Yep, I actually did it… I got one. While the iPod is charging I’m going to tear my dashboard apart so that I can build a shelf for the iPod in place of the OEM cassette deck. We’ll see how that goes… I’m all excited, though.
Well, I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do for music playing in the car and the living room. I think an Apple iPod will be the best solution. Now, which one to get… The 15GB is $399, but the 30GB, twice the size, is only $100 more. I’m thinking that if I don’t get the 30GB, I’ll be kicking myself in a few months wanting the larger one. Now, where to get it… And when… It’d be nice to have it engraved, just in case there was any confusion, it’d have my info on it. It’s also be nice to have AAC compression, but I can wait either until I get a Apple or iTunes for Windows comes out. We’ll have to see… Maybe I’ll hook up the RCA <-> 3.5mm cable today and see if this project is really something I want to do.
Hmm. Does anyone know where to get custom car parts made? What I’m looking for specifically is a replacement center console cover for a 2000 Grand Am. There’s lots of room in the center console, and I want to move the fan controls down a bunch and have room for an 8″ or so touch screen LCD. There would be plenty of room behind the console to add a PC/104-based computer, which would be booted from CompactFlash, and the music could be stored on a FireWire or USB 2.0 hard drive in the trunk. I think the whole thing could be put together for under $500, and it’d be really nice to have a completely custom system like this. It might even be possible to add a radio tuner.
Or, I could just rerip all my music to MP3 and get either an mp3-enabled stereo or an iPod. I think the iPod might be cheaper at this point, as my stereo already has line level ins.
I’m thinking of moving nuxx.net to being hosted straight out of my house. All I’ll be doing is mail and the current amount of web hosting that I am now, namely /gallery and random stuff in /images and /pdf. The only thing I could think is that it might be good not to do my own primary DNS, that way if my IP changes it’ll be real easy to point things to the right place. We’ll have to see… If I have time after the blind install I’m going to watch Powaqqatsi while working on getting exim or sendmail, apache, php4, random imap or pop3 server, and bind running on golgotha (the file server). Or maybe bind should go on the firewall itself… Or maybe djbdns… I’m so confused! heh.
Okay… So how was tonight you ask? Well, everything started off great… More dinner at Pete and Michelle’s place. Mmm… Anyway, for those of you that aren’t within 100 miles of Detroit, this area got hit with snow tonight. Hit hard. We’re talking about 6″ – 10″ on the ground. This is *not* an exaggeration, I was just out in it.
That’s where the problem started. I left the Ferndale area at right about midnight. Except for the obviously slow conditions, the drive was very uneventful. I stopped on the way for a bottle of water and a candy bar, no big deal. Quite a bit of slipping, problems leaving stop lights, etc, but everyone who braved the roads seemed to be driving safely.
Anyway… I get home, well, no, back up a bit. I get in to my subdivision, right to the end of my driveway, and get stuck. See, I live on a court with a rather long, slightly hilly, driveway off the main subdivison road. I try to go up the hill, I get stuck. Not stuck as in ‘my car is stuck in a ditch’, but stuck where my car couldn’t continue forward, as the road was too slippery to continue. I think this was compounded by the hard pack snow underneath the fluffy stuff, but I digress… Anyway, what ended up happening was that I had to shovel ruts down to the pavement for three to five feet, use that to get my car going, continue until I stopped, lather, rinse, repeat. This snow ranged in depth from six inches to drifts that were over a foot deep. Needless to say, it sucked. Anyway, after all the fun with that there was another two foot drift in the middle of the court, and a four foot drift in front of my garage door. I snowplowed through the two foot drift and shoveled away the four foot one. Oh, and I just looked outside, here’s the plows. Uggh. Ah well, at least I got a workout.
To detail the shoveling distance I grabbed random satellite photo and drew some lines. The yellow line in the road is where I originally got stuck, the red line indicates the distance that was shoveled. You know something is seriously wrong when you can detail the distance you shoveled on satellite images.
A few weeks ago I started getting really interested in the Shelby Township area Nike Surface to Air missle (SAM) site. This place used to exist in the area between 22 Mile, Ryan, and Shelby roads. (More information here.) Well, I came across the email address of someone who works at the site. Read below for our email correspondance… I’m really excited.
>Raye,
>
>I found your name when searching around online for information on the
>old Nike missile site in the Utica / Shelby Township area. I’m curious
>if you have some more information as to the exact location of this
>site. I’m interested in visiting the site and seeing what remains.
>
>Thanks very much…
>
>-Steve
>
>Steve Vigneau EDS Technical Advisor Group 1075 W. Entrance Drive –
>Mailstop 4N – Auburn Hills, MI Office: (X-XXX) XXX-XXX-XXXX Pager:
>XXX-XXX-XXXX / XXXXXXXXXX@epage.arch.com
>
Steve,
I teach aerospace science for Utica schools called Project INSPIRE. We
are located on the old NIke site, housed in the three remaining barracks.
I would be happy to have you visit sometime. I work school hours plus
many nights. On occasion, we meet on Saturdays for rocket launches. We
are closed this week for school vacation, but I’ll be back next week. I can share what I know of the site, and can show you blueprints of the layout and demolition plan from the 70’s. I have always been interested in preserving the history of the site.
Raye
Raye Klopfenstein
rk4mucs@ucs.misd.net
Director – Project INSPIRE
UCS Shadbush Center
4681 Riverbends Drive
Shelby Township, MI 48317
(XXX) XXX-XXXX
FAX (XXX) XXX-XXXX
www.macomb.k12.mi.us/utica/inspire/
www.ucsinspire.com
—
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]
Gee, the lot of uranium-doped marbles that I ordered are less radioactive than the calibration sample on the side of the geiger counter. This sucks.
Gah, what a time for /var/storage/Large to start clanking. :(
And, broadq QCast Tuner seems to crash jdk1.3.1 under FreeBSD 5.0. Hmm. Moving back to 4.x wouldn’t be that hard, but recompiling Java would be a chore.
I just had an interesting idea:
You all know that random number generators are not truely random, as they generally get their input from something that could theoretically be predicted (temperature, radio background noise, etc).
I think it would be interesting to see if a person could be used as a random number generator. The data could be fairly easily gathered by sitting a person down at a speech recognition device that will respond to ‘one’ and ‘zero’ or ‘yes’ and ‘no’, recording them as bits in a key. If the person were to rattle off 1024 yes/no or one/zero answers, then you would have a 1k key. My presumption is that if you told a person to randomly pick one of the possible answers, they would tend to get fairly random after a while. But, it would be interesting to see. Standard tools for analyzing randomness of data could be used to see just how truely random the person is. It wouldn’t be hard to collect a number of high-bit samples from an individual, nor would it be difficult to collect samples from any number of people, allowing for proper analysis of a human-based random number generator. It’d also be an especially geeky way to generate PGP/GPG keys.
Also, WeatherBug says that it is 0°F outside right now. I’d confirm this, as about an hour ago I was buying gas somewhere in the 9 Mile and Woodward area and I was just standing there, shaking, being amazed at the stillness of Ferndale and how crisp and dry everything seemed. At those temperatures snow is almost like gravel. It’s no longer slippery, it’s almost like the dirt on a freshly plowed country road, crunchy, blowing in bizarre egg-dipping-oil-like patterns across the highway.