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.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Year! Ben and I had a great time in Minnesota visiting family and friends. It always goes by too fast though, doesn’t it?
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Here are some photos from Thanksgiving at my grandparent’s house in South Dakota (including a few below from my sister-in-law Heather). We had a great time – lots of family, food, desserts, card playing, and fun!
(NOTE: click on Continue Reading below to see the rest of the photos!)
After my SWE Conference in Baltimore, I took a train to Washington DC. I’ve never been there before and since I was so close (a 40-min train ride), I decided to squeeze it in. I stayed over night Saturday and then got up really early on Sunday to see the sights. My flight left at 5:30pm so I didn’t have much time.
I was out on the “mall” by 8am, and it was a beautiful day! There was hardly anyone out yet, only a few other tourists and joggers. You can see this in some of my earlier photos – later in the day it became much more crowded. I walked all around the mall from one end to the other – it’s a lot further than it looks!
I’m back in Boise after a long weekend in Baltimore for the Society of Women Engineers Conference. The conference was great! Here’s some photos from the weekend…
HP Recruiting on Thursday night:
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.
My friend Randy Feist has a pumpkin farm in Kuna, ID.
- Quite an operation: pumpkins, corn maze, petting zoo, mini-pumpkin slingshot, hay bale maze, hay rides, etc.
- I didn’t quite get the pictures I wanted – a view of the whole 35 acre party and a few pictures of just the corn maze. I’m starting to think that real-time video of what the camera is seeing might be handy.
- I added a servo to the setup, which should have caused the rig to automatically pan left and right, for a total range of 180 degrees. Not sure it worked though, mostly because I couldn’t get the screw connecting the servo to the rest of the rig tight enough – so the servo was rotating, but not really taking the rig with it.
- In spite of these difficulties, we got some pretty good pictures…
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.
Last weekend we took a road trip to Moab. Ahh, Moab, I love that place! If you’ve never been to Southern Utah you should definitely add it to your “list” (if you have one, well, doesn’t everyone?). The scenery is just amazing. Bright orange and red rocks in all kinds of shapes and formations. And usually the sky is bright blue which makes a nice contrast.
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