It has happened. After about 2 years of faithful service, my A620 has kicked the bucket. I bought this camera for about $240 and I can’t say I have made many better purchases in my life (other than the $30 bucks I forked out for my Columbia wrist-watch which still works fine to this date after about 5-6 years of abuse…) As someone tinkering with photography this thing was a dream. It was fairly fast to turn on, had a buttload of manual settings and best of all … A SCREEN THAT SWIVELS. I was told I would never really use the feature and that it’s mostly a gimmick, but this is the one reason why I am not too impressed by “better cameras” that have 10 billion megapixels. What’s the point if you can’t easily take a picture of yourself and a friend? The ability to swivel in most possible directions let me take some pictures I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise - like when taking a picture over a crowd of people (don’t have to be 8 feet tall…) or using my body for support as I take a picture with the camera against mah belly. The unit is also built like a brick. I carried this thing around on the construction site WHILE working on the solar house… while dragging myself in dirt under the deck of the house and it’s had its experiences with gravitational forces of the unpleasant nature.

I am planning to step up to DSLRs and maybe learn more but this thing will be sorely missed.

The following are some of the last pictures it took before it had futile negotiations with fine sand on the beaches of San Diego.

R.I.P.

Well.. after a long stay at dreamhost, I am now moving to hey.nu. LostInCake is now on Hey.nu and Pixelfaction and related stuff will soon be over on hey.nu too!

As for other news… Heroes Season 2 ftw!

It’s been 3 weeks since I started work. And I have to say, I don’t really like working in corporate jobs. For the following reasons:

1. Can’t wear jeans.
2. Can’t wear sneakers (although I wear my nike’s and they haven’t noticed).
3. And lastly, and most importantly, half the people there don’t seem to give a shit about what they are doing.

I know it’s always cool to stick it to the man or w/e but it’s kind of depressing when you are sitting in a cubicle and you hear people calling home to tell their kid to finish his homework, or schedule their tennis games for next week. People drag on work for weeks when they could be done in about half of one. There isn’t a lot of intrinsic push… I wonder if its just government jobs or other places that I imagine to be different. Like people at google, or MS labs, do they do the same shit? i.e. just do work so the next time the boss comes around to check on you, you have something to tell him?

Eh. Atleast it’s paying. I am getting paid about 10/hour but atleast I get to play in software. They didn’t put me in testing (which btw, sucks monkey nuts… giant hairy monkey nuts). The dev team I am part of is working on something fairly cool. We are consolidating a bunch of old spreadsheets that people use to get things working around here into one central system where you have a web based dashboard of some sort to know where people are in their projects across the teams. We are also providing web services for maybe a client application to connect to if needed. We are mostly using AppFuse . Pretty cool stuff. But as I said, when you go out of these small teams, the rest of the like… 60 people on the floor basically seem to want to get to the end of the day as soon as they get in. Hope it doesn’t turn me into that sort of person…

Terps Racing is coming up very soon. Going to Cali for about 2 weeks. The first week I will be at competition and the second, I shall be spending some time with my cousin in San Diego…doing nothing! Should be fun. Oh and Kosta is here! Well… I haven’t seen him yet. He apparently got screwed over by the airlines … surprise surprise… But we are supposed to be hanging out on Monday. I should start some sort of list where I check off names as the meet the people from hey.nu. So far I would only have checked Sari, but soon, Kosta… hmmm…

Well … that was a tad bit long.

Well. It’s here. Officially. I can’t believe it’s been a year since last summer, where I was basically working full-time on solar. Feels like all of it happened yesterday.

Either way, exams are finally done. Speaking of which, the exam I thought I had tomorrow was apparently yesterday. So I come home from the 324 exam in the morning and guess what I find out? My 446 exam is the same day… After about half an hour of studying, and barely staying awake during my second exam of the day after about 2 days of not sleeping much, I am done.

And summer brings good things. First, I have a job! Even better, 2 jobs! I will be working at my dad’s workplace over the summer. $10/hour isn’t a great rate but they are a big corp. company so it shall look good on me resume (hopefully). The second job will be partime-ish with MCPS. They pay me a lot more ($25/hour :D) and I actually like what I do there, so my evenings shall be dedicated to them. It might kind of busy but atleast these things will have set time-limits per day. So after 8 hours per day, I am done with ACS and I can go back home, no questions asked. And after working for 4-5 hours for MCPS in the evening (I can work from home) I can stop and do something else. No more continuing things into the late nights on hairy schedules!

