My car got hit tonight

So, visiting a friend for his birthday, my car got hit parked outside his house. The hit and run demolished my back end and moved my car forward about a car length and a half. Either way, my car had to be towed away.
I loved my car. It is a 2006 Ford Fusion and was in pretty good shape. The only issue I ever had with it was my air conditioning. Actually not my air conditioning, but a sensor that confuses my thermostat. Anyway, we have two cars and mine was the better of the two. Now it goes out for repair and my worries begin.
Will they fix it or try to scrap it out? I'm hoping they fix it and think they will, but totalling is always a possibility with insurance. If they total it, I hope and pray that they give me enough for it that I can buy another car. Likely not and so I worry. Only time will tell...

We've Moved

This weekend, my family moved into our first home.  An exciting experience, but one that requires a lot of work.  Even now, I write this post from my laptop tethered to my phone because I don't have the internet now.  I don't have cable either, so it's over the air HD for me.  

So, in a system that mimics our first apartment we will have the internet, but no cable.  In order to save money, we will forgo the extra channels and work with my ever growing library of TV shows and movies.  The only difference this time is that I have wired with Cat6 and have a handful of different boxes hooked up to my TV.

The main centerpiece to this whole system is my storage server.  halfway filled with hard drives, it can hold over 4Tb which I hope to expand another 8Tb eventually.  In order to play that content, I have a WDTV and more recently a Logitech Revue (although I'm skeptical of the Revue's MKV playback).  There was alwaysthe Xbox 360, but even playing games it sounds like a jet taking off.  Either way, there are plenty of playback methods, it's just getting the content that needs work.

Out of all the TV out there, I seriously can count the number of shows we watch on all my fingers and toes.  That's not too bad, but we obviously don't have all the channels.  I might look into a Hulu+ subscription, but there are many means to find episodes on the internet.  Knowing where to look, I think I can pull something together to where we won't miss cable.  Which is the plan, since we really can't afford anything more right now.

Squarespace Android App

Squarespace has an Android app now. I'm not sure when it came out, but I gave up waiting. Finally I heard about it in an ad on TWiG. Very nice app and now I can update from my phone (which seems to be the only computer I use lately). Hopefully this will help me use this page more. Thanks Squarespace for making such a great tool!

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

I don't know what more is to be said.  He revolutionized the smart phone, had a big hand in the biggest computer animation company, and continued to "think different" throughout his whole carrier.  He is a huge loss to the tech industry.  Rest in Peace.

Lead Astray

Lesson learned tonight: sometimes the community can be so wrong, it's funny.

So, I got my mic in today and decided to test my VU code.  I took some tips from this Arduino forum and wired up my mic in a similar fashion.  Needless to say, I couldn't get it working.  I started to question the forum's advice earlier in the day, but I had to wire it up and test to prove my theory.  And I was right!  So, my new code for this looks nothing like what I originally wrote:

void mode_EQ() {

 level = analogRead(micPin);

 if(level<512){level=512;}

 int clevel = (int) floor((level-512)/40);

 if(clevel>newlevel){newlevel=clevel;}else{

   if(newlevel>0){newlevel--;}else{newlevel=0;}delay(80);}

 switch(newlevel) {

  case 1:... <- And the rest chooses the LEDs to light based on a value 0-12

Where did they go wrong in the forum?  As one member points out, the circuit was supposed the filter out half of the wave form.  But he also states that the Sparkfun board knows the Arduino can't handle negative values.  If the mic is only putting out positive voltage, what is the diode for?  Turns out... absolutely nothing, of course!  Basically the waveform exists in 0V to 5V with "silence" hovering around 2.5V.  This is easy to filter programmatically and my problem solved.