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lm  ·  2205 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 14, 2018

Grace passed away last night. Bye, little friend.

lm  ·  2373 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 27, 2017

Hank laid her first egg today!

(It's the top one. Pig laid the other green one today and Gracie the brown one. My other two hens are freeloading jerks!)

lm  ·  2500 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 24, 2017

Our chicks are 6 weeks old tomorrow. Here's them when we first got them:

4 weeks old, discovering the yard for the first time:

Pig (left) is very good at digging:

Sittin':

Everything else in life is kind of blah right now but I like these lil' guys. They've discovered that they can fly high enough to clear the cage walls (~2.5 feet high), so I guess I need to build a lid for their cage now...

lm  ·  2410 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 23, 2017

This Tuesday pubski thing is still throwing me off!

lm  ·  2241 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 7, 2018

School

Work on the textbook progresses inexorably...I'm just about done with the content, but then I have to edit, index, write a glossary, make a website, convert the book to HTML, polish up examples, and figure out details of publishing it. One step at a time, I suppose.

Some friends and I developed a tool called Assigner for managing homework submissions. About 4 or 5 classes now use it!

It's nice to realize that I've managed to effect long-discussed change in a department. (Less nice that it's not my department anymore, and frustrating to realize that it's not the faculty doing it.)

Got a rejection on a conference paper I submitted. I was expecting a rejection, so it wasn't a surprise, but it's still kind of a bummer. One reviewer was very thorough, though, so I think things will be better for it.

Have any of y'all put anything on Arxiv.org? I've got a journal paper that's been stuck in submission since 2015 and I'd really like to be able to drop a preprint somewhere without making IEEE mad at me.

Chickens

Last week Hank got sick and spent the day sitting on the couch with me. She's back to her normal self now, though!

We've trained her to hop up on our arms and eat snacks and she's getting really good at it!

Annie's got a cut on her head; she can't see well, so she might have banged it on something or maybe one of the other birds was bullying her. Either way, she's living inside now until it heals up. She seems to be enjoying her stay so far:

lm  ·  2423 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 9, 2017

Birds

Chicken coop and run is just about done. We moved the birds out there on Saturday and they seem to be enjoying it quite a bit. It's twice the size of the box they were living in in our dining room.

Look at this handsome roo:

Broke out the OA torch and "forged" some brackets for the ramp from the coop to the run out of a bit of rebar. In the process of making these I broke a drill bit, but I was able to re-grind it myself and it still cuts great.

School

My advisor told me to take this week off and I am following her advice and trying not to work on much related to research or teaching or whatnot. Instead I'm trying to wrap up a handful of projects that have sat too long at the almost-done stage.

Ambitious Project

Not being content to merely finish stuff that I've already started, I have begun a new undertaking. Some friends of mine run a colo "business"/hobby and want to offer cheap Raspberry Pi colocation. You can buy "Compute Module" Pis that are pretty much the CPU + RAM + a few capacitors on a PCB that will fit in a DDR2 laptop RAM slot.

I have started drawing up schematics for a backplane that has everything else those compute modules need: USB, Ethernet, power, storage, etc. It'll be quite interesting -- doing Gigabit Ethernet trace layout requires a bit of EE black magic -- but hopefully the end result will be really cool. Right now we're guesstimating that we can fit somewhere around 150-200 Pis in 1U if we can manage to get power and heat to cooperate.

lm  ·  2801 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 27, 2016

I'm getting published! It's not the most applicable conference for me to publish in, but it's the first paper I've gotten from my PhD research, so I'm happy regardless.

lm  ·  2633 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: January 11, 2016

Currently spending a lot of time in the right half of this diagram, so I tried to put some of that anxious energy to use, mostly for nerdy things that probably aren't terribly interesting in general:

- I wrote a program to let you pipe stuff into IRC.

- I wrote two articles on C++ first-class (ish) functions.

- I read Brave New World, since one of my friends gave me it for Christmas. I should have read it a long while ago. One thing that's interesting to notice is what Huxley imagined would be automated and what he imagined would still be done manually (e.g., adding various fluids to bottles and helicopter piloting). Ultimately, though, it feels like Huxley is presenting a false dilemma between hardcore moralism and hardcore hedonism(?), which was somewhat disappointing.

Then, last night my wife swerved to miss someone who blew a stop sign and hit a curb at 35 MPH in the Rabbit. She's fine, but the car ain't. The lower control arm failed where the ball joint bolts to it, and physics took care of finishing off that CV joint and the quarterpanel as well. There's also a new dent in the roof, which says 'bent frame' to me.

Naturally, insurance wants to total it out (seeing as I paid $1400 for it, I don't blame them). I'm getting it towed back to my place; I'm going to fix the mechanicals myself (since it doesn't look like any of the suspension attachment points on the body are damaged) and then see what it'll cost me to get a body shop to straighten out the rest.

I'm just hoping that the tow truck can get it into my basement garage; otherwise I'm going to be laying in some very cold gravel in my barn instead.

I was going to try to get that information theory math explainer written this week but that is probably going to be put on hold until I have more than one functioning car again.

EDIT: Cold gravel it is for me. Fortunately a more thorough investigation of the damage showed it's not much worse than I already thought. No damage to the door, and nothing in the strut tower or underbody appears out of place. The wheel is cracked, but the tire appears OK?

lm  ·  2436 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 26, 2017

I just have to write and grade a final exam and grade a few projects and the summer semester is over! Then I have a few weeks "off" until August 14 where I teach algebra for a week and then start the fall semester.

The chicken coop is nearly done; the oppressive heat has kept me from working on it as much as I'd like to. I think the plan is to put a small computer out there with a couple web cams so people can look at birds ~over the internet~. If any of y'all know anything about using the Raspberry Pi camera interface or streaming video on a low-bandwidth connection, I am all ears.

Would there be any interest in a Shopski on shortening bar piercing jewelry? It's not terribly interesting but there have been a few twists involved because the work is so small.

Here's Bertha napping under my leg:

Lion, being handsome:

Hank, being the sweetest lil bird:

lm  ·  2465 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 28, 2017

Took some pictures of chickens last week! Some even turned out: http://imgur.com/a/eHOXF

Emailed my advisor on Saturday to say that I couldn't keep working at the rate that I was. I'm missing a paper deadline, which I'm not pleased with, but I also feel like a person, so I guess it's working OK. I'm going to try to figure out how to run my life so I can sustainably produce great research and teaching without burning out or neglecting personal responsibilities.

I'm afraid that that attitude is going to mean that I'll look less qualified for faculty jobs. However, if I can't keep up with that level of workload anyway, why would I want a job that expects me to? Hopefully I'll find a job somewhere that fits me OK.