am actually consider not posting it. If you are reading this you will know my decision. The point of this site, at least initially, was to be a true account of my life. For myself, and whomever wanted to peer in. Over the years it has been neutered because of job prospects and the negative effect honesty can have. I want to return to a place that I can actually fulfill that goal. I was far more cavalier in my teenage years, but you get that beat out of you as you mature.

This is some kinda rambling mess isn’t it? In general, when I write it’s hard for me to organize thoughts into a cohesive manner. I am far more of a stream of consciousness devotee, but I hope this wasn’t too disjointed.

I do want to sincerely make an effort of writing in this more, even if it is whiny, immature, nothingness. Part of it is just getting over the fear that what you produce isn’t worthy. The truth is most things are not, you just got to show up and try again. Not exactly poignant, but utilitarian I
guess.

P.S. My glasses broke today. Can someone please cue the Charlie Brown theme please?

I’ve been silent recently about the robot project, because there really wasn’t a lot of showable progress. However, we are now nearing completion, like really, fully complete. We are going to get near or right at what our original goals were which is insane to think about when you realize how much work had to go into it. So, until I put up a final postmortem with all the results, I wanted to post some video showing off some cool stuff so far.

We worked furiously up until the competition, but we knew we’d need a big push to get something not embarrassing to bring to Notre Dame. I knew we’d be in the senior design lab most if not all of the night so I set up a webcam in the corner and capped pictures every 30 seconds. This is the time-lapse of 16 hours compressed to a minute.

Here is a video of the throwing mechanism actually able to throw it to a receiver.

We can modulate the speed of the motors so here is some preliminary tests where we assign a specific speed to each of the buttons of the Xbox 360 controller.

Here is us at the competition. We were super pleased with what we had working and here is a little video showing some throwing tests.

There is a comprehensive video and document forthcoming, with absolutely everything about the project. I want it to be as open and assessable as possible so people can learn from what we did and maybe do it themselves.