leapinggnome.org

Oh man, what can I say? I’m just not a very good blog writer (blogger? bloggist?). Maybe for the same reasons I was never good at keeping a journal when I was a kid. Not much has been going on for me. Midterms are mostly over, and classes seem to be letting up momentarily (thank goodness!). This has given me the chance to work on my mythbox (a computer that records TV programs) and to renovate my stereo system. It’s nice to actually get a couple of projects off my workbench, but more on those later.

Snow hit us for the first time this season as of almost exactly a week ago. I couldn’t have been happier brushing off my car the next morning. It was neat to actually have several inches of accumulation on the ground before halloween. Too bad it is all melted now. Last year, we hardly saw any snowflakes in the air until after thanksgiving. Hopefully this means we are well on our way to breaking 300″ of snow this year! I want to say we had 270″ my freshmen year, but I think Houghton can do better. What can I say, I love the snow.

At the possible expense of this post being too long, I’ll start one more paragraph. I watched ‘Click!’ tonight, Adam Sandler’s latest movie. It was quite funny, but it actually had value beyond the humor – something that is not common in his movies. It was thought provoking and reminds me to cherish even the doldrums life hands us. Hopefully that didn’t sound too cheesy. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it. ‘Night.

As a few of you may know, my trusty Heathkit receiver gave up the ghost a little while back. The title of this post is taken from a sticker on the bottom. Almost 30 years ago, someone was tinkering around inside it trying to make it work right. I wouldn’t mind replacing the whole unit (it is 10 years older than I am, after all), but the amplifier I would like to replace it with will cost me around $150. I don’t really want to spend that, so it is sitting open on my workbench right now.

The electronic component you see in the center of the above photo is a capacitor. It belongs to the power amplifier inside of my stereo. If you think it doesn’t look very healthy, you are very much correct. Besides the nasty corrosion (the teal-blue color), you’ll notice the black rubber cap on the capacitor is popped out of the aluminum body, where it would normally reside. Capacitors will do this for many reasons, but the most common is because of high heat. Running current backwards through them will cause this to happen in a hurry. In this case, I think old age is mostly the culpret. I have new capacitors on order from mcm and am looking forward to the triumphant return of my slightly antique receiver. FYI, the one pictured above is actually not the one that caused my receiver to stop powering up. See if you can pick it out on the power supply board (it’s not the big one on the bottom, though that doesn’t look too good either).

There’s not much else going on for other news. Chris and I replaced the front rotors and brake pads on my car. The brakes were getting pretty bad. It is so much nicer now. And I’m still working on getting a ‘fish cam’ link on this website.

I’m sitting in CS2321 – Data Structures. The instructor is going over the differences in efficiency for linked lists versus other forms of storage. I’ve heard about enough of it. In other news, it’s been just under 2 weeks since I last updated this site. I guess I still haven’t got into the swing of updating this often. My roommate brought up a 125 gallon fish tank, which is a *big* fish tank. He’s got 6 (I think) fairly good size Oscars that are fun to watch. I’m considering firing up the webcam server once more, and putting a camera on the fishtank. Should be a good attraction for this site, at least for a little while.

To go back to the academic world (basically the only world of mine right now), the first real week of classes is drawing to a close. Last week was only 3.5 days, so it wasn’t really a full week. Classes seem to be going well for me. Homework load is picking up slowly, and our first sizeable programming assignment is due monday. I also have an intro to electronics lab this year. It’s pretty boring thus far, on thursday we proved Ohm’s law through experimentation. I’ve been playing around with all this stuff since I was a kid, so i’m pretty sure this class will be a breeze.