Category ‘0ther’
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About a year ago, I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t beat the song Jordan on Expert difficulty in the video game Guitar Hero II. One thing led to another and I ultimately hacked my Guitar Hero controller to “record” songs (what it records is the button presses and strums) in practice mode – at half speed – and then play them back at full speed. Alonna made a youtube video showing it in action.
So that’s the kind of thing I do in my free time… I have a slightly more detailed description of it here.
Alonna and I just had LASIK Done. She on January 22, me on January 23. Basic Points:
- LASIK consists of having a flap cut in your cornea, a laser reshaping the part of your cornea under the flap, and the flap replaced. Watch this FDA Animation.
- It costs roughly $3000. Our insurance covered $500. You can pay a lot more or a lot less.
- We had “Wavefront” LASIK – where your prescription is determined by computer and lasers or something. Whereas prescriptions are generally measured to 0.25 of a diopter, this measures down to .01. This effectively means that you’ll probably have better vision than you did with glasses or contacts.
- LASIK can also correct astigmatism.
Today I traveled to Baltimore, Maryland to attend a National SWE Conference. I have been a member of the Society of Women Engineers, or SWE (pronounced “sw-ee”) since college. SWE is a national non-profit organization which encourages women to enter and succeed in the engineering field. I’m President of our local Southwest Idaho SWE Section, and I was lucky enough to get HP to fund my trip!
Sunset from my flight:
For some background on me & engineering, here is a profile I wrote for a SWE newsletter last year.
So I’ve been toying around with ASCII art for about 10 years now. My last ASCII project was multi-layered ASCII art, which looked pretty awesome I think, here’s my ASCII take on Da Vinci’s masterpiece. I also wrote a program that converts videos into ASCII videos, here’s me mountain biking, and here’s me mountain biking some more. I have ideas for taking ASCII art to a whole level way beyond all that. But the world isn’t ready for that yet, first I wanted to try an idea I’d been kicking around: phrase based ASCII art. The idea is to just throw in a bunch of phrases related to the subject, hidden like in a word search, but in places where they contribute the picture, or at least don’t ruin it.
Apparently so…
Found it in the valley between Squaw Creek trail and Cobb trail. I didn’t roll around in it though, maybe it’s just poinsettia.
I brought my kite/camera gear along too, mostly just to see how hard it is to bring the whole setup on a challenging bike ride, in preparation for trying the same thing in more interesting out-of-the way places. The kite stayed up just long enough for me to attach the camera and then floated back to earth. It was too hazy for good pictures anyway.
If you read our blog, or any other blogs, you might find yourself checking them frequently only to find that nothing has been updated. Or you might forget about them and then later when you remember to check there’s 6 months of posts that you’ve missed. This is why you should setup an RSS reader.
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