I've been wanting to buy a decent dSLR camera for a long time now, and I finally had the money saved up to buy one. I bought a Canon XT 8MB digital SRL Camera as a kit with the EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 lens.

I got it at a fairly decent price off Amazon.com ($460) and also took advantage of an offer for a free neck strap for it. It all showed up Monday and Tuesday and I've been taking a ton of pictures with it since.

A lot of the reviews said to skip the kit, just buy the body and buy a different lens, but the other lens that I would have been interested in as a starter lens would have set me back an additional $330 over the price of just getting the kit. So far I've been really happy with the lens that came with it. I do see some of the limitations of the kit lens, but really, for what I'm doing, it's not that big of a deal.

I think my next couple of purchases for the camera are going to be possibly a flash (the XT actually has one built in, but it only points straight forward and is really close to the lens) and the 50mm f1.4 Canon lens. I was looking at the 50mm f1.8, but a lot of people said it was really flimsy and breaks easily. It's $200 cheaper, but I'm thinking it might be best to save my money and go with the next higher model.

The banner that I added to the top of the page is for a photography workshop that I would actually love to attend, but is a little out of my price range. There is sort of a contest related to the banner, and putting it on my page gives me a chance to attend the workshop for free. I doubt I'll win, but thought it certainly doesn't hurt to put it there.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I think my page has finally grown to a size where I need to start archiving some of the older stories. I'm not using any sort of content management software at the moment, so I'll have to do that by hand. I'll also probably add a photography section for some of the pictures I take to go along with my Projects section (which currently has nothing in it.)

Good news for all of you meat lovers. After much discussion and planning, the second Saturday in April has been declared National Meat Appreciation Day (if anyone contacts me living outside the United States claiming to have celebrated Meat Appreciation Day, we will change the name to "International Meat Appreciation Day.")

For all those interested in the process of how National Meat Appreciation Day originated, please read on.

My friend Matt was telling me about a glorious restaurant he had gone to, and remarked that they also served lunch at a reduced cost. We agreed that neither of us would probably go for lunch unless we had a special day off, like an anniversary or national meat appreciation day. This of course set us off on the quest of determining if there was in fact a meat appreciation day. While we did find a Meat Day celebrated in May, we decided that it just wasn't suitable for our needs, this isn't just about meat, it's about the appreciation of meat. We needed to create this day ourselves.

After having decided to create National Meat Appreciation Day, we needed a day to actually celebrate it on. Our first thought was to celebrate it exactly six months after International Vegetarian Day, but that would put it on April 1, which seemed like a poor choice. After a little more research and though, we decided on the second Saturday of April.

So, on this and every second Saturday in April, we urge you to join together with friends and family and help celebrate National Meat Appreciation Day by eating meat and truly appreciating it.

I never did write down my rant that I had talked about back in May. The short version of it is that I was pissed off because I had been having a conversation with someone and jokingly told them to start an organization to do something, and rather than just laugh it off, they became very insistent that what I was suggesting was impossible. Doing what I suggested is most certainly not impossible, it might be very difficult to accomplish, but it's not impossible. I was going to expound on this, but it's past me now.

I'm a bit frustrated by the concept of the Big Bang. I'm not exactly doubting that the Big Bang happened; I just have a problem with the explanation that everything in the universe started out as a tight, compacted ball, and then suddenly exploded.

My understanding is that when you get enough matter in one place, the gravitational pull becomes so strong that nothing except Hawking radiation can escape. Does this mean that all of the matter/energy that was trapped together at the beginning suddenly converted to Hawking radiation and expanded at a super fast speed? The M-Theory idea of two branes colliding, causing the Big Bang seems like a much better explanation to me.

Updates galore.

I just spent a lot of time updating the layout of the code for this page. The website looks exactly the same, but I've made the code a bit easier to read at a glance. It will take a bit more work each time I make an update, but it's only a few seconds of work that will make viewing and updating my code a lot easier.

