"If you are not a liberal at age 18, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative by age 30, you have no brain."

Mouthy, arrogant conservatives are just such a fucking joy to work with, wouldn't you agree?

I haven't seen the Sopranos season-ender, but I read a few spoilers today. The acting is fantastic, and I enjoy the drama, but I'm about sick of this deus ex machina BS.

Sounds like the Vinyl Solution, a neat record store in Tuscaloosa, AL, is doomed. There's reportedly a liquidation sale going on. It and Egan's are going to be bulldozed as part of the continuing Disneyfication of the strip.

There is a story mentioning it in the Tuscaloosa News, but I won't link as they have some lame-ass registration policy.

It surprises me the Europeans are so secretive about the Beagle 2's failure [ New Scientist ]

The complete report, which will not be made public, follows a three-month investigation by unnamed space experts from Europe, Russia, and NASA.

Why not make it public?

This does not inspire confidence in the Huygens probe, currently hitching a ride on Cassini. Course the US has had its screwups too. Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander both failed due to overly-agressive schedules, lowballed budgets, and human error similar to Beagle 2.

I like squirrels, but when they're cleaning out your bird feeder almost daily they lose some of their appeal. They hog the feeder and keep the birds away. Some of my friends call them "tree rats," but I'm not willing to go that far. I must pick up some of that cayenne based feed treatment. Reportedly squirrels hate hot pepper, but birds don't mind it.

So far we have two feeders, one seed, one suet. We've seen your typical feeder birds, such as cardinals, titmice, chickadees, and bluejays, but also towhees, woodpeckers, and cowbirds.

I've also been spreading some feed into the leaflitter of the lower yard to benefit the ground feeders. I only recently realized that the seed I'm spreading isn't sterilized. I expect a forest of sunflowers by mid summer.

Sometimes you just mature into concepts. For years I had convinced myself assembly language was beyond my reach. I've done the typical x86 and 6502 assembly computer geeks from the 80s have all seen, but I never really ran with it. Recently I started looking into microcontrollers, which are simple 4 or 8 bit CPUs with embedded RAM and flash memory to hold your program. At first I wanted to get a C or BASIC compiler, because I figured the assembly was just over my head, but after stumbling on some sample PIC assembly and actually understanding what it was doing, my mind began to change. There are only 35 instructions. It can't be that hard to wrap your mind around a vocabulary that small.

In only an hour or so I was able to write some routines to convert an eight bit number to packed BCD. My methods aren't as sophisticated as those CS academics might implement (see Reciprocal Multiplication, A Tutorial for some clever and efficient division routines using only shift and add instructions), but they work as intended.

I shouldn't let psychological barriers stand in my path as often as I do. Too often I'm guilty of giving up by assuming some task is beyond my ability. Note to self: must test limits more.

Friday saw the serial cable blues dispelled. I've been trying to connect this surplus GPS clock to my PC. According to the docs the serial inteface is RS-422. After spending three nights wiring various permutations of null and non-null modem cables with no success I was just about to give up. After dropping by Rad-Shack for some more crimp-on serial pins and d-shell connectors I wired up a 422 loopback plug as a sanity check to make sure the 422 adapter actually worked. Hyperterminal confirmed that indeed the 422 adapter worked.

In complete despair, I made a plain old DB25 male to DB9 female null-modem RS232 cable just to see if that would work. And Lo, the heavens opened up and I was able to communicate with the clock. Whee!

Anyway, you can check the status of the damn thing (updated every 30 minutes) if you want.

The clocks themselves are interesting, and kind of have a cult following.Sprint PCS apparently did some "forklift upgrades" on their cell sites in Florida and dumped hundreds of these things on the surplus market. They used them to time sync their CDMA towers. These clock record their last lattitude longitude, so I was able to determine that mine spent its previous life at a cell tower along Highway 1 in Marathon, Florida.

Why my clock speaks RS232 is a mystery. I checked the motherboard and the popular RS232 modification hadn't been performed on it, so I'm guessing that some were just made RS232 according to SprintPCS's or Quaalcomm's wishes.

So if you need to know what time it is within a few microseconds of accuracy, gimme a call.

The laptop is broken. The power supply puts out 18.5 volts, but despite this this power indicator does not light. I have been directed to take it to Radio Shack for service. Yeah, that inspires confidence.

Actually they just ship it to a service center, but still, taking any broken computer into a Radio Shack where you will be forced to admit you cannot fix it just stings of defeat.

Yay, it turns out my laptop power supply is in fact working, it's just that the connector has a loose wire. I used a VM to check the power at the connector, which was nil. Because I was either going to have to strip the DC cable and resolder to fix it, or get a new PS, I opted to strip the cable and use the VM on the exposed wires.

It was 18.5 volts as expected, and once I cut away the connector sheath I could clearly see the pos lead was broken. Since I lack 31337 soldering sk1llz, I opted to just buy a new supply for $45.

The wallet is the tool to end all tools.

I'm just glad the laptop itself, theoretically, isn't toast.

My federal refund is almost exactly what I owe to the fine state of Georgia. The Feds giveth and the State taketh away.

Over the course of my vacation I’ve done my taxes, renewed my auto tag, got some scheduled maintainence done on the Honda, in addition to some recall work and a patch for the nail hole in my tire. Monday I'm having the thing detailed, since it hasn't had a thorough cleaning in five years. This requires me to clean out my trunk today. Oh the dread. I have this unfortunate tendency to collect old computer hardware. There’s quite a bit of it in that trunk: the remains of a 1969 Wang calculator with transistors the size of dimes, several disk packs (those 1.5’ wide stacks of hard disk platters that fit into washing machine sized drives), full-height 5.25” drives with capacities less than 500MB, and various VME bus boards in nice hard plastic anti-static cases. Hopefully I can convince myself some of it can be thrown away.