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Well that was a little bit longer of a break from updating than I thought it would be. Rest assured your great wonderful really hot webmaster is still alive and kicking, but as usual the start of the semester becomes incredibly busy. I haven't even been updating the webcam, so you know I've been busy.
This semester I'm taking:
EEL 5666: Intelligent Machine Design Lab
COP 5536: Advanced Data Structures
CEN 4500: Computer Networking
EEL 3304: Electronic Circuits
The coolest of those by far is IMDL, as it's the robot course. Over the semester I'll be building an autonomous robot from scratch, and then demoing it as our final in there. It's got a reputation as a very hard and demanding course, but also one of the best courses you could ever take since you gain an incredible amount of real world knowledge. After a long deliberation, I finally settled on a BullBot which will try to ram red things and see how good of a matador you are. Don't worry, there'll be lots of pictures as I slowly build and program the robot. The interesting thing about these robots is that the simplest tasks are often incredibly hard. If you can draw a perfect square or circle, it's an automatic A and you'll have the professors great respect, since even though two motors may say they're the same strength and rotate at the same speed, that never happens. So just telling it to make 4 left turns will not get you anywhere close to where you started. My other classes seem like they'll be pretty cool, but IMDL is definitely going to be my favorite.
I've also really been enjoying my laptop. As I said in the last updated, I reformated everything and created some Linux partitions, so I basically started out from scratch. I have Windows working great on it, but I'm still fighting with Linux to get X (the graphical part) to work. So I can get to the console just fine and even connect to the internet, but because I have such a new videocard and something's just not working right with the config file, I can't get graphics to come up. I'm sure I'll get it working eventually, but in the meantime I've been busy using the wireless in Windows. Now if only we could get wireless in the dorms. I've also got pictures of it now up:
Next to my desktop monitor
What it looks like closed
The back
Closeup of the keyboard and mousepad
Bored with your digital camera? Try making it into a Gigapixel camera by meshing together over a hundred pictures into one huge 40,784x26,800 picture. An impressive project to say the least. Unfortunately since the image size is over 2 GB, you can't download it, but the comparisons should do it justice.
And finally the coolest pictures you will see this week. A combination of incredible sidewalk artristry and the right camera angle can create some absolutly mindblowing images. Remeber, these are all on flat concrete.
Sidewalk Art #1
Sidewalk Art #2
Sidewalk Art #3
Sidewalk Art #4
Sidewalk Art #5
Sidewalk Art #6
Notice in the last picture how it looks like they're really standing on stones. To get an idea of how they do this, look at this picture and you'll see how the camera has to be at the right angle to give the right 3D perspective. For a Q&A about the artist of some of these, check out this interview with Kurt Wenner.
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