Kit's Blog

A sample...

I need to actually type some of my stories up. The ones I like are still in written format.

A Curious Christmas Story
By Kit Sczudlo
     Victor walked off the airplane and stopped for a moment. He sighed and looked at the familiar surroundings. It was Monday, December 22, a few days before Christmas. He was heading home to his father’s house from college for winter break. Quickly, he went down and picked up his bags, and as he stepped out into the blustery winter night, he took a deep breath. It was snowing, and he loved the snow. It was something that he missed at college. He looked about and hailed a cab. He hopped in.
     “Quite a night tonight, isn’t it?” the cab driver said lazily.
     “Oh but isn’t it beautiful?” said Victor.
     “To each his own, I guess,” and with that, they were off. The dry heat of the taxi made Victor tired. He stared out the window as glass buildings and lit up trees whizzed by. He thought about his father, only a half-hour away. He would be sitting, drunk and weeping before the fire, cursing his wife, like always. Victor’s mother had disappeared several years ago. No one knew why, or where to, and it had ruined his father. He was drunk and irritable, and did little to stop himself from having outbursts at guests. But Victor came home every year, just to see a little slice of home. It was better than nothing. The cab pulled to a stop.
     “That’ll be twenty-three fifty” gruffed the taxi driver.
     “Hold on a second,” Victor fumbled with his wallet, “ah, here you go. Keep the change.” Victor handed him thirty dollars.
“Hey, thanks,” and with that, he buzzed off. Victor hauled himself up the steps to his father’s townhouse. An orange glow emanated from the living room window. Victor envisioned it, sighed, and pulled the bag over the last step. As he went to knock on the door, it blew open.
     Odd… he thought, and walked inside. His father lay prostrated before the fire, in a pool of blood. The wine glass spilled across the carpet towards the entryway. Victor fell to his knees.
     “Dad?! DAD??!” He called out in vain, his father didn’t stir. And as he scrambled towards his father, from the stereo on the wall came the following.
     “Menace other Neanderthals dear apple. Ye, do everything. Cold embers mangle briers, ever remembering talkative waffles. Entangled nuggets tie yellow towels, wet on ignorant, malformed swallows. Often rigorous ridges yelp in contrived omnipotent underling languishing. Don’t note that! To effuse lumbering lampposts, you opportunely unify butter uncles top yttrium over undulating, raging fires. Actions taken here either repeats what act sequentially happened earlier. Rather, emphasis on nodules lost yapping at silly acquiescence smacking portals. Yam ignoramus. Folly opens unknown noxious dominions. Happenstance instills mountains of unorthodox titters for inexorable reasons sounded too implied. More sickly origins ‘round righteous yaks. If kit, now, only works: yellow orchestras undoubtedly could anticipate new tortoises. Edible, voracious, eternal. Robots fortuitously open rancor gloating invitations. Victor, encapsulate me, eternally.”
     And he wept only harder, for now he knew who had done it, and why.

Creative Writing is excellent

     So tomorrow I'm going to post some stories I've written while in Creative writing. For now, all you need know is that I'm trying to do homework, and I'm totally not posting on my blog in order to avoid it... especially not at 12:23 in the morning... nope... not posting.

Oh, and in case you were wondering how techno-babbly I can sound check out this email I sent out to the robotics programming team (a quick side note should tell you that THEY didn't understand it either):

////////////////////////////////subject: A cookie for anyone who can integrate 200 times a second
////////////////////////////////Body:
Dear everybody on the programming crew,

So with build season upon us it looks like only Matt, Brian, and I care. Oh well, such is life. Anyway, Just to toss a challenge at you that you'll never complete, who can make this happen?

I need to figure out how to read the data the accelerometer gives us. Right now we can get the actual data, but only from one of the ports. Anybody who can get more than one of the ports working gets a cookie (yes, I'll be bringing in cookies, a real one).

Secondly, I need to figure how to integrate the whole thing. This is just basically multiplying it by the amount of time that has passed. But you also need to make it into workable units. Here's the killer, the accelerometer gives data as 290milliVolts per 1 g of acceleration. That's 290milliVolts per 9.8m/s/s. The ADC.c program spits out wildly different values depending on the number of samples you take (look in ADC.h). I need someone to look into what exactly "u"volts are. I think he means *10^-4 but I'm not certain. I'm not asking for the wildly complicated integration, I just want to see who can figure out the conversion factor from what Kevin gives us to an actual unit of measurement.

Thirdly (and probably lastly), I'm looking for anyone who can figure out how to have that whole system integrate at 200 times a second within the ADC program. Okay, no one can do that but me... nevermind.

--Kit

Attached files:
frc_gyro.zip -- This is the code for this year's gyros. You'll want to mess with this MOST of the time. If you think you've got better ideas then go for frc_adc.zip on kevin's website. Most of this code won't be useful until we get to the yaw-rate-gyro, but the bias function will be very useful.

frc_accelerometer.zip -- This code has the conversion factor for the 2005 accelerometer. Don't know if it will help, but it's there if you need it.

Robot is killer

     So with my general strategy of keeping myself under a deathly pile of work that never ends, I'm currently trying to do my Opengl work for NIST mixed with Robotics. This doesn't work largely because I don't have any time after robotics to work on programming Opengl, and that mixed with my current deplorable and questionable skill in Opengl programming in general has rather put a damper on my happy plans for working for NIST. I'm really trying though...

Oh right, and keeping with the general pattern, I added two new games to scuzzstuff, and got my first email from someone who actually plays on the site who I've never met! I'm pretty psyched.