Orange Planet

This is old news. Just FYI.

On the Memorial Day weekend, my friend and I attended Fanime and set up a table to sell art. We knew we probably weren’t going to sell much, so we didn’t want to make a whole lot of prints in advance, especially on nice paper and at high quality (Printer ink is supposedly worth it’s weight in gold, and I’m sure photo paper isn’t that much cheaper).

So we decided to drag my HP Deskjet 6980 along and print art on demand. This was a great idea in theory, but the folks at the con decided to charge $300 for access to the power grid. We thought that was just a little bit ridiculous as that amounts to about half of my monthly power bill (and there are now seven people living in my house).

Obviously the right answer to the problem was to bring our power supply in the form of a golf caddy battery. To power the printer off such a device required a 12v DC to 120v AC transformer and the Deskjet’s own 120v AC to 36v DC power brick wired together in series. This isn’t really the most efficient or elegant solution, but based off the 240WHr rating on the battery and the maximum power draw of 36W for the printer, we could have theoretically run the printer for about six hours straight. And that’s really something of a worst-case scenario.

So it turned out to be a pretty workable idea and we actually made close to double my original estimate (though really, it still isn’t much; we did make back the cost of our table, though). Score 0 for Fanime planners, score 1 for DIY. We’ll probably end up doing the same next year…

Oh yeah, Amol was there too. I didn’t see him -___-

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

That’s my new obsession for now. I input random data and see what kinds of things it comes up with. Random statistics, random computational code, random functions, random dates… it’s really amazing. I suppose if you get a PhD when you’re 20 and make a living off of selling Mathematica (which is actually an amazing piece of software), you might just be bold enough to come up with a “search engine” like this. Words fail to express how broken it is, so why don’t you just click on the link and just enjoy the generous information it pukes out?

Warning: Keep out of reach of high schoolers. And college students.

Hmm… I have a test in about fifteen minutes. Maybe it’s not the wisest idea to be starting this blog post…

I’m not quite sure how to start here; the way I see it, it’s about getting an education. A lot of people seem to fret, switch, fret, switch, fret, and switch, but I don’t think it matters where you study, what you study, or how you study; it’s about studying itself and learning how to learn.

That isn’t to say specialization isn’t “necessary”. Specialization is supposedly a defining characteristic in civilization (or so they told me in junior high), and I do believe it is better to do one thing well than to dabble in a wide field of things. One reason why I think GER is crap.

Anyways, choose something and stick with it. That’s what I think. If it ain’t what you really want to do, that’s just too bad. If you really know what you want to do with your life, I’d say you’re way ahead in the rat race. And now I should sit down and meditate before my test.

What a cheesy frikkin’ title (and arguably it’s yet another moan post). Anyway, for the past couple of weeks I have been wondering if Engineering was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Why did I want to do Engineering? What was my inspiration? Was it just the fact that everyone around me had the “Engineering is so cool!” attitude and did I go through (or started cutting a path) because I wanted to be “cool”? To a certain extent, that might be true. When I was growing up, I really wasn’t exposed to many career options - it was mostly always having either an Engineer as a career, or a Doctor. There was a rare business case that was slipped in, but nothing other than that. Linguistics was sparse. The rest was just non existent. And top it off with the fact that I just grew up assuming that being an Engineer was teh shit. Perhaps I really did want to be an Engineer. I loved tinkering with stuff, and fixing them. I daresay I was good at it too. But somewhere along the line, somewhere around my early high shcool years, everything just fell apart. Maybe because it was around then that I started taking any sort of remote interest in movies, music and eventually computers that would serve as the primary tools of distraction. 

Now, I have been wondering if I want to switch majors to the TV/Film industry. Now, I don’t mean I want to act. I want to work with the behind the scenes tools - the really obscure job titles that scroll through the ending credits at the end of a movie or a sitcom. I am not sure what I want to do yet. Something where I can be creative perhaps. There are other hazards too - Firstly my GPA won’t be good enough to request a major change. Secondly, what guarantee is there that I’ll like it after I switch? What guarantee is there that I’ll be good at it? How are the job prospects (I suppose it shouldn’t be that bad since the media is always doing something or the other)? If I wanted to major in Japanese, how am I going to be living off of it (since it seems like it’s a fairly hard profession to live by)? But then I realized that I can be creative in Engineering too, and that I have been sucking becuase I probably didn’t put any thought into the fact that what I’m learning is the alphabet of the language that I will be speaking when I get out of college. If I knew what I was good enough, I can probably create an essay of wonder with my command of the language. So perhaps when I was really thinking that I was being true to my heart, it was just an illusion, and in reality I was probably betraying myself. 

