Hawaii Five-O wherever I go…

Recently I have been reminded of some of my favorite memories of college days. I went to BYU in the early 80’s. It is by far a conservative school and is always #1 in the Stone-Cold Sober Schools list that comes out each year. When my sister first attended BYU in the mid 70’s the dress code had loosened to allow girls to wear pants or pant suits. Just before I arrived on the scene in the early 80's they had just started to allow jeans on campus.

I remember rushing to my M,W,F morning class in the fine arts building. Depending on what time I left I might in fact be stopped for a daily tradition. The national anthem would play and the flag raised by the ROTC. I believe the same happened to lower the flag in the evening but I rarely remember being on campus during those hours. Everyone within listening distance would stop in place and wait for the anthem finish.

Another tradition happened late at night sometime shortly before the library was to close. A different anthem would play – the theme song from Hawaii Five-O. In such a quiet place that was still laden with card catalogs, it felt odd to hear such upbeat music playing over the loud speaker. We would joke that it was to wake everyone up! It was the anthem for library closing time. I cannot hear the song today without thinking of those late nights at the library decades ago.

Last week CBS announced that a new “reimagined” version of Hawaii Five-O will begin to air fall 2010. I’m not always fond of classic things being reinvented. Time will tell if this remake of the series will live up to its legacy.

Two nights ago it was Nick’s pick for movie night. He chose a fascinating show I had never heard of before called “The Dish”. It is all about the Apollo 11 mission but from the perspective of Parkes Australia (with some license to make the story better than the real one) where they housed the southern hemisphere satellite dishes that produced the first images of men on the moon. I recommend it as a good movie. But here is a spoiler. In a scene where the town was welcoming the US Ambassador, a teenage band was asked to play the Star Spangled Banner. When it was time to play, the song that came out was the theme song to Hawaii Five-O. I'm guessing it didn't happen that way in reality but to me it was classic.

Becoming a Maker [Geek Warning]

I've always been interested in electronics, but have never been very good at it. Lately I've gotten into working with the Arduino microcontroller system and I was looking for a project. Here my work life and my hobby life intersected:

This project was born out of necessity. We needed a way to interface our DriveSafety DS-600c simulator to our MindWare Technologies BioNex system.

While the BioNex can receive TTL signals via a 9-pin D-sub-miniature connector, there was not a good way to get at the serial port of the simulator's host machine while it was running. At least, not one that I could work out in a reasonable amount of time. However it was very easy to open a TCP socket from the simulator while it was running. With that socket open, we could send commands.

This suggested writing a program to run on one of the existing computers in the rack (there are eight of them right now). However, they are all pretty taxed during a simulator run, and space and temperature constraints suggested not adding another computer. This project, therefore, suggested finding a solution which met the following requirements:

1. a small footprint
2. low power consumption
3. easy programming
   
4. easy to interface with components etc.

Enter the Arduino: For this project I've used:

1. Aruino Duemilanove
2. Ethernet Shield
3. a small proto board (Radio Shack)
4. project enclosure (Radio Shack)
5. PCB-mount 9-pin D-sub-miniature connector
6. 6 resistors (5 22kOhm for TTL pins, 1 560 Ohm for the power LED)

Currently, this is *very* primitive. There is no acknowledgment of a correct or incorrect command. Also, after powering up the system from the USB connection, you have to hit the reset button or the network connection won't work. I understand this may be common to the Ethernet shield.

On the other hand, it seems to work very well.

If you're a geek, read the full post here.

This is what happens when you go the extra mile

Nick asked me to make him a list of what I wanted for Mother’s Day. He knew it would include cleaning because the reality is a clean house put s me in a good mood. Doing the cleaning myself does not put me in a good mood. Getting it cleaned and then having everyone else undo the work puts me in a bad mood. So keeping with the saying “if momma ain’t happy nobody’s happy and if daddy ain’t happy nobody cares” he took my list.

Well Nick and the boys did most everything on my list on Saturday. Ahh it felt great to wake up to a cleaner less cluttered home! Then Sam had to stay home from church as he threw up again early Sunday morning (oh that part of waking up wasn’t so nice). Nick stayed home with him. Upon returning home with Dan we found Nick had cooked up a nice lunch (but more like dinner as it was a big meal). But he strayed from the list and tried to go the extra mile. He decided to turn on the self cleaning oven while we were gone so the oven would also be clean. As I’m looking at the good food he has cooking on the stove I notice my cute Tastefully Simple collection of various spice mixes that sit across the top of the stove ledge. They looked like they had fallen down and not been put back carefully. But on closer inspection they were melting! OK I know it’s just spices but they look so good lining it and honestly there aren’t any other good places to keep them all. The bottles don’t stand up right and some can’t stand up at all.

I was a little sad and trying to resolve what felt like unnecessary sulking about spice bottles -kind of like don’t cry over spilled milk. I didn’t cry but knew I couldn’t replace all of them as some of the spices are no longer available. Then purely by accident I ran across a solution online. I found this cool set of glass spice jars and they were on a great sale. Even though I really didn’t feel a need for a mother’s day present where money was spent I still ended up with a little gift. I can’t wait for it to arrive so I can transfer my spices and come up with some way to label them.

So sometimes when you go the extra mile things don’t quite turn out as planned. We never had a problem with the bottles melting in previous uses of the self cleaning…or when was the last time we did it? But it all worked out. I’m now getting an extra present.