Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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got that wrong
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Thursday, June 18 2015
For part of the afternoon, I tinkered with electronics, trying to get an 8-pin AtmegaTiny85 to communicate as an I2C slave with a 28 pin Atmega328, both of which were using code compiled with the Arduino IDE. The AtmegaTiny85 had to be programmed in a little dongle designed for that purpose. It's got connections for all its pins so that it can do things while it is plugged into that dongle, but it turns out that the dongle interferes with the states of some of those pins enough to break I2C (at least when using the TinyWireS I2C library). Once I'd figured that out, I could proceed, though it made debugging code considerably more complicated; now I had to pop the AtmegaTiny85 out of its socket in the dongle and put it into a version of its application circuit, run some tests, figure out what was wrong, pop it out, and put it back into the dongle for reprogramming. If I really want to work with AtmegaTinys, I'm going to need a programmer with a quick way to switch between programming mode and application mode (sort of like the setup I have for 28 pin Atmegas, though it's more important with AtmegaTinys, since they cannot be programmed in-circuit using a bootloader). In the meantime, I worked with a small socketed breadboard and a bunch of jumper wires with different combinations of male and female ends. I have a good variety of such wires, though they tend to be colored based on the gender arrangements of their ends instead of arbitrarily (so I can, for example, select red to represent VCC and black to represent ground). So I used Sharpie markers and acrylic paint to give them various useful colors. The acrylic wires weren't even dry before my tinkering was interrupted by the arrival of my houseguests, my childhood friend Nathan, his wife Janine, and the other human members of his family.
The last time Nathan and Janine had visited me was a little over twelve years ago. Since then, they've had dogs grow old and die, they've had a biological son, and they've had a series of foster children (and others in need of shelter). Today they were traveling in a big boatlike (and very new) Toyota Sienna with their eight year old son Afton and a foster-daughter named S, a 20 month old African American girl. They'd left their two dogs at home. Gretchen was at work when they arrived, and, knowing my imperfect social skills, had arranged a plate of snacks for me to bring out when Nathan and his family arrived. First, though, the men of the family all made a show of urinating into the narrow strip of woods between our yard and the Farm Road. Nathan is ecologically-minded, and he knew that I would approve.
Soon we were out on the east deck eating the snacks Gretchen had prepared. These included crackers, an artichoke & olive dip, and two different Miyoko cheeses. (By the way, both Nathan and Janine independently figured out that Gretchen had done this prep work; they know I'm too much of a social klutz to have done it myself.) I also busted into a couple beers for Nathan and myself. This included an inferior new IPA from Glens Falls Gretchen had boughtt called Davidson Brothers IPA. Ramona the Dog was delighted to have two kids unexpectedly arrive, although, truth be known, neither Afton nor S seemed especially interested in her. Meanwhile, Celeste the Cat was occupying her own chair on the deck. S nearly said the word "cat," though her language skills were at the point where even her best articulations were only approximations of English words. Nathan and Janine were up in the Northeast to visit her sister and so he could attend some job-related seminar in Manhattan. Gretchen had been lobbying for years that they also tack on a visit to Hurley, and finally it had happened.
I gave a tour of the brownhouse and greenhouse, and we were actually in the greenhouse when Gretchen returned from the literacy center. She hung out for awhile with Janine in the greenhouse upstairs while Nathan brought S with Afton and me up to the laboratory, which Afton wanted to see. He logged into his school's account to show me some animations he'd been working on with the kid-friendly computer language known as Scratch. At some point I downloaded a beautiful painting of nuclear bombs going off in a city for him to use as a single-frame slide in an animation depicting one of his cartoonish characters defeating another. He also recorded some explosion sounds using my microphone, though they would have benefitted from considerably more bass.
After spending a long time on the animation, Afton eventually lapsed into his favorite computer activity: watching videos of others interacting with their Minecraft worlds. I know too little about Minecraft to even know what it was he was watching, but it was as engaging for him as Saturday morning cartoons had been for kids his age when I was his age. Eventually I had to transplant Afton to my Hackintosh so I could check my email and do other basic things on my rig.
Gretchen prepared a dinner centered around macaroni and cheese (a kid-friendly dish) as well as leftover french onion pie, salad, and other things. The weather was drizzly and a bit cold, so we were forced to eat indoors.
Later in the evening, we hung out by the woodstove, where I burned off an accumulation of paper and cardboard. Amongst the topics discussed was my lack of a relationship with my mother and the various things going on with Nathan's parents. Nathan's father had just been hospitalized for pneumonia, though it wasn't anything antibotics couldn't fix. [REDACTED]

Nathan and Afton opted to spend the night down in the greenhouse, whereas Janine and S slept in one of the bedrooms downstairs. It was all fairly tidy down there, as I'd spent more than an hour down there vacuuming and scrubbing earlier today.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150618

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