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I declare victory on my project of installing a whole house humidifier i embarked on at 8pm today after finding out they sold them with kits that had all the necessary parts at home depot.

There's a few rough edges still, but it's working and you can feel the air getting more moist. Kickass.

Stovepipe hat

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HEY GUYS HERE'S A POST THAT IS NOT SOME RANDOM BULLSHIT FROM TWITTER

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You know, these constant posts of worthless crap from twitter infesting my friends page as of late is some serious bullshit.

13:23 @randomperson: ya it's great isn't it
12:03 i just shat myself hardcore
93:21 #someotherdong: lolololol ya <3
23:19 dude i love twitter for whatever reason
00:39 man my iphone is awesome i want steve job's kids
02:23 i hate life and my job sucks wwwwwaaaaahhh
34:04 @otherperson: yea i like it in the butt you know other randomperson 
does too. DUDE I CAN MAKE THIS BULLCRAP APPEAR IN FACEBOOK NOW TOO YAY!
03:34 HALLO FACEBOOK I HOOKED UP MY TWITTER TO FB FOR MAX WIN

            Posted by LiveTwitter

That stuff is fucking irritating and worthless. I mean, a lot of shit on livejournal was just shit before, but it's like someone said "take the same worthless shit you'd bitch about on livejournal, and make it fit in 160 characters. Do this several times a day. It's how to be cool on the internet now."

Horseshit. Content or GTFO. You people are part of the reason I only read LJ like once a week now. (I'm also busy and stuff)

On that note, I got an Arduino board and I've been having some fun messing with it. I've made a 300 baud modem that my homeboy Brad and I are working on a demodulator for, and it's working rather well. If you are thinking "dude i know C and i would love to write some embedded shit" but are also thinking "DUDE requiring a $90 dongle to program shit and dealing with resistors and TTL serial is seriously shitty!" and also "fuck basicstamp it's an expensive toy" then Arduino is the board you've been waiting for. All you need is a USB port and random crap to hook to a microcontroller and you're in business. It powers itself on the USB port if you get the right model. The IDE is java and is so-so but the code you write is in fact compiled instead of tokenized like the basicstamp. It's like writing for the AVR but with convenient ways of getting your code on and off the chip. Epic win.

At work I got finished writing this fucking beautiful work of art that downloads files from AT&T's Z/OS MVS mainframe over dialup, does a bunch of comparisons to see if the file is different than the one I downloaded yesterday (see why?!!?!?!) and then try sending it to our intercarrier compensation billing company. If all that works, kick out an email telling everyone it worked. Otherwise, do nothing and let the humans figure out what went wrong. It worked today, the first time I left it unsupervised. Kickass.

I'm also writing an advanced tollfree routing system to build upon some neat features I've seen elsewhere, and give even more flexibility. Woo.

What's up, livejournal?

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Got my arm worked on again. There were two pockets of infection that hadn't worked their way out. They drained them with a scalpel and a syringe, and now I get darvocet and augmentin. Good times.

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240 posts back and I'm giving up. It's starting to look familiar so I'm sure I've caught almost everything. If you were expecting a comment from me somewhere, let me know where.

Let's see, what has happened the last few weeks?

+ Becky bought her mom's car. We're a two car household now!

– I got a bad infection in my arm. I thought it was a bug bite, but the kind folks in the ER told me it was an infection of my hair follicle, leading to cellulitis. Google that term if you want some gross photos. If you want ones that are more representative, I've been tracking the changes with my camera, so if you want 7mp of infected arm goodness, I has it.

I had to be admitted to the hospital, and i spent the night in observation getting IV antibiotics every 6 hours. I took my 10 days of antibiotics afterwards, every 6 hours, faithfully. I run out tomorrow and it's not totally gone yet. I bet they're going to jab me with more needles. 🙁

– Taking vicodin and keflex does bad things to your bowels. Nothing medically relevant, thank God (at least so far, anyway) but that combo has left me in a mild bit of misery in ways that you can imagine if you read the side effects on each one. (See how I'm saving you the really gruesome detail I'd usually make sure to throw in? Consider it your Thanksgiving present!)

+ I finally got a working printer in the house. It's a nice brother laser printer and networked scanner. It was an excellent deal (under $300) and includes native IPv6 support. Very excellent. It sends scanned stuff over FTP to a selectable list of places. It emails me if it runs out of paper. It's awesome.

+ I upgraded the webserver to dual 500GB SATA II drives with 16GB cache from it's 250GB raid with one failed drive. This is of course a huge upgrade and has been made of win. What made it more win was the drives were on sale at Microcenter for $60-70 apiece.

+ An old friend from highschool has caught up with me on facebook. This is also made of win. I lost his email address and contact info in the raid a few years ago.

+ My satellite tracking software I wrote to track the international space station, and adjust my radio to compensate for the doppler shift of an object that's got a ground speed of over 3km/sec. It works!

– The problem is that the ISS wasn't on the air when I tried to call them. Doh! Hope to manage to score a contact with the space station this weekend.
PS: ICom's CI-V serial protocol sucks balls but can be used for this if you tweak things just right. I need to make a version for my kenwood in the car. (My car's ham radio is the same model used on the ISS)

I'm sure I forgot things. I've been busy at work as always, and social events were had, and good times were had. I love you guys!

The personal website of Paul Timmins – Telecommunications expert, father.