Crowders Mountain

I considered heading up to the Appalachian trail this morning, but reports from the National Weather Service ("TRAVEL IS EXPECTED TO BECOME VERY HAZARDOUS OR IMPOSSIBLE.") encouraged me to stay closer to home.  Plus, the Volvo needs some maintenance.  So Dexter and I took off for Crowders Mountain.


He's hiked it before, as have I, but it really does offer some spectacular views.
  
The only wildlife we saw was a hawk soaring below us.  The top offered a 360° view of North and South Carolina.  Despite the clouds, I could see the city of Charlotte and beyond.


I noticed that the Ridgeline trail, the one that connects the North and South Carolina parks, has been completed since the last time I was on the trail.  I think I may hike that on my next day off as a bit of a challenge.  It's posted 210 minutes, one way, so I should start out once it gets light out. 


But it would be nice to hike around some of the white, fluffy stuff.

WinMo ROM

For a couple of weeks it seems as though my phone (an HTC Raphael stripped-down mod by at&t called the Fuze) would choose to ignore some mail pushed by google, so I thought it might be a good time to re-up the ROM.

Lately I've been preferring the ROMs put together by NRGZ28. The latest stable for Windows Mobile 6.5 (based on the 21889 Build from the OEM COM2 tree) is EnergyROM.

There's still a lot of activity on the XDA Raphael forums, but I think it'll die down a bit as more and more people get Android phones, and the like.

But anyway, the EnergyROM is running quick and smooth.  It's amazing how much better it is than the software that came installed on the thing.  It's a testament to what kind of advances can be made when software is open.  Oh wait, I guess MS isn't open.  I guess it's a testament to what kind of advances can be made when a company looks the other way as others reverse-engineer, recalibrate, and then redistribute their software.

XBOX XBMC PlayOn

We've been using the old skool XBOX as a media center with XBMC for some time now. XBMC is a great piece of software -- probably the best at what it does. I used the IDE Hot Swap Method to softmod the XBOX back when we lived in Baltimore, but only recently we've been using PlayOn to stream video from the office computer to the XBOX via ethernet.

If I told Nicole how much money we saved by not paying for cable she'd probably be momentarily pleased, but then she'd remember all of the programs that were cut short or all the time I spent fiddling with it.

Being denied The Daily Show for a week I figured is was time to reinstall a new build. Since Microsoft won't open up the system, or XDK, (even though it doesn't develop for it anymore) the only way to obtain new binaries is through illicit means and there are only a few that I know of. Right now it seems to be working great. This is what I've got:

+ T3CH XBMC 2010-01-03 SVN rev26316 from http://t3ch.yi.se/
+ PlayOn Version: 2.59.3664 from http://www.playon.tv
+ PM3HD skin as included with T3CH build

And it seems to be working quite well!

I also just tried a different build, but it couldn't display the PlayOn categories using the same skin.

The Transparency! skin can view all of the categories, but it can't play any from Hulu or CNN - which is a shame because it looks great. The older Rapier skin seems to work well, with Hulu at least, but I'll check out the new release.

One thing that I suspect may have been a problem was the extent of thumbnails that existed in the User directory of the old build. I don't know if XBMC manages these, but I didn't copy them over to the new build.

I'll have to test it out a bit more and decorate with a suitable skin.

Dog Tracking

I recently spent some of my free time looking for an acceptable tool set to develop software to track Dexter. He is kind enough to use a litter box most of the time, and my goal is to use computer vision to give him positive (and maybe negative) feedback to help him reduce his error rate.

I spent some time looking at IM but eventually settled into openCV. It supports rudimentary firewire capture and includes a "highgui" toolset to help gui novices, such as myself, display results quickly. Installation required building the libraries and I wouldn't have been able to decipher the error messages had it not been for Surgey Ten's blog.

Now I'm working on identifying the dog object. Once it's accurately recognized, upon entering and exiting the litter box a positive reinforcement statement will be played.

Later on, and this I think is the trickier part, if the dog-object sub-divides then a negative reinforcement statement can be played. I think the tricky part has something to do with differentiating the head and rear of the object -- so as not to scold a sick puppy. But, I guess, many would argue that negative reinforcement directed at a Chihuahua is ineffective.

The Laptop That Wouldn't Die

So Nicole and I won the bid for this Gateway SOLO PRO 9300 laptop maybe six years ago. After trying out all of the small Linux variants I could, I finally settled on Puppy.

I think it runs alright on this old thing. Sure, it's a beast, but it's the only computer we have that we can use while sitting on the couch, with our feet up, without squinting.

But it's not without it's troubles. At some point along the way I've had to repair the CD-ROM, the keyboard, the trackpad, the power supply. And I'm not taking buying new parts, I'm talking 'breaking out the soldering iron' repairs. Oh, and I also gave it a two-toned paint job. And we never did get a battery for it. I guess because a new battery costs more than what we paid for the machine.

So last week the thing started arching near my leg and I put it away. I'm sure Nicole was a little excited, in some way, expecting that we'll sometime soon get a new laptop for her. But, once again, I dug out the soldering iron - found a new power adapter plug - and got the thing working again.

I hear you can get brand new netbooks in the $200 price range nowadays...

Skin Cancer Sucks

But I'm very glad that our civilization has great doctors. I currently have another hole in my face - perhaps 2cm x 3 cm -- which should be repaired tomorrow. It freaked out Nicole. It freaked me out while it was happening, but I felt more comfortable than when I tried to have the surgery earlier only to be told that we'd have to wait until we could get a plastic surgeon involved. That time I had to fight through the fog of the pseudo-Valium to understand what Dr. Carruth was telling me.
This time he dove right in, sending unneeded bits of flesh popping off my face. While he was working I was about to ask what the foaming sound was until I smelled the charred skin. I couldn't feel, but I could hear the scraping of the blade across my skin as he removed samples.
The samples are analyzed to determine the extent - and fortunately for my nervous ass, they only had to take 2 samples (sessions) before they could tell me it was gone.
So now I wait, with a hole in my face, fully conscious, dreading tomorrow and all the while hoping to get it done with! Maybe later I'll attach a picture.

So now it's just over a week later and I'm feeling much like my old self. Dr Gibson managed to hide the massive hole in my face with a cheek flap rotation. I still have steering strips from the corner of my mouth running up along my nose up to my eye, and then across to my hairline, and then down below and then to behind my ear. The line ends in what Nicole expects will be a cool Z - shaped scar. Last Sunday(?) I had the drainage tube removed from behind my ear. There are a lot of stitches still in my face which I intend to have removed Monday.

But it's amazing! I'm so grateful that so many people are so good at what they do!

Lisa and Michael's Wedding

From Blog

Lisa Jones and Micheal Mancuso (sp?) were married today. It was beautiful, as well as wonderful to meet up with all of the family. In many ways, our family helps define us as much as we help define the family. It's amazing how many traditions are adhered to at weddings. And it's not as if we have them all the time, or even write down the procedure. It's interesting how folks pick and define wedding procedures as time goes on. Do wedding planners study ancient practices?


Lisa