Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay, my favorite presidential candidate is still a white man… (Kucinich). However, I’m donating equal amounts to three different candidates – Hillary, Barack, and Dennis – and I’d be happy with any of them, I think. Barack is a little too religious for my tastes, but on the other hand, somehow strikes me as less corrupt than the average pol. Hillary is both a woman and in favor of sane health care.

I’m no longer worried about the possibility that Ron Paul might be elected.. I think that he’s a further out in the fringe candidate than Dennis [and that’s saying something]. On the other hand, I would have bet money against Dubya’s re-election – one shouldn’t discount the politican’s natural tendancy towards cheating. It may just come down to who cheats the most successfully this round..

I don’t actually know that much about the political scene any more, since I don’t watch or read the news. I’m completely out of touch with world events and I continue to like it that way.

I’ve been working on my EV projects again… I ordered some more programmers for the mk3eb boards (I seem to toast them with alarming regularity), and I’m waiting for those to arrive – in the meantime I’ve started massaging the code and started thinking through how the code for the master computer ought to work. My current system has a single process with all functionality built into it, but I’m going to replace it with a process that communicates with the serial EB and accepts network connections which can post messages to and receive messages from the EB. Combined with some filter logic, that ought to give me a much more flexible and easy to develop for system.

One of the things that I’m thinking about right now is the message abstraction class. Currently I’m building packets manually, which requires the developer to understand exactly what each message means – I don’t require the developer to ham and crc the packet – there are functions for that – but you do have to know what the functions and arguments to those functions are, which is kind of messy – I’m thinking I should wrap it all in a nifty li’l wrapper so all a developer has to do is $message->QueryVolts(unit => 14) and they will get back 12.82 as a answer. Of course, it may not be worth the trouble if no one but me is ever going to use the system, which is entirely possible.

Another incredibly nifty battery has appeared – Lithium Iron, lifebatt.com – a little pricy for a car, but I’m thinking of converting the yellow scooter using them.

Until fairly recently I was working 50-60 hours a week – however, with being laid off from Arbonne and with the software development people paying me in stock instead of dollars, I’ve had a little time to work on my own projects. However, if more paying work doesn’t appear soon, I’m going to have to start brushing the dust off my resume and pounding the pavement..

Fairly recently I was looking at resumes to try and hire a local Flex/Java programmer. I can’t decide if this process made me feel better or worse about my job prospects. I keep hearing about how people in the computer industry are being laid off.. I want to think that I’m in one of the top tiers of skill level, but unfortunately the things I’m really good at – assembly for microcontrollers, writing device drivers for linux, writing perl & C for linux, writing C++ windows applications – there just isn’t a lot of call for. Maybe I should go write some video games for cell phones..

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.