inportb

A couple of nights ago, I chanced upon a particularly interesting image. The character appears to be from the Japanese TV anime series Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight!, though for some reason she’s in a box labeled #inportb. So… not to be outdone, I kicked it up a notch.

Erm... yeah.

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Free email providers of old appended advertisements to messages to subsidize their service. Thanks to Google’s email service, these footer ads had largely disappeared. More recently, however, there has been a resurgence of such useless footer messages corresponding to usage of mobile devices. It used to be just Apple fans letting the world know that their messages were sent using their iPod Touches or iPads or Macbook Wheels. Now we have more elaborate footers on not only emails but forum posts as well, “Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk” or even “Sent from my HTC Touch Pro2 on the Now Network from Sprint.”

Signatures were once used to express something personal about the sender or convey a useful notice. Today, abuse seems to be the norm. It’s just an observation. If you actually like these messages, just go right on sending them…

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I guess I smile a lot. Almost everyone whom I met and worked with this month mentioned that I almost always had the hint of a smile on my face, even when I was under a lot of stress. In hindsight, I recall being ridiculed by my elementary school classmates for my positive attitude. They bullied me for it; and even in retaliation, I did not lose my smile. I was victorious, I thought, because they could not make me frown.

My folks say that I’m a simple guy — too much so for my own good. I like to see the best in everyone. And if, God forbid, I had a reason to be upset, I didn’t see the need to actually be upset and compound the problem.

With experience, it would be increasingly difficult to maintain this attitude. I would hate to have to live with anger.

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Well, not really. I started hosting on a VPS when my needs outgrew shared hosting, but I still hosted some of my experiments with 110mb. Since the new administration took over, my 110mb-hosted material mysteriously disappeared. Until today, I had assumed that the whole server was down. I guess my account was misplaced during the transition. At any rate, I won’t be creating another account there, not because I expect this to keep happening, but because of my specific needs. I still recommend 110mb Hosting to beginners for whom shared hosting should be more than enough. And I would continue helping out on the support forum, as long as I’m needed and I have the time.

I’d like to mention that it is partly because of 110mb that I had gained so much experience with Web development, and that I now know so many worthy individuals. Thanks.

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It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but I think it’s time for another cleanup! Recently, I almost wiped the wrong database when switching between blog and bleeding-edge code. Yes, I know I was silly, and I believe the time has come to separate blogging from experimentation.

The blog will continue to be accessible at this address, while the experiments are now to be conducted at Area 51. As projects mature, they may be migrated here or simply redirected, resources permitting. The other homepage is still quite young and boring, but there will be all sorts of goodness.

Thanks for your continued readership!

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It’s today! According to SparkFun,

You can blame it on Chris Anderson’s book Free. After reading his book, I started kicking around the idea of what we can do that’s ‘free’. Sure, we have free bits (open-source hardware designs, available code, etc.), but we don’t have free physical widgets. Now combine that with our love of creating shear havoc (AVC, C&D letter, Portable Rotary Phone), and you get Free Day.Nobody gives away a free physical thing. There’s always a catch. So up front: you have to pay shipping. Other than that, it’s open season.

• $100 max per household
• You pay shipping
• Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
• Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
• Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
• Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed

So… go grab some parts?

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Thanks to my awesome uncle, I now own a Kindle 2. I have updated the firmware and loaded up a couple of PDF’s, and am browsing Amazon’s library of free and public domain content. And ultimatebuster has mastered the art of converting any website’s content to PDF.

full of e-ink win

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Totally unrelated photo of the moment, just because. May the warmth of the flame carry us through the long winter nights of finals preparation?

It is morning and I have two final exams later today back to back… and I’m slightly ill. As a result, I have been taking a lot of time off to think about random things. Today will be a disaster, but I’ll survive. I know that whenever I think of my wonderful friends. Because of you, I feel that I am not alone in the world. Because of you, I feel that I am special. Because of you, I have an audience for my silly exploits. Because of you, I can pour my mind out onto the internets. If you’re reading this, I thank you very much for sharing in my thoughts.

Sometimes I feel that I have not spent as much time with you as I could have. While I am not studying, I am your regular hacker and script monkey, instead of being useful. I might even have offended you at times when I am not feeling my best. And during the past few days I have not been keeping up at all with what’s going on around me. It is my ultimate goal to be useful to society… but how could I, if I could not even help my closest friends? As I partake of this wild life’s journey, there are those that I would not, could not forget. I hope you can forgive my selfishness.

It may sound strange, but I’m going to say this anyway: I love you and I treasure your friendship. Knowing you has made my life meaningful in so many ways, and I have grown so much because of you. I am proud to know you all.

Bark with me if you’re my dawg?

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Early this month I heard about the ECCERobot, or Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot. While standard humanoid robots mimic humans in appearance, ECCE copies the internal structures and mechanisms. The anthropomimetic design incorporates such elements as bones, joints, muscles, and tendons, allowing for the potential for human-like activity. ECCE’s drive system of elastic cables and drill motors may be complicated and inefficient, but it provides insight into our own design.

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Having unpacked much of my stuff at my new house, I found a neglected helium-neon laser. I’m surprised that I still have one of these things, since solid state lasers seem to be all the rage these days. Anyway, the design makes it quite suitable for experimentation. I dusted it off and decided to have some fun with one of my storm windows…

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