And so I’m starting over for the umpteenth time. >_>

So I was doing my daily trolling on the NBR boards and I came across an interesting thread. Apparently Dell’s releasing something called the Latitude Z, which appears to be akin to an Adamo for the corporate user. At this point, I’m not totally skeptical about this machine’s existence anymore, but information is still hard to find.

I read this elsewhere on the Interwebs…

That’s why I thought I’d give this a try… as there is very little information about this DELL Z series laptop on the Internet, my blog post should attract some considerable audience in the next few days. So, this article is more like a search engine experiment that anything else.

… and I thought it was a great idea, so here you are. A completely uninformative post about this Dell Latitude Z. Try searching for the Z on Google in a day or two and seeing what happens!

At any rate, I’m fairly neutral towards the release of another Dell-branded “luxury notebook”. The Adamo is nice, but what I’m really looking for is a cheap XT2, not some massive, MacBook Pro-like slab of a laptop. Besides, if I was (god forbid) in the market for a similar device, I’d rather have a Thunkpad X301 or an HP Envy 133.

Oh yeah, I’m also going to claim that I’ve seen the first Z-Series machine, and the above is it!

Is there one? My answer would be “no” if I wasn’t introduced to “Art of Electronics” by Horowitz and Hill. It’s probably the only textbook that I’ve ever used in my entire life that has struck a chord with me. For the $70-odd that it costs @ Amazon, it’s well worth the price. It’s interesting that a book that hasn’t been revised since 1989 has garnered such good reviews, and still continues to impress. Compared to the Alexander & Sadiku’s Fundamentals of Electric Circuits, which my professor prescribed, Art of Electronics is off the shiznit. My only regret is not coming across it earlier.

The only reason why I like the textbook is that it aims to explain how circuits are designed and used in the real world. The book emphasizes real world scenarios, and even though it’s only been less than a day since I’ve been using it, I’ve started to understand some things that I never even thought about before. It puts things in a different perspective that seems to be more in-line with circuit analysis, rather than a bunch of formulas, theories and theorems.

Another book that I really liked was University Physics (I forget the author’s name). The fact that they split each problem into “Analysis,” “Solution,” and “Understanding” really helped. And as with any good book, I discovered it only when it’s too late.

If anyone ever reads this post (hah, like that’s gonna happen), do give the Art of Electronics and University Physics a shot. Maybe it’ll help understand the problem as a whole, concepts and all.

… are actually pretty good. I’ve always liked Baked Lays (significantly moreso than regular Lays), but I’ve never tried baked Ruffles until today. I daresay I like them significantly more than regular Ruffles too. Maybe they have Baked Ruffles Barbeque as well?

At any rate, I’ve been playing a game of Transport Tycoon on the side instead of doing more constructive things like working on an illustration I’ve been meaning to do (and to a much lesser extent, longer-term projects). I’ve been playing this silly game on and off for as long as I can remember; probably since I beat all the maps in RollerCoaster Tycoon and its expansion packs back in 2000 or 2001.

The point of the game is pretty straightforward: like every transport simulation game, all you need to do is move shit from point A to point B and make some money while you’re at it. That’s it. But while some games like RailRoad Tycoon (in my opinion) focus more on the financial side of running such an operation, Transport Tycoon focuses on the logistics of moving a ton of trains up and down a limited number of tracks. This is what makes it appealing to me.

Of course, there are trucks and planes and ships, but trains are SRS BSNS.

This game has gained quite a cult following (maybe not really the proper term here) over the past fifteen years; development is still progressing with a third-party patch that significantly enhances game play, and you can download a fair number of third-party vehicle sets as well. I usually play a game every time a major set is released; the current set I’m using was released late last year.

