Some of you may have not heard of The Mysterious Speck, but as you can see, it is coming along nicely at the 12 week mark.

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We recently ran across a new Arcade Cabinet on Craigslist. A Nintendo PlayChoice 10! It's in fairly good condition, I had to rebuild parts of the base, but that was just an hour job. The upper monitor needs some tweaking, since you can see the flyback still, and the joysticks are really loose. But, on the plus side, it has lots of the classics! Super Mario Brothers 3 Super Mario Brothers Mario Brothers Metroid Contra Mike Tyson's Punch-out Duck Hunt Tennis Gradius Excite Bike

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So, Michelle and I have decided to try a new system for losing weight. It's a magical system, and I've been reliably losing weight for the last 5 days (we started last Saturday) Previously, I was only able to keep a downward trend for about 3 days.

What is this magical weight loss program? Do I have to take pills? Will I be hungry all the time? Does it involve the sacrifice of chickens? No my friend, it's quite simple. Click Read More, and you will see the simplicity of this system.

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Michelle and I built some pegboards for Michelle to hang stuff on in the closet. Here you can see her gluing pegs into the boards.

And Here's the final boards painted and installed on the wall.

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I built a new workbench, to replace the small 1ft x 4ft one I had that just didn't work. This one is built from 2x4s, and only took about 4-5 hours to build. It's a nice 2.5ft X 8ft workbench, with a lower shelf!

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Michelle and I bought a house!

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While in Chihuahua I had Tacos El Pastor, which was really good. So the other night I made something with some ideas I got from that dish. The only real carry over is the size of the taco, the pineapple, and the parsley.

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Well, here I am in Chihuahua. It's a hole, and in the middle of the desert. We went exploring today, and here are some of the pictures.

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I made some pulled beef today. It's basically a bunch of meat, in a sauce, that cooks until the fibers in the meat fall apart.

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As many of you know, I moved to Florida in July. And all I have to say is, "It's 80 out in December." My there are a lot more useful days in the year down here.

Update [Eric]: Ok, so it's not so nice. It's been a little chilly the last few days here, in the 30s overnight. But it's still warmer than I'm used to in the winter.

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In my search for a Christmas present for Michelle, I decided to make a talking stuffed animal. But not just any stuffed animal, I decided to mod "David Bowie" The cheap red stuffed teddy bear I won in a claw game machine in Florida. Read on for the details of this project.

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So I've now built a board for my scopemeter so that I can hook it up to the computer via the serial port. I used designs linked from Scobegrab32 And made a PCB using the laser printer method I used in the Paintball shot counter

So far it's working pretty well, I've got it tuned in so that it will go 19200 baud, but that's as high as I can get it. I think it's because of the speed of the diodes, but that's just a guess. Anyway, it's kinda cool the amount of things that can be controlled by the serial interface. Pretty much any key on the front panel can be pressed, the raw waveform data can be downloaded, The scope can even be turned off and on using the serial interface.

Next thing I hope to do is write a nice Java based GUI for interfacing with the scopemeter. The only real gui to speak of that I could find was Scopegrab32, and it's Windows only. So another project gets added to the list. That list keeps growing, and rarely shrinking.

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Well, I guess it's about time I updated this with some stuff thats gone on in the last little while.

So a few weeks ago I broke down and did a little traveling. I went to Pittsburgh and met some friends in person for the first time. Most of them were people I've known from playing Puzzle Pirates. Well About 40 people showed up. Some were from Pittsburgh, others from Chicago, Philadelphia, North Carolina, and California. We all stayed in the one house, so you can imagine it was pretty crazy.

While I was there I met a bunch more people that I had never met in game. Indeed, Gothmog, Pranth, and many others that I've forgotten to mention. Everyone was really cool, and I wish the weekend was longer!

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So in the past few weeks I've been playing paintball on the weekends. I played in the Monster Game, and the next weekend I used up a lot of my left over paint at RJ Performance Paintball. I still have about 1000 rounds of paint left over from the monster game, and then another 1000 from some crap paint I bought to test in the yard. So we'll probably be playing at RJ's again this weekend.

So you're probably wondering how the monster game was. Well read on, and you'll find out.

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So, it's been a while since I posted something here, I've been busy getting a project at work done, and installed in production. All in all, the project went well. I had many a bugs to fix once it got put into production, and a few still to fix. But after a few initial problems with one application loading down the terminal servers, all seems to be working well.

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My friend Ryan told me about a robot project that him an some others are working on, and demoed at Penguicon. This is called ORPP, it's the Open Robotics Peripheral Platform. Basically, it's going to be a generic control and inteface mechanism for robots. You can take a look at the ORPP Homepage.

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I'm working on adding a comment posting piece to the site, This article is here for me to test it with!

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So I started playing paintball last year when a friend of mine had a bunch of people over to play. Someone brought a spare marker and mask, so I borrowed it and joined in. Needless to say, I got killed pretty quick, but it sure was fun! So I went out a few weeks later and picked up a PMI Piranha EForce kit, and some paint. I've only played once since then, mainly since that friend is now in the Navy. But that's not gonna stop me from modding my marker!

Last Updated - 4/10/2005 3:04PM EDT

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I really dislike PHP's magic quotes. In the previous post I had them enabled, which is why all the ' have a \ before them. I turned them off now. They're really a stupid way of handing data, they only make it so people are lazy when attempting to write database driven apps. Here's a quick lession in using a database from a programming language.

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I added a posting interface now, so I don\'t have to do direct table insertion. This is the second post made using that interface (The first one is now deleted, please share a moment of silence for article_id 5)

Ok, that\'s enough silence. I still have some work to do to get this where I want it, but so far it\'s doing pretty good.

Well that\'s all for now, I\'ll share more as I get it written.

-- Eric

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Well I setup a database backend on this site, now the articles are stored in a database rather than static pages. Right now I have to post articles by direct insertion to the database, but this isn't too bad for a few hours work.

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Welcome to Bootseg.com. I'm still messing with the layout, and trying to do it all with CSS. It's a lot harder to get the layout like I want compared to using tables. But I figured I'd give it a try. Also once I get the layout like I want, I'm going to put a database backend on this baby, and see how it goes.

I can already see using CSS alone can be rather powerful, but these layouts are a pain to do using CSS only. While I'm playing around you can check out one of my past projects: My Dance Dance Revolutions Pad hooked up to Yohoho Puzzle Pirates.

Some of you may be asking why I'm not using a pre-existing CMS. Well I decided that I wanted to play around, and write my setup from scratch. Mostly for the entertainment value.

-- Eric

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