Friends

Brendon
Jay

Archives

January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
August 2008
July 2008

Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2009

Sterling’s annual conversation on the Well should be required reading.

You could also go back in time and read the 2008 and 2007 editions; they still sparkle.

Credit: Boing Boing reminded me about it this year.

Spelunky

It’s a sidescrolling exploration game with you as an Indiana Jones type in a procedurally generated dungeon.

spelunky

Nice.

Download it here.  If your download gets interrupted, try using Firefox’s pause/resume feature.  Originally found on Outworld.

New Year’s Resolution

So I have some travel photos that I’ve never gotten around to posting.  My New Year’s Resolution is to do that, but in order for it to make any sense at all I’m going to backdate the posts to the time when the trip got made.  I’m violating the integrity of the blog timestamp system!  Oh noes!

Cancun 2008

In December 2008, I got to go to the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Cancun.

This was my first academic conference, and from a professional point of view it was great.  I learned a lot and got many new ideas for research.  Unfortunately, for most of the daylight hours I was inside the hotel, listening to speakers.

DSCF1210

This is the view from my hotel room.  The ocean is on the protected side of the peninsula, so it was fairly calm.  I managed to sneak in a 6:30 AM swim a couple of days before breakfast.

DSCF1220

I had an extra day after the conference, so I took a guided tour to Chichen Itza.  Here’s a sinkhole where we stopped to swim during the 3 hour bus ride.  It’s 50 meters deep - don’t drop anything!

DSCF1227

Here Hugo, the tour guide, is telling us about the main temple at Chichen Itza.

DSCF1244

And here’s the Plaza of One Thousand Columns at Chichen Itza.

Cancun was a bit of a tourist trap - the hotel strip is a long way from the city itself, and so everything is priced for tourists and geared towards the lowest common denominator (nothing spicy on the menu, bars set up to attract the 19 year old college student from Kansas who can’t drink at home, etc).  But the scenery was beautiful, and it’s really hard to feel bad about swimming in the warm ocean at 6:30 AM, having a tasty breakfast, then learning about multi-agent control for a few hours.

CDC next year is in Shanghai.  Hooray for academia!

Halloween 2008

Halloween 2008

Ruckingenur II

Screenshot from Ruckingenur II

Ruckingenur II is a Windows game about reverse engineering small electronics in order to bypass their security features. The story is all about some sort of military conflict (grumble grumble) in the year 2016… but they seem to still be using through-hole components. Maybe there was a surface-mount rebellion in 2013?

OK, I think one joke about electronic packaging is enough for a lifetime. Moving on.

For electrical engineers: You get a serial logic probe, three digital voltmeter probes, a pulse generator, and a simplified JTAG probe, and you have to figure out how to bypass the system’s security by observing and manipulating the traces between ICs. It’s great.

For others: After playing this game, you’ll have a really good idea about what an embedded systems engineer does all day. Except that instead of reverse engineering someone else’s stuff, we usually poke around on our own systems, trying to figure out why they aren’t working properly.

When people ask me why I like engineering, I usually answer “because it’s fun”. This game does a good job of presenting some of the fundamental skills that an engineer uses, and also captures the problem-solving challenge and enjoyment that engineers find in their work. I’m looking forward to whatever else Zach Barth comes up with.

Originally found on hack-a-day.

Matt’s Birthday

Yesterday I went down to the South Bay to hang out with Vicky and Matt. We went hiking on the Los Gatos Creek Trail…

Fellow Canadians at the Los Gatos Reservoir

… saw some wildlife in the Los Gatos Reservoir…

Vicky, Lucky, Matt

… stopped for coffee and a photo op…

… walked back, went for dinner, and called it a day. Happy birthday, Matt!

Commercial Drive Car-Free Day

In early June, I was in Vancouver, visiting friends and working with a prof at UBC. On my last day in Vancouver, there was a Car-Free street fair on Commercial Drive. Pauline and I wandered around for a few hours. Here are some of the photos I took.

Click any of the pictures to go to the full album.

Cake or Death?

nuclear-cake

Mmmmm, plutonium.

found via woot blog