Rainy afternoon Robotics, or the “Frankentruck FT-5”

So, the day turned rainy and there is a somewhat rigorous moratorium here on desktop computing.  I decided that didn’t include supervised robotics.  Full details, more pics and movie mayhem after the break.

Regex for Java in Unicode…

Think The Producers‘ “Springtime…  in Germany” when reading the title, it might make slightly more sense… A friend of mine was recently posed a challenge by hir instructor in an introductory Java class.  The challenge was (sic.) “I was recently writing a program to generate usernames from the first seven letters of a student’s last name and their first initial,
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A UNIX Wizard…

So, I heard “Pinball Wizard” on the radio the other day and it reminded me of a parody (author unknown) called “UNIX Wizard…”  While googling for the text for all of you, I also ran across this “UNIX Heirarchy,” which explains the difference between mere mortals and sucessive progress towards enlightenment.

Integrated Gallery While You Post…

I wanted to use Drupal to post pictures, much as LiveJournal can.  However, I already have…  an image gallery.  And, while it is a good and wondrous thing to have the gallery integrated with Drupal, what I really wanted was to be able to nicely choose images mid-post, without having to do crazy things like write my own <IMG> tags. 
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14.2 miles

The Little Traverse Wheelway is a bike path that circumscribes Little Traverse Bay.  I’ve personally seen about 12 miles of it from a bike, and its pretty spectacular.  Most of the wheelway is specially set aside and paved for bikes.  Some of it is sidewalk, and a few segments are officially marked bike lanes on public roadways.  The path is
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Sunset

Not quite the land of the midnight sun here. 🙂

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A Three Story House… built inside.

Spent the evening assembling the sets for the musical Jennifer is in, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.  The pinnacle was, of course, the three story house (7 foot ceilings) installed on the stage.  After a number of people put the first story together, three of us bravely climbed to the second level.  While we had
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goofy kids

They wanted their pics taken.  Wee lad on Tuesday and lass today.

USCGC Mackinaw

The USCGC Mackinaw pulled into the bay this afternoon, shortly after lunchtime.  What she was doing, exactly, is anyone’s guess, but she appears to be capable of tending buoys, and that seemed to be what she was doing.  After work, she still hadn’t left, so I lugged the telescope down and started getting insane with optics.  I first tried just
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a day around the beach

I snapped a shot of the new bike rack (attached) in the better light after lunch today. After a quick chat with Dad about that we geared up to go riding. There’s a bike path that goes for quite a few miles around the bay, all the way down/over to Charlevoix and all the way the other direction up/around to
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