Since this game was made for DOS, it actually has to be emulated in XP and any current NT-based Windows OS. While the game is really quite efficient in DOS, the virtualization of the engine actually significantly degrades performance on a modern system, despite the fact that the game is fourteen years old. On both my E2140 and P8400, I can get significant lag performing some tasks with a game of 150 to 200 trains.

One focus of this patch and these sets has been to make the game more realistic, but realism is really what you want to make of it. With twenty-car trains being the length of a city, you’re obviously never going to have a great deal of realism, but you can try to avoid things like right-angle and fifty-percent gradients. At any rate, I’m always amazed how nice people can make a twenty by forty pixel locomotive look.

So the two pics here are from my current game. It’s 1996, and I’ve got something like 150 trains and a couple 747s. My track isn’t too unrealistic, but I’ve got a bunch of fairly dated engines running around for this time period.  There’s a seventy-year old steam locomotive and a GG1 hauling ass in that second pic.  And it’s a fairly profitable route, too.

Ok, that’s all for this time. Peace out.

Sometime around the 3rd week of March, my Dell XPS m1330’s motherboard died. And I was lucky that it died within 5 days of warranty. I got a “new” mobo (or so the dude said), and all was good in the hood. I was jivin’ on my trip to Japan, and I came back all was swell. Today, fifty three minutes past the fifteenth hour, while I was doing a test run of GoD Games’ Mafia, Sae passed away. With no warranty to fall back on, it will R.I.P.

I will always miss my love.

@}-`-,–

It is no surprise that DRM is bollocks. We all know that. Textbook prices are bollocks too. When you combine them together you get full frontal exposed bollocks.

Incidentally, I had purchased a textbook off of the VitalSource Bookshelf for my statistics class, after much ado. I still don’t know why I threw $101 into the gutter, but I did. I think it was because I wanted to try to study for an exam or something. I’m not too sure, now that I think about it. In anycase, those nice people who made the software conveniently omitted the fact that you can only install the thing on 2 computers (run, rather. You can install it, but it won’t really do anything). But I can download it any number of times on those 2 computers. Hurray!

So yeah, I have 2 computers at home, and I installed and activated the software on 2 computers. So now I can’t use it outside of home. Now that’s convenience. Thanks, VitalSource. Now piss off!

One fine Tuesday morning, Bluetooth SIG said, “Hey guys, what is up? I’d like y’all to meet our 3rd son, Plus HS. He’s Taurus.”

And I want him in a DAP. Let me explain. Almost every backpack these days have a place to put in your iPod/Zune/Sansa Clip (yes, that’s right. Haters.) and have your headphones just poke out and stick in your ear. What if you’re a user like and always ends up putting the DAP in the pocket, thereby defeating the entire purpose of the hole that looks like “Ω.” So, what I want is a DAP with BT 3.0 + HS so that it can stay in that designated compartment. Why BT 3.0? Apparently the power consumption on idle is “remarkably low” so it can be on standby in that pouch until my computer sends a signal asking it to wake up and smell the bytes. This has numerous advantages:

1) Assuming that DAP has the same battery life as a DS Lite, the DAP can stay on for ideally 34-40 hours (the DS Lite’s estimated battery life is about 19 hours, and this DAP is just decoding some audio formats). I’m assuming that it does only the bare essentials (hey Sansa Clip!), and does it supremely well (hey Sansa Clip! x2). I’m also assuming continuous playback.

2) If this has A2DP, I can communicate with it via my phone. That means that it’ll never have to leave my bag - I can start/pause/stop, skip forward, skip backward, etc from my phone. Nifty.

3) It now has enough bandwidth to stream music without taking a hit in noticeable quality. Even current BT headsets do a good job, and this can make it even better. Sans wires is the way to go.

So basically it’s a DAP that just needs to be charged. Everything else can be done wirelessly, tucked away in a corner. Managing music, going through playlists, etc. This is where a lack of screen might be an excuse, although I’ll never ever endorse a DAP that doesn’t have a screen. The idea is just stupid. This also means that we’re getting rid of proprietary headphones. Oh snap!