I’m finally done sorting through the pictures from the bike trip Jamey and I took in the San Juan Islands. I take a shitload of pictures every vacation, mostly because I’m not happy with the “automatic” setting on my Canon PowerShot A630. I ended up filtering a lot of them when I decided which to post to my picasaweb album, and now I’m filtering them further to present my favorite trip pictures here:
Over the past week, I’ve run into two different people who expressed the same thought, “Linux lacks support for a lot of devices.” I told them that this was a myth, and the Linux Driver Project has proven it is a myth.
Today I had an idea for a way to dispel this myth. I think someone should post a video of them walking into Circuit City, buying a random device, and walking out to their car. The video shows them configuring it on a Linux box and testing it. Then they would return the device and buy a new device. Buy, configure, return; repeat as necessary. The devices and configuration notes could be posted on the Linux Drivers Project wiki.
Now to find a decent videographer, buy a GSM data phone plan (for downloading packages and drivers in the car), and find some funding for devices that are non-returnable. In my copious spare time, of course.
The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) builds, designs, and launches open source amateur rockets. If you haven’t heard about PSAS before, watch my five minute Ignite Portland 2 talk and follow along with the sides.
Dan showed off the start of the nosecone mold today.
Jamey and I will be biking the San Juan Islands to celebrate our first anniversary. Today I decided to go to the central library to check out some travel books on the subject.
It turned out that all the books on the San Juans were checked out. I was bummed because I had gone to the library for nothing, and I was going to be an hour late to the PSAS meeting. I got in the elevator to go down from the third floor. As the elevator started moving, this piece of paper fell from the ceiling:
The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) builds, designs, and launches open source amateur rockets. If you haven’t heard about PSAS before, watch my five minute Ignite Portland 2 talk and follow along with the sides.
A PSAS member showed up to the meeting today with his own amateur rocket. DISCLAIMER: This is not the PSAS rocket (it’s still being rebuilt).
This past weekend, my Grandma Bailey turned 80. My family took my grandma to Lincoln City to celebrate. It was a wonderful trip, and it felt good to spend time with my family.
Highlights:
I have become the official blogger for the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS). If you haven’t heard about PSAS, watch my five minute Ignite Portland 2 talk and follow along with the sides.
In this PSAS weekly episode, I talk about the rocket airframe and the software for the avionics sensor nodes.
Airframe
Tim showed off pictures of his setup for creating the light-weight fiberglass shell that goes around our rocket:
Last night we had “going away” dinner at Arabian Breeze because my friend Deepak is leaving Montavista Linux. Deepak isn’t actually moving away from Portland. He’ll be working from home and occasionally flying to Boston to meet with his coworkers at the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) company. It sounds like OLPC still wants to work on the Sugar UI and Linux infrastructure, despite Nicholas Negroponte’s recent remarks about developing Sugar for Windows.
The dinner was good, but it got off to a harrowing start. When I arrived at the restaurant, I discovered that there was a giant warehouse fire across the street. The police had the entire block (including the restaurant) roped off with caution tape. They did let us through, once we explained where we wanted to go. I guess they just didn’t want a crowd of gawkers hanging near the fire.
Still, it was a little dumb of us to continue eating at the restaurant, considering there was a gas station next door.
In celebration of this sugary occasion, the Portland bike community arranged an Ice Cream cone ride. The idea was to ride to all four locations and get a cone at each one. We started at 5pm, and the free cones ended at 8pm.
I’ve been slightly side-tracked from my quest to host my own blog by the search for a good calendar and todo list application. It is still sort of relevant, because I’d like to embed my calendar in my blog. It’s really useful to point family members to a web calendar and say, “You pick a free night for us to have dinner.”
My current setup is just not working. I’ve been keeping my todo list and events in a plain text file in a git repository. I usually only check the file when I’m adding a new task or event. This means I’m suddenly faced with the
mountain of undone tasks during a (usually) stressful moment. It’s no wonder I’ve slowly started avoiding looking at that file at all. I need something pretty that I can bear to look at every morning.