Lines in the sky

There are too many main stream songs on Pandora, and I'm still disappointed that they haven't exactly gotten around to streaming foreign language songs as of yet. Angry French rap is what I really want to hear,but sadly, Pandora doesn't yet deliver.

Later tonight, I'll be attending a Christmas party with my mother. It's a reunion she'll be having at her friend's house. It'll be be a bit of a multicultural experience for me, since we'll be in a house with at least four Peruvians. It won't really be multicultural I guess.. If there's only one culture present, it'd be mono-cultural won't it?

A few days ago I spilled orange juice onto my key board. Since then the left home row keys became sticky and unbearable for the 70 wmp average I've grown accustomed to. Earlier, I unscrewed the back. 18 screws total, but one of them was hidden behind a label. For a while I was struggling taking the cover off, wanting to not force it anymore than necessary in fear of causing plastic deformation to any material in holding it together. Prudence paid off, luckily. Inside there were three layers of clear plastic with a traffic line map printed on to each. Pretty impressive actually. The thing could be made more compact and portable since the plastic is capable of being rolled up. Just looking at what I had underneath this keyboard made a lot of the more expensive "portable and roll-up-able" keyboards less impressive.

I took the cover to my bath room in hopes of getting some of the stickiness off from the orange juice incident. I spend 15 minutes in there utterly disgusted at all the disgusted-ness that fell out of the cover. Your keyboard is the most dirty thing you probably touch all day. Wash your hands accordingly. I can imagine how it must be like under there for the public computers that get touched in the CS lap or library. >.<!

So I got this idea for a project somewhere between midnight and Pandora. I also re-realized how not rich I am. The only money I'm currently getting for anything non-tuition related is coming out of my sweet mother's purse, and my father's as well. This usually occurs around holiday times such as is the case right now. So I'm thinking of buying an Axon micro-controller and some unaugmented ones from ATMEL; to play around with some ideas that came up.

But more about this idea. Currently I'm not intellectually capable of carrying out all the minor details about this. That's why I'm purchasing an already capable augmented micro-controller and thinking in the abstraction level in which technician would. There's nothing wrong with thinking like a technician. Sure it's a level down beneath how an engineer should look at something, but for the moment, I really don't know much about transistors or even assembly to do things from scratch. It's funny because I can grasp the higher level coding, and the mechanics of things, but when it comes to the middle (the electronics part) I simply see everything as enclosed inside of a black box and I pretend that faith works out 100% of the time. It's very easy to do this seeing as, most IC's and transistors are already enclosed within a black box. Sort of poetic anit it? But whatever, this level of abstraction comes with a handful of documented algorithms and schematics all ready for a layman to grasp. I'll learn more about the theories as I approach specific issues that might come across, but until then I'm going to need some help.

I'll be initiative and approach some of my more electrical savvy amigos on this matter. I'll document the project as it develops over time as well. Maybe this can go somewhere.

So it's 7:30 now. The sun has been up for a while, and my room light is still turned on.. Such a waste of electricity. I'll probably be going to sleep in a couple hours since I'm currently operating an a nocturnal sleep cycle. Oh, and about the lines in the sky. There was a set of 4 different planes that left behind intersecting routes printed onto the dark blue sky when I first started typing. They're gone now, except for one. Or maybe it came from a different source? Another one more just showed up. It was nothing unique then, but still unusual for me to see. There seems to be a problem with my "l" key. It's getting stuck in the down position. I suspect some of the mold underneath it is starting to harden up from its moist state. This could be a problem. I'll see what I can do about it.