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It's been a good week for gear. Last week I failed a Willpower roll and picked up 123 Robotics Experiments for the Evil Genius, which despite some weird nomenclature issues (it took me forever to determine that what the author calls a "PCB mount socket" is known in the UK as an SIL socket and in the States as an SIP socket) is really a neat Intro To Electronics For Those Of Us Who Kinda Forgot Most Of What We Learned About It In High School Apart From All The Equations. I think it will prove quite useful for the voice-activated house project. Anyway, the book comes with a little PCB which works with a Parallax Basic Stamp 2 and to which you have to add a bunch of relatively inexpensive components you have to buy yourself.
This led to the discovery that: 1) Radio Shack has really gone to hell in the last few years, and 2) eastern Iowa is quite lame when it comes to places to buy parts. However, the good people of All Electronics came through for me, and on Friday I discovered a deceptively small package in front of my garage, containing a wealth of goodies.
You have no idea how cool it is to work for people for whom "I was soldering" is a valid excuse for deciding to come in late and make up the hours on the weekend.
Oh, but the goodies aren't all self-acquired, either. DelphiGoth has apparently made it his mission to spoil me rotten, or at least worse than I already was. Lately I have been treated to an astonishing amount of dinner, a pair of fuzzy smiling skulls which now dangle from my rearview mirror, a plush ginger kitten who has been dubbed "Fang" and is sitting on top of my office box, a surprising wealth of new-to-me music (highlights include Voltaire's Banned on Vulcan, Emergence's The Science of Suffering, and a whole bunch of stuff by Mesh) and a copy of Design Patterns (Gamma/Helm/Johnson/Vilssides). This is in addition to the long-term ("You can get this back to me whenever") loan of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, a metric assload of material on extreme programming, a copy of The Hastur Cycle, and what promises to be the first of many, many Spider Robinson novels that I just never quite got round to reading.
Is the way to my heart that bloody obvious? :)
This led to the discovery that: 1) Radio Shack has really gone to hell in the last few years, and 2) eastern Iowa is quite lame when it comes to places to buy parts. However, the good people of All Electronics came through for me, and on Friday I discovered a deceptively small package in front of my garage, containing a wealth of goodies.
You have no idea how cool it is to work for people for whom "I was soldering" is a valid excuse for deciding to come in late and make up the hours on the weekend.
Oh, but the goodies aren't all self-acquired, either. DelphiGoth has apparently made it his mission to spoil me rotten, or at least worse than I already was. Lately I have been treated to an astonishing amount of dinner, a pair of fuzzy smiling skulls which now dangle from my rearview mirror, a plush ginger kitten who has been dubbed "Fang" and is sitting on top of my office box, a surprising wealth of new-to-me music (highlights include Voltaire's Banned on Vulcan, Emergence's The Science of Suffering, and a whole bunch of stuff by Mesh) and a copy of Design Patterns (Gamma/Helm/Johnson/Vilssides). This is in addition to the long-term ("You can get this back to me whenever") loan of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, a metric assload of material on extreme programming, a copy of The Hastur Cycle, and what promises to be the first of many, many Spider Robinson novels that I just never quite got round to reading.
Is the way to my heart that bloody obvious? :)