rubber cowy

Who knew the importance of a rubber ducky? the little monster now splashes and kicks up a storm if she doesn't have her bath toys to distract her.

FYI that is not a rubber duck it is a rubber chicken.. really now? she also has a sheep and a few other oddball animals.

The cow is my favorite. mooo!

Fashion block 2009

This is the '09 installment of the usual photo op suspect: style week. To be bombarded with pictures from previous years y'all can click on my older posts for 2007, 2007 contd. and 2008. What was new for this year? I left the nosebleed section behind on got behind the ropes[big metal barriers] into the VIP section. I was so close that I could have stretched out my hand and plucked one of the models off the cat walk Mmm.. Everything else was old. In fact the fashion seems to be going be regressing, the models and their outfits where not happening.

I just was not feeling most of what I saw. That second girl had the meanest, scariest faces ever! She looked like she was trying to smite the audience with her mind. I think the previous years had been much better clothes, models and production wise. Disclaimer: don't take my hating too seriously this is coming from a guy who knows nothing about the industry.

They dropped in a priceless gem this year though. Digicel decided to give away a blackberry javelin to the wanna-be-model member of the crowd who could win the most crowd support. The MC only asked for 10 ladies but they streamed on stage one after the other with no relent. Of course the crowd picked the first fluffy girl brave enough to strut the runway. I have to run off to work, I'll finish this post later.

micro controller woes

A couple of years ago I bought a little circuit(pictured top left) that had two relays controlled by a 315MHz radio and a range of 1500 feet. Luck was not on my side or maybe just misused it didn't last a week, it just up and stopped working. I just threw it in my box of electronic parts and forgot about it until I got my micro controller and started to rummage for interesting circuits to interface with it. It was a good thing I didn't throw it away as a closer inspection revealed a radio daughter board that could potentially be used with my micro controller so I swiftly soldered it off.

I had no idea if this piece of the circuit even worked but I carried my bits and bobs to work and started to plug up the breadboard. When I pushed button 1 and 2 I got the led to blink rapidly but it was continuously fluctuating when no buttons were pressed. I made the assertions that it was background noise and that the circuit outputted a +5v square wave. I went to work writing the C code to prove my hypothesis and read data from the radio. I was able quickly get some code to dump thousands of ones and zeros as it just sampled the input pin each couple of clock cycles.

It took me quite a while to figure out what to do with the 1's and 0's but eventually I massaged them into something usable with the help of gnuplot.

This first graph shows a wide view as I pressed button 1 four times. The outcome looked good like there was something usable there.
I zoomed in a bit more and got this second graph, yup a detectable cycling signal was definitely there.

The only thing left to do was determine if the other button produced a similar signal with a different detectable signature and the bottom two graphs showed the signal from the two buttons magnified to a similar point of interest and there was my different but detectable signals where clearly visible. Eureka!

The next problem is to develop C code to detect those two signals in a stream of bits. I wrote my code but it was not triggering when I pressed the buttons. I soon realized I was suffering from the observer effect in which my code to detect the patterns as I sampled the data output from the radio added delays in the detection that changed the signal signature.

I wished I could turn back the hands of time and pay just that much more attention in school, it would have made dealing with all of this a lot easier. I eventually got the circuit matching the signals and it was mostly reliable. Button two triggered all the time and from far distances but button one worked when it felt like. Mission accomplished so I packed my stuff and sent it back home. Of course I attracted quite a bit of attention from my co-workers again during those couple of days while developing the code for it. Those who thought I was working on a bomb before when I was working on the timing circuit eyes definitely popped open a bit wider this time when they saw the remote control. I pulled out the antenna a bit more just to mess with them lol.

UWI Carnival '09

So it's that time of the year again and I found myself at the UWI Mona campus to capture some of the coeds bump and wining themselves into a frenzy last weekend. I was looking at last year's photos and was wondering if I should bother put up any for 2009 after all it's essentially the same theme but then I looked at my stats and of course there is a boost as the search engines push people my way. Why not give the people what they want? so here goes.

We arrived on the campus at the usual start time, 2pm, and aside from the one or two scantily clad girls walking about there was no sign of carnival. I wasn't bothered much though as I was sure I didn't get the dates mixed up and there was another event, Fun In the Sun, going on in the Mona bowl and I could kill some time down there. A few hours passed quickly and it was 4pm when things were just about starting.

The bands weren't as nice as last year, you could definitely tell that something was up.. recession but the kids never minded much as long as they could chip along like conjoined twins joined at the hip. There was less costumes, less trucks, less give aways, these surely are hard times.

As usual everybody got action, the young, the fat, the uninterested and the dorm room railing.

After making a full circle along the ring road they stopped in front of the library and had the competition between the bands which is the worst pronunciation of dry hump session in the dirt. It looks like time was running out so they hurried back around the ring road and debuted Allison Hinds.

By the time they got around to the maintenance section of campus they took out the water trucks and was spraying everybody. I stood from a distance and took a few shots but it was getting dark and I don't particularly fancy the built in flash on my camera so I just made my way back to the Fun in the Sun concert back at the bowl.

See you again next year UWI carnival, hopefully I'll be a student again then.