davekrnavek.com

job offer!

dave — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:12:10 +0000

got a job offer today! made it just shy of two years of unemployment -- thank god for laura, or else i'd have had to settle for something just to pay bills. instead, it looks like i'll be working for a really interesting company, teledyne scientific. i'd be working as a research scientist, probably working on a few different projects at a time.

needless to say, i'm quite happy...

(laura's gift)

and here's phase two of the celebration. the weekend's project...

butterball!

dave — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:45:02 +0000

there's another nephew down in waco. karen and jerome's fourth boy, currently being referred to as "butterball," was born around 11:00pm on april 20th.

hanging rock state park

dave — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:06:50 +0000

so we had an amazing weekend at hanging rock state park, which is a great park about 2 hours from us. randy and nika joined us (with bali, of course), for nika's first real camping trip. i think it went just about as good as it could have, except for the bug attack on night one.

we took a 4.5 mile hike on the moore's wall trail, which was quite strenuous in places, but had some great views and beautiful scenery the whole way. then we made our way to the hanging rock trail, which is 1.5 miles to the top of the rock, then another 1.5 miles back down. again, ridiculously pretty views, and some very worn out dogs.

all in all, a wonderful start for the camping season...

weirdo

dave — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:43:03 +0000

i don't know how this guy's spine works, but it's a lot more flexible than mine. found bruno napping in between the sofa & chair...

POLLEN

dave — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:07:39 +0000

ugh, this spring has been ridiculous with the pollen. my allergies have slowly gotten better, but it's a mess out there. it's been in the 90's without any rain, so all the pollen is just floating around out there. the pines are the worst -- green dust is covering everything out here. played some tennis yesterday and it was like playing on a clay court. puffs of dust every time the ball hits the ground. fun, fun.

here's a quick shot of the pickup and my boots which were just hanging around outside the door. this was two days after washing the truck, too.

easter!

dave — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:02:43 +0000

well, hope everyone had a great easter weekend. it was beautiful out here, a bit too hot and sunny if anything. we ended up heading over to our friend mike's new house, along with our friends randy & nika, and had a nice roasted leg of lamb. in the shade, it was beautiful, so we spent pretty much the whole time hanging out in the backyard, including lunch (except for the ladies, who still had to prepare the salad and couscous inside).

the dogs even hung out with us, initially each tied to his own line. bruno did his share of barking when we'd go inside for a bit, but when we settled down to eat, he pretty much just chilled out. bali on the other hand, let us know the whole time that he wanted to join in with the meal. so since bruno did so good, he got the first crack at the leg bone, which mike also grilled. needless to say, he was a happy guy.

eno river

dave — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:55:37 +0000

Jennifer & Owen came down last weekend, so we took a trip out to Eno River State Park. It's still not quite green out there, but we had a nice hike with those two, along two other friends of Jennifer's.

The Bruno backpack definitely helped drain the guy's energy. He carried both his and our water...

arduino -> max/MSP

dave — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:50:47 +0000

so i wanted to hook up my arduino to maxMSP so i could use data grabbed from the microcontroller to do fun stuff with audio. maxMSP has some dead-simple serial objects which just read data off a serial port, but i wanted to go a bit further and have my arduino send OpenSoundControl packets. unfortunately, the arduino needs an ethernet shield to send network packets, but since they're usually connected to a computer, i decided to write a c++ program to grab data off the serial port and format it into OSC packets. gave me a chance to play around some more with visual studio...

so here's a screenshot of the program -- it's got a dropdown box showing your serial ports, along with some IP address/port text boxes and a preface string. so far, i'm just grabbing a single byte sent on the port, but i'll probably modify it a bit to allow more precision than 0-255.

and here's a basic arduino program that just sends a random byte every second, for testing purposes.

i made a pretty simple maxMSP patch that grabbed the OSC packet and just changed the frequency of a sine wave, but there's so many possibilities here. multiple people can send data with unique preface strings, and i could do whatever i want with the audio. fun, fun!

--dave

mountain dog

dave — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:35:27 +0000

we're planning on hiking a stretch of the appalachian trail once it gets a bit warmer. probably sometime in may. and we figured bruno's going to be carrying his own weight. so we decided to get him a backpack a bit early, so he can get used to it. also we can use it on walks to drain his energy more -- a big factor in getting this thing early...

so he didn't really know what to think. he was a bit apprehensive, but when we took him out on the walk, he was doing alright. it definitely slowed him down; he was pretty much walking right next to us the whole time. he managed to pee with it on, which was a biggie.

so, definite success.

i'll have to load him up and try and get some pictures of him outside. it's really quite adorable...

--dave

boxes underway

dave — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:26:29 +0000

well, it was a beautiful weekend, so laura figured it was time to start sanding away at the boxes. we've got seven all screwed together, with enough wood for two more boxes. problem is the other plywood is really warped. they've been sitting in a moist pillowcase under some weight for a week plus, but it's not really working. so we figure might as well get cracking on the rest.

so she went at it and got all seven sanded down with some medium then fine sandpaper. we'll be staining them sometime soon and see what we're left with.

anyways, here's the carpenter at work:

--dave