My old Jetta is long gone now. The week before Christmas, a woman ran into me while she was going in reverse through an intersection. She had missed her turn, and apparently thought it would be better to put the car in reverse and stomp on the gas than simply go around the block. The road was a bit slippery, and when she ran into me, it caused my car to spin into another car that was parked on the side of the road. All four doors of my car ended up stuck shut, but I eventually managed to kick one of them open. The car was totaled, and so all of my plans for the car were cancelled.

I purchased a '77 (I think) Chevy Caprice as a temporary vehicle until I was able to buy myself something better, then in February I bought a '95 Ford Taurus Sedan.

I put 4 new speakers in the Taurus, replaced the radio and installed my subwoofer. I started out using the old amp from my Fairmont, but it crapped out on me after a week. I've got a new one now, it only outputs about 150 watts, but really, that's plenty for me.

I've got a new job with a consumer electronics company. This job has been working out pretty well so far, and has also allowed me to purchase a 26" HDTV at about half the retail price. The reason that I only went with a 26" TV is that I wanted to keep my entertainment center in my living room, and thought the 26" TV would fit. Unfortunately, it's about a half inch too tall, so I'm going to have to get a bit creative to get it set up the way I want.

My MAME cabinet is still alive and well, just moving very slowly. I recently acquired a 26" standard definition CRT TV with S-Video in, for $25. It was used, but it fits my requirements for the monitor on my cabinet. I've been keeping my arcade games up to date, but the computer that is going to be running the games hasn't been updated since November. Perhaps I will try to get that back up to date tonight.

I had this cactus that I bought way back in '99 or 2000 that had started out really small and had grown quite large over the years. Unfortunately, it got caught outside during the first frost this last winter, and a large part of the plant had died off. I managed to keep a small part of the plant alive after bringing it inside, but it became quite evident that it would never be a good looking plant again, only one of the branches was still alive, and even it was struggling.

I eventually decided to just toss the plant, and recently bought a type of exotic sage. A significant portion of the plant broke off during shipping, and it lost most of its leaves, but after a couple of weeks of nursing it along, it is finally making a comeback.

I have a small rant that I would like to make, but I don't have the time to write the whole thing up right now, and feel that it would make a better post if it were on its own, so I'll try to write it up later.

That's all for now.

Decided to play with the layout of my site a little

I haven't updated in a while, but I've started working on my very own MAME cabinet. MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It allows me to basically set up an arcade machine in my basement capable of playing several different arcade games.

Not having enough money to fully complete my project, I'm doing the parts that will just take time and can be done cheaply or free. What follows is a recount of what I've done so far.

Day 1
I put together a computer from parts I had lying around my house. It has an old Gigabyte motherboard with a 1.2Ghz AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor. I'm using a 2 or 3 year old Nvidia video card, not sure what model it is. I originally had a linksys 10/100 network card in it, but Damn Small Linux didn't recognize it, and not wanting to spend a lot of time trying to get the network card working, I found another network card lying around that was recognized right away and moved onto the next step.

Next I did a hard drive install of Damn Small Linux. It's a nice minimalist version of Linux that I've used in the past, and it uses Debian's package management system. Unfortunately, some of the software it uses made getting all the software I needed installed very difficult. I could have gotten it to work, but felt that I was better off trying a different approach.

Day 2
Having given up on Damn Small Linux I next decided to try Debian Linux, I also had some trouble there, and having found some instructions on installing it on Ubuntu Linux, I decided to install Ubuntu. Finally, after installing a ton of development packages, new hardware drivers and monkeying with some settings I finally got MAME installed under Ubuntu. After getting it working I now know what I could have done on Debian to get it working as well, but since it's working, I'm not going to go back and try it again.

Day 3
The version of MAME I am using is SDLMame . XMame hasn't been updated in a few months, and SDLMame is current. Not wanting to run SDLMame from the command line, I started looking for a suitable front-end. I was somewhat surprised at a lack of good front-ends for mame on Linux, there are so many for windows that I had assumed I would have no trouble finding one for Linux as well. After some searching I finally found one I liked,
Wah!cade . It's sort of a Linux port of Mamewah I believe. For some reason, when running sdlmame from wah!cade it looks for the sdlmame config file in ~/.mame/ but I can live with that.

