Andrew Underwood

Binary Analog Clock

The last place I moved into had a clock hanging on the wall, didn’t ever pay much attention to it since it was in an unnoticeable place in the kitchen. When I moved out I took it with me and had plans to make it into something more interesting since it was as plain as clocks come.

I put this background on it that turns it into a binary clock. Black is low, white is high. Read it by seeing if the blocks the hands intersect are high or low (the minute hand isn’t quite long enough and the hour hand is a bit too long). It’s read from the outside to inside. The inner 4 rings correspond to the hours and the 6 rings past those are for minutes. This clock is a bit different since it counts from 0 to 11 instead of 1 to 12.

In this picture (it’s not upright) the hour hand is over black, white, white, black. Which corresponds to 0110 in binary equals 6 hours. The minute hand is over black, white, black, white, white, white. Equivalent to 111010 binary = 32 + 16 + 8 + 2 decimal = 58. So the time is 6:58.

CD/MP3 Player

I’ve had my CD player for three years now and I dropped it tonight while out running.  It exploded sending parts everywhere.  This is most likely due to me taking out all the screws two years ago and never bothering to put them back in.  The reason I was trying to take it apart was that I had dropped it before and the only thing that broke was the spring on the open/close slider.  I wanted to fix it but never was able to since I couldn’t even seem to get it open.  Thus the reasoning that it doesn’t need screws.

I picked up all the parts after it was dropped tonight and went home.  I’ve been thinking about MP3 players for a long time now but I wasn’t going to buy one until my CD player gave out.  This is because it plays MP3s too.  Storage was cheap, just writable CDs and it had great battery life. The biggest downside was the large size of it, even though it’s small for CD players.
When I got home I spent some time surfing around different MP3 player sites.  I didn’t really find anything that I liked that wasn’t really expensive.  Finally I had a look at my broken CD player and amazingly I was able to put it back together.  I put a CD and it works fine, it just has one more dent.  So it looks like I won’t be buying a new MP3 player quite yet.

Unveiling

Almost this whole long weekend I’ve been working on my new photo gallery. I already had a gallery that was more of a place to dump lots of pictures, more of a filing system than anything else. Now there is an additional gallery that just shows some of my better pictures in a slick design with titles and descriptions. Click the pictures for the description. Check it out and witness it’s operation, there is a tab above for it. It might be best to press F11 to fullsize your browser.

The gallery doesn’t use any Flash, just Ajax. I had huge problems embedding Gallery2 into this Wordpress site because of having to merge two CSSs and making things mesh. I think the end result was worth it though. Although it’s easy to have a neat Flash photo gallery, it blocks search engine bots from spidering your images.

At times the Gallery2 program can be slow on my server for some reason. If anything goes wrong just click reload (refresh).

Build up stupid

Upon seeing huge snowflakes falling past our apartment windows last night, Kyla, Allan and I went outside. We made our way to Churchill Square and decided to start rolling snowballs. These snowballs turned out to be more cylindrical shaped than anything else. The cool thing was, since the grounds are covered in smooth cement it made rolling them really easy and they gained mass and volume very quickly.

What else could we do with our cylinders besides build a snowman. We had to cut two of the cylinders into sections to lift them up to the next level. I had to stand on a garbage can to put the head on.

In the end it was over 10 feet high and covered with all sorts of designs and mathematical equations. Despite me carving a huge PLO into the front, it was gone when I walked past there today on my way to class. The whole grounds had been bobcated I suppose. At least there are pictures, and this video.

Worst Acronym Ever

I just received an email newsletter from the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta. One really has to laugh at this. The following was taken right out of it:

WTF?

The Dean of Arts, in conjunction with the Office of the Provost, established in September 2005 a joint Arts/University Task Force to complete a thorough assessment of writing instruction and writing competencies at the University of Alberta. As a result of its work over the last year, the Writing Task Force has made recommendations (see www.arts.ualberta.ca/wtf/) about writing at the U of A and is now asking for input from students, faculty and staff. Make your voice heard at the upcoming WTF Open Forum on November 23, 2006 from 3:30 to 5:30 pm in Education North Room 2-115.