Came across this page at work today. This guy has a huge collection of projects he has built (really cool ones) including a plotter, a 1-pin dot matrix printer using a BIC, a drum scanner, a wooden joy stick and a digital camera from a gutted flatbed scanner. Wow. I wish I could build things like this!
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Just wishing everyone a happy Pi (March 14, 03/14…) day! Once again I’ve cooked up a big huge batch of Pi day cookies. They are round (circles like Pi), they have the symbol for Pi on them, and they have purple icing which has a wavelength as close to 314nm as I can get. Click on the picture to see more pictures.
Here are some Pi day links for you:
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Last night we had some fun. It seems in the strong winds we were having that a power pole (see right) broke, presumably causing a short that caught the pole on fire and knocking out power for our entire neighbourhood for a very long time.
The power went out at about 4:40pm. I arrived home at 5:30pm so Anji and I thought we’d take a look and see what was happening (I had noticed the fire dept was locking like they were doing something on the way home). We wandered over to the location of the fire truck and noticed the power pole broken near the top and at a crazy angle. The cross bar was very black, burnt, and the wires all tangled (see picture). The pole was still glowing red although no visible flames. We, of course, each had our camera on us and snapped away.
We had a nice evening. I, being a flashlight guy, immediately started pulling out flash lights. I always carry a Maglite Solitare in my pocket, a Photon on my keychain, and a Swiss Card w/ built in light in my wallet. I grabbed my bigger Pelican light and kept that in my pocket too. I love power outages.
We decided to have steaks for dinner since we could still use the BBQ. I also felt like beans so I decided to head down to the car and retrieve the backpacking stove and pot. The parkage was awesome. Absolutely pitch black. Apparently nobody thought emergency lighting was a requirement in the parkade. I ended up doing another trip to the parkade latter with a bag of garbage. Both times I encountered people who drove into the parkade, turned off the car, realized there were no lights and seemed a bit lost as to how to find the stairs. I helped them out of that. Also came across a family who was trying to leave without a flash light. I heard fumbling in the dark and finally someone said “Got it” and I saw a car interior light click on as the door opened. Hehehe. People really should have a flash light 
All in all it was a rather fun evening. The power finally clicked on around 3am when we woke up to the lights coming on in our suite.
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Today has been an awesome day so far. I’ve setup a RSS reader called SharpReader at work and pointed it to various news sources and a few friends (Mike and Erika’s) sites to read. It’s pretty nifty. Anji and Kailey came and met me for lunch today and we had those German sausage’s stuffed into a baguette on Stephen Ave and enjoyed the nice weather. Then to top off my day I was sitting in my chair at the office and tossen a very small magnet (about the size of a dime) and it stuck to the ceiling. The guys said “bet you can’t stick a coin to it” so from sitting position I tossed a dime at a target about the size of a dime and it hit dead center and stuck. First try! It was arguably one of the greatest accomplishments of my life! Yes. A great day!
I took a class in University on building Neural Networks and it was pretty interesting but I never really got the hang of it. Anyways I came across this library for .NET that builds simple to complex neural nets and lets you use them. It also comes with a really slick DEMO app that lets you play with NN’s to model functions and do partitioning. Really cool.