That's about as far as I currently am. I've also started pricing out the controls that I would like from Happ Controls and designing the actual cabinet. It's probably going to look a bit like an old Joust machine.

That's it for now, I'll update this as I go along, but knowing me I probably won't update it for another 6 or 7 months.

added crappy, paint comic to bottom of page

I had an interesting encounter at the gas station today. I'm pulling in, and this truck pulls in at the same time from a different direction. I think he wanted to pull all the way through, but I was going to the same row of pumps, so we each ended up with our vehicles facing each other. Now, when I first started pulling up to the pump, he wasn't yet pulling into any specific spot. If he had been, I would have chosen a different row.

This whole thing didn't bother me, there's no reason for it to bother me, but apparently it bothered him. He glared at me while I was pumping my gas. All in all, I didn't think much of it, while my gas was pumping I opened my hood and checked my oil level, it was fine, but I saw that I was running low on windshield wash, so I left my hood open and went inside to pay for my gas and grab some windshield wash. While I was inside, I see the guy get back out of his truck (he had finished pumping and had gotten back into his truck and was just sitting there,) and do something near the front of my car, jump back into his truck and race off. I get back out to my car and see that he had poured coffee on the engine of my car.

Now, this wasn't some young kid or anything, this guy had to have been at least 35, old enough not do petty shit like that, and no, it wasn't accidental, there was actually a pattern to how he poured it. What was the coffee supposed to do anyway? He didn't pour it into anything, or even near anything where getting wet would have caused any problems. It was just coffee. Yeah, the engine smelled like coffee for a little bit, but when I started driving again the engine heated up enough to cause all the coffee to evaporate. Really, the coffee isn't even a minor annoyance. I think I'm actually more annoyed by the fact that his petty annoying bullshit action had absolutely no consequences, good or bad. There was no point in it. Even if he did it because he was mad at me, it did nothing. It's as if he did nothing at all. He would have been better off not doing anything at all. It was expended effort out of spite, that accomplished nothing.

The sad fact is, the 5 minutes that I spent writing this was more attention than this guy deserves. I don't believe in petty retaliation, and I don't think that an "eye for an eye" is a good way to live life. All it leads to is pain and misery. However, having said that, I also don't believe in doing any action that actually has no point, no consequences. This guy expended effort, needlessly, to do nothing. While I would have actually been pissed off at him if he had done something like key my car, I would have just been mad at him for doing that, for scratching my car. Now I'm actually upset by the fact that he wasted energy doing nothing. I'm not mad at something that he did, I'm mad because he's the type of person that spends time and effort to do nothing.

I'm not saying that everything you do must have some value, some purpose. I'm perfectly happy if you want to watch TV, lie around and do nothing. But if you're actually going to do something that takes effort, make it have some effect.

Anyway, I'm done with this for now, I've already spent more time on this guy than he warrants.

While waiting for the stereo install kit to arrive I decided to install a couple new rear speakers. I have some really nice Polk 6"x9"x3 speakers, unfortunately, there is no good way to get them into the car. I decided to go speaker shopping today and ran across a really good deal. I got a pair of 6 1/2" Polk speakers that were an open box return for $30. I tried them out when I got home and they sound great. I have no idea why they were returned cause there's nothing wrong with them, the little protective bags they come in weren't even open (they come sealed in plastic bags.) I'm pretty happy with getting speakers that normally run $100 for $30.

The Jetta comes with holes for 4" speakers, so the 6 1/2" speakers don't fit. I started working on modifying the rear dash so they would fit, it took me almost 2 hours to get one hole done. Part of that was just plain not having the right tools to do it quickly, all I have is a cordless Dremel. The other part of it is that I was spending a lot of time trying out the best way of doing it. After getting the first hole done I decided to call it a day, the second hole won't take me as long, but I'm wiped out. No, it's not just the cutting the hole that wore me out, it's everything else that I did today, that just piled on top of it. I probably won't be able to finish it tomorrow either, but that's because I'll be out with my fiancé’s family celebrating Easter.