Over the next month or so, I shall also be working/finishing up the Coil Guitars website along with my own. And perhaps work on some of my programming projects.

Oh, and Kosta shall be visiting! And we might be able to bug sari in NYC! w00t.

Should be a fun summer (finally)

Seriously hate this class… But on the bright side, the final exam is two days from now. On the not so bright side, there is a chance I might not pass… REALLY REALLY hope that wont happen. Don’t even care about a grade in the class right now… just wanna pass the course and get done with it.

Was watching Ghost In The Shell - 2nd Gig again a little while ago - awesomeness. The Major is actually wearing clothes this time around. She’s actually a lot more attractive when shes fully clothed in her suit for whatever reason. I guess she just looks a little weird in her “fancy” suits from episode one. They also show a lot more of the emotional side of things… even for the Major… Need to finish re-watching it after the exams…

Upgraded from 2.3.1 to 2.5.2… It’s … different. In a very good way. Wordpress finally feels a lot faster.

But that’s really not as important as…

I am sorry. What did you say? I couldn’t hear you over the FREAKING AWESOMENESS of this movie. Why is it so awesome? Look at the picture… It’s a guy in a robotic suit. It’s got glowing eyes. The dude has a freaking ball of energy in HIS CHEST. What… can not be awesome about this?

And honestly, there wasn’t anything bad with the movie. Yes, a bunch of it is very hard to believe in the real world… but it’s a marvel comic - it’s supposed to be fantastic. Throw into the mix Robert Downey Jr. and you now have an awesome comic flick. Not good enough for ya? How about if they throw in Gwyneth Paltrow? Sounding better? Well it should. She looks … well … as good as she usually does. Definitely recommended.

Yesterday was awesome for several other reasons. One, I finally got a haircut… lost about 2 pounds… it was a lot of hair. Second, Team Fortress Free Weekend! Anyone who’s wanted to try the game out can try it out on Steam for free for the weekend (till tomorrow afternoon or something). And I have to say, it’s a lot of fun. There is not one class that stands out… they are all loads of fun to play. It’s a you-die-you-respawn kinda game so it never really gets that stressful. You are mostly just goofing around.

This weekend ended being a little pocket of free time for me so I will probably work my ass off on the guitar website and perhaps work on my own website in little chunks.

Me want. Well… they can shove the blaster up their asses (actually, it looks kind of … wrong). The actual toy looks awesome though… mmmm.

It’s been a good 4 months since this place has seen any posts. Kind of sad. I am going to make sure that doesn’t happen more often.

Over the past couple of months, I have basically been working my ass off for Terps Racing , both forthe website and the wiring harness and such. They recently went to competition. I, of course couldn’t go because I have an exam tomorrow and a project due over the week (yay). Apparently we came in 6th overall, which is a great improvement over 15th from last year. And this is 6th out of about 80 teams, which is pretty damn good. Our wiring and such apparently held up so it was worth it!

I have also been working on that website for the guitar-prof (aka the professor that is going to sell guitars and needs a website .. I shall just refer to him as guitar-prof from now on… why? cause I can). Things move a lot slower when you are working on a flash-based site. It’s somewhat annoying. But when stuff works, it’s pretty nice. Updates and screenshots will probably show up here soon enough.

I have also spent some time working on my PixelFaction layout. Dusty Wilson @ Megagram has been generous enough to donate hosting so I will be moving over to his server when I apply the new layout. Lost.In.Cake will still be alive as I want Pixel.Faction to be all about my work and Lost.In.Cake will be play. The current layout WIP can be accessed at http://www.aditya.hey.ext.megagram.net/

I recently acquired COD4. It is most likely the best FPS I have ever played - both single player and multi player. The game just… owns… everything out there. There are basically 1 .. maybe 2 moments in the game where you are like .. that’s silly or that’s a blatant bug. It just fits. It just works. It’s just fucking beautiful. When you see something like the following and you know its from in-game… you are in for several cranial orgasms.

