BillstronBlog

My family’s longest standing Christmas tradition is my domination over my sister in the Christmas morning wrapping-paper-ball fight. She is just too weak to handle my onslaught. I love you Andrea, but it’s true. Merry Christmas!

My mother-in-law gave me a roomba for Festivus. I don’t think I have been so excited about a gift in quite a while. I had no idea it was coming. The Mrs. told THE mother-in-law that I wanted one, and she couldn’t believe it. All she kept saying was, “I can’t believe I gave my son-in-law a vacuum cleaner!” I think my reaction shows how excited I am about it. The picture is of me hugging my new robot.

And that is the thing… It is a ROBOT! That is why I wanted it. Well of-course it will round up all of the cat hair tumbleweeds in the house, but it is also extremely hackable. The brilliant MIT engineers from iRobot even put in an expansion port so that you can reprogram your Roomba without having to modify the main PCB. How cool is that (in a dorky sort of way)!

Here are some links to Roomba projects that will show that the Roomba is not all work and no play. A big list of hacks reside here. Here is a look at the robot’s guts. Here is a guys blog posting about his Roomba hacking that includes this remote controled (via a bluetooth cellphone) roomba. Here is a musical Roomba with video included. Of course, my Roomba hacking will be feature only on the billstron blog. Stay tuned…

We are some road tripping monsters. Oakland CA to Louisville KY in 40 hours door-to-door. We set up a bed in the back of the supper wagon so that one of us could sleep while the other drove. We basically only stopped for food and gas and… well you know. The only snafu came when at 1am in the middle of nowhere Arkansas (isn’t all of Arkansas the middle of nowhere?) one of our headlights burned out. Thank god for Walmart being open 24-7, otherwise our record time would have been severely screwed up. This is the route we took.

The Indian “woman” who won the silver medal in the 800 meter dash during the Asian Games failed a gender test and had her medal stripped.  An Indian official claims that she hasn’t had a sex change.  She must have abnormal chromosomes.  I’ll bet she’s a real looker. 

I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a gender test. Apparently it consists of a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist and internal medicine specialist checking out all portions of someones health.  I didn’t see the need for this type of test at first.  Then I realized that a test like this could be useful in San Francisco some times. 

BREITBART.COM - Runner Fails Gender Test, Loses Medal:

Finally, the semester from hell is done. I finished up my last final this afternoon around 1:30. It’s time for a little winter vacation. Hooray!!!!

It really wasn’t the semester from hell. I really enjoyed my Artificial Intelligence class. We did some really cool projects — like programming an autonomous Pacman and teaching a box to walk with it’s one stick leg. My Robust Control class was extremely hard, though. We learned some really interesting things, and I’m sure it will be useful to my research in the coming months.

Next semester is still up in the air. Unbelievably, I still haven’t registered for my classes yet. I should probably do that… I think I’m going to take another Artificial Intelligence class and a Nonlinear Control class. My work life is pretty well full though. I will be doing a 10 hour/week teaching assistant job and 10 hour/week research assistant job. This is my first semester as a TA. I am really looking forward to it. I am assisting my research adviser, David Auslander, on an undergraduate Real Time Programming class. This type of programming is where the rubber meets the road for controls. The students (and I) will be programming robots and other cool stuff like that.

This is a test of the Deepest Sender firefox extension. I just downloaded and installed it, and this is my first post using it. It was very simple to set up, and so far, it has been very simple to use. I will keep you apprised of how I like using Deepest Sender. If you want to try it out for yourself, check it out at the link.

Deepest Sender | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation:

“Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!” This is the default text that comes with a new WordPress blog. I just transfered my old blogger blog over to WordPress.
I haven’t blogged in a long time. School has really been kicking my ass, but I have decided to restart my blogging. Plus this has given me a reason to put off studying for my last final on Monday.

Also, I have started a Wiki based website at Billstron. There is nothing really there yet, but I will add things in the coming weeks. Keep these spaces watched. Hopefully you won’t be disappointed.