No, this isn’t a tale of a hobbit. It’s been nearly a month since I’ve written in my blog. It’s also been nearly a month since Hurricane Katrina first hit. As you may have guessed, these two events ARE, in fact, joined at the hip. I was deployed to New Orleans on State Emergency Duty with my B Co. 135th Signal Bn, and was attached to the 35th Special Troops Batallion, but was working for the 35th Infantry Division G-6 (Communications Office). It’s okay if that seems confusing to you. I’m IN the military and it was confusing for me. Anyway, I was there for a little over a week and a half, when they sent me home so that I could continue school. This was my first semester back at UMR since my last deployment, and it would have sucked to throw that to the four winds too.

The last two weeks I’ve been at my wit’s end (which is unsurprisingly short), trying to catch up in my classes. I had to drop my Linear Algebra (3 hrs) class again (sorry Dr. Insall) bringing my down to 15 hours. I now have General Physics (PHYS21), its lab (PHYS22), German Literature (GERM70), Embedded Systems Design (CpE213), and last but not least Algorithms & Datastructures II (CS253). Now you can see why I’ve been so busy. Some of you may need a reference to look up some of those topics, I know I did. Long story short, I’m making a decent comeback, with relatively little weakness in those subject areas (opposite of last week).

Now on to more exciting things. I finally got some new tires and rims for my car. They’re Kazera KZ-V’s. You can sort of see them here. My car is on the left. I took this picture for a comparison between my rims and Andy’s. As it turns out, mine are way better smirk. If I get a chance this coming weekend, I’ll wash and wax my car and get some prettier pics of it. I think it looks down-right mean now. Andy agrees. I also got the rest of the parts that I needed for my carputer. Now the only challenge is to find the time to work on it. I’ve had ideas for this thing for a long time. It looks like somebody beat me to the punch though (at least in the hardware). Mine, of course, will be better since I’m using Linux and other Open Source projects. It’s just the nature of the culture to always improve on past work, and I’m not to be outdone. The longest part will be the custom programming that I’ll have to do. I’m not going to just throw in a windows box with WMP9 or a Mac Mini with iTunes, this is going to be sexy. At least that’s my goal. I often think that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, but that keeps me motivated and constantly improving my skills. Which is really what the whole project is about, isn’t it?

Well, since I’m getting paid by the hour to type this, I should probably shift my focus to more work related work. I had some downtime and thought I’d give my loyal readers an update on the life of D. Yes, I’m counting both of you.

Some real quick ideas for my carputer software (in case somebody wants to help):

• Linux based system (Gentoo 2005.1)
• Use e17 environment (it’s sexy)
• Use emotion for video/dvd/audio playback (includes MP3’s and Ogg)
• Create e17 interface for GPSd (so I know where I’m going….where I been…[like shoes])
• Create e17 Kismet interface
• Create some sort of messaging client w/ VoIP technology (maybe use Jabber) for local comms (w/ other cars that have similar systems)