One thing that is also stopping me from proceeding is that I discovered that the screws that I have to hold the speakers in place are too short. That doesn't surprise me much, I didn't actually buy any new screws so I just tried out what I had on hand, and those were just a bit too short. I'll run out Monday to take care of it.

I also have a subwoofer that I want to put in the car, but I'm holding off on that till I can fix the lock on the trunk. While it's probably not too likely that someone would just walk by and try to open my trunk, I'd rather not put something like that in there until I can actually lock it.

Not that anyone actually reads my website (I've got stats to prove it) but with having mentioned my car so much I'm thinking that I might have to put up a picture or two of it. So um, all you non-existent people, stay tuned for that.

I ran into another snag with the car radio, but I think I've got it straightened out. I guess Volkswagen switched which radio they were installing in the Jetta in August of 1986, my car was built in January of 1986, but upon further examination of the radio that was actually installed in the car, the car has the radio that was put into the cars after August. This actually works out well for me, the install kit would be the same either way, and I can actually use either of the wiring harnesses as there is already a wiring adapter in the car to go from the one radio style to the other, where I luck out is on the antenna. Volkswagen uses an odd connector for the antenna, I couldn't find an adapter for the ones built before August of 1986, but I found one that will convert the post-August connector to the standard Motorolla connector. If I had the antenna connector from the pre-August radio I would have had to solder a new connector onto the antenna wire, which may not have worked well as there is no slack in the wire at all, so I might not have had enough wire left over for it to reach the radio, or I would have had to replace the entire antenna, which would have been a laugh and a half.

On Hack a Day today there was an article about ferrofluid. Ferrofluid is sort of a magnetic liquid, it's actually a bunch of tiny, magnetic particles suspended in a carrier fluid, but done in a way so that the magnetic particles are stable and won't separate from the liquid.

Here is a link to some nice still pictures and some videos of what it looks like
Here is a link with instructions on how to make your own ferrofluid

A quick note on the radio from the Jetta. I was able to finally remove the radio without resorting to removing the dash. If my car had been built one year later it would have been easier to remove. There are four little spring loaded clips that you need to push in to remove the radio, the year after mine was built they went down to two larger, spring loaded clips.

On a different note:

I love free software, and these days it is in abundance. A lot of the software lags behind the commercial software in features and usability, but there are plenty of really nice, free programs available. With all of the great, free programs available, I've always felt like I was missing one fundamental type of program. I've always wanted a good music creation program. Yes, there is Audacity, but that's not a music creation program, that's a music editing program. Over time I've run across programs that looked like they were a good start at a music creation program, but fell desperately short of what I wanted.

Today I was so fortunate to run across a program called Psycle. It went above and beyond everything I had seen in the past, it was beautiful. There was one problem though, it had a very limited selection of "instruments" to choose from, and even though it supported adding instruments via a plug-in system, there wasn't much that I could find.

Luckily, that isn't the end of my exploration. While looking for plug-ins for Psycle I came across some information about another program called Buzz. Buzz was exactly what I wanted, tons of instruments, tons of effects, tons of everything and there is a huge community following it. There is a bit of a learning curve, but well worth it.

Website for Buzz

I recently bought a 1986 Volkswagen Jetta GLI, my old car had developed a cracked head gasket. It was still drivable, but it was definitely on its way out.

I got the Jetta at a steal, $950, but it does have a couple of small problems. The back doors don't open properly, it's got a leaky valve cover gasket, the trunk doesn't lock, and the windshield washer pump didn't work. Even with those problems I got the car for much less than it was worth.

I'd ordered most of the parts needed to fix the small problems, but hadn't yet gotten around to fixing any of them yet. I was taking a look at the radio tonight, trying to figure out how to remove it; I think I'm going to have to remove the dash to do it. I didn't feel like going to the trouble of removing the dash tonight, but I figured, while I was going at it I would replace the windshield washer pump, it works great now.

I still think that my next step is going to be the radio, that or the trunk lock so I can put a subwoofer in there without worrying about it getting stolen.