Engineering Probability Exam is tomorrow. Why is it tomorrow? Because 5 individuals whose names will not be disclosed (because I don’t know them, or else I would have punched them in the face) asked the professor to move the exam back to Monday AFTER he had moved it to Wednesday to give us more time to study. Thanks guys. I suppose I should go study for that now.

Till next time… hopefully, in the coming week.

So teh christmas is heere. It’s a nice time of the year. Almost everyone you see is cheerful and you get to eat craploads of food for no reason

I’ve also had some time to work on things I have been putting off. One of them is grrimmi’s blog layout. She’s been patient with me so I decided I would sit down yesterday and finish it. At this point, she hasn’t seen it finished, so it’ll be a nice belated christmas present from me… so… Merry Christmas Grrimmi! :kiss:

I’ve also been working on a layout for PixelFaction (another thing I’ve been putting off…). The following are a few concepts. The one to the very left is the latest one that I think I will go with:

Any comments are always welcome. The latest one actually got some good comments from Nina, who is usually very picky (but honest!) and other people I’ve asked seemed to like it. I’d ask sari, but * ahem * WHERE ARE YOU SARRRI? :bummer:

I’ve also restarted my work on Tangelo, which is my Content Publishing System. I will be finishing up a simple barebones CMS for PixelFaction and then resume work on Tangelo.

Have a bunch of other crap on my list of things to do as always

• Coil Guitars (Website for that professor starting a guitar company)
• Animating a character model for NMRiH
  
• Doing some work for INE @ UMD
• Website work and controls for Terps Racing

So… solar is done. It was great and painful at the same time. But now it is officially over (well it was over a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been recuperating…). The following is a little glance at the process:

So what do I do now? Go back to school of course. The first week I came back, I had an interim-deadline for a CS project, two exams and one homework. The exams and homework I mostly bombed. I had to drop a course. You see the trend…

On the bright side, I now have about an hour of classes everyday except for Monday and Friday which I have completely off. I also now have something that can fill up a nice little entry on my resume. I “was part of a team that designed a home automation system for a completely solar powered house that allowed the house to function efficiently” I also now have a name in certain useful places in the Engineering Department which is nice. I also made a bunch of good friends. So I think it was all worth it in general.

Lots and Lots of pics here: https://gaddam.smugmug.com/

Going back to “regular life” is kind of nice. I’ve missed my other friends and (as weird as it might sound) my online type friends. I really did miss spending time with ya guys But as it stands now, I’ll be around more… whether that is a good thing or bad for some of you peeps.

I have realized that I now have time to work on random things like my website and the media center in the living room (all of which I shall probably be posting about soon).

The remaining courses I am taking now are Computer Architecture and Game Programming. Both are quite interesting. Game Programming is basically a semester long game project.

The Game Programming project is a lot of fun. It’s a lot of work, but a lot of fun. Read more about that at: http://www.entropy.pixelfaction.com

I recently found out that my power supply is apparently not enough for my video card. Which kind of blows. I’ve been having trouble with the card in higher-end games and I think the power supply is the problem. A good one costs about 250 bucks… so.. meh.

I’ve been drinking waaaay too much coffee….

I am currently addicted to TWIT.tv

That is all for now I suppose.

This past week, Anthony (the other member of the smart house team at solar) and I worked 8am to midnight (or later) everyday to get a lot of shit done. Needless to say, come Thursday, our brains were fried, and his room (which was our “lab”) was filled with wires, spare chips, breadboards … etc. What were we doing? We were trying to get most of the smart house system into hardware instead of relying on a PC. By yesterday, we got 3 micro-controllers talking over a data bus with each other and some of the devices in the house. This week, we get to work on getting the controllers talking to more devices by ourselves. I get to make temperature/humidity/light sensors talk to the controller. This way, we can monitor conditions around the house and decide on what to do (like turning an A/C on and off). Rambling aside… pictures!

Both of us decided to take the weekend off and work on other things. Hopefully, I will get something else done around the house and such.

Random side note. Was copying stuff to an external HDD for backup. It about 100 gigs of old files and such. This is what Vista thinks it will take to copy over all the data. You will see that about half of it has already been copied over (it took about 1 hour to get to this screen):

Well… time to do something other than solar for a few days. Maybe work on my website… (heh, right.)