blog.sjwaller.com

I've just submitted my first job application in something like 12 years! Woohoo :-)

Hopefully I'll at least make interview ... then I can let the Gods themselves decide my fate ... and if I actually get the job I'm applying for, the move down south will just be sooo sweet!! 

To be honest I don't think I could have written a job spec that I'd prefer to do - but I have to realize that these days there's probably a billion other people that will be applying for it (and hopefully, nah surely, oh please be ... a billion stupider people than me?!) ... we'll see :P

Anyway, this Saturday is going to be the official "Wave-Goodbye-To-My-Fish-Day" ... sniff ... I think Friday night will be a pretty major chore getting things organized to make the pick-up as easy as possible ...

Saturday morning will involve temporarily re-housing the fish in the small tank into 2 big plastic containers, cleaning out their tank and putting it in the front room, moving the P's into the small tank, draining the big tank, cleaning and drying it as much as possible, bagging up all the gravel and sand, then wait for the guy to come pick them up ... hopefully with some extra muscle as everything is bloody heavy and I'll be knackered by then ...

However, once the tank and kit is gone I can move onto the next phase of my moving plan ... selling, dumping and boxing ...

*sigh* ... but come xmas my life is gonna be sooo different and I'm pretty confident it's all going to be just swell :-)

Fingers crossed indeed!

x

Well it's either a good sign that I haven't written anything here for so long as it might mean I've been very busy and up to all sorts of exciting things ... or perhaps I've just been nothing but a lazy blogger ... hmmmm?!

Actually, I have been busy ... pretty too fucking busy to be honest ... mostly with work - but I'm not going to bore you with that ... Instead I'm going to bore you with my musical endeavours :-)

Since March I've recorded two albums:
Ok so I'm still not what one would call a 'band' or even a 'musician' but I really think I'm starting to get better at making tunes.

I like the stories in Plastic Horizon - they are pretty silly and still make me smile when I listen to them. Lighters & Haystacks on the other hand was supposed to be a step up - thinking about feelings and emotions and trying to write tunes that expressed these sonically as well as topically ... um well perhaps not Cornflakes :-/

Anyway, I've just started on my new project 'the next train' which is soooo going to be amazing I can hardly wait till it's finished - I promise this time your gonna like it ... So far I've added an intro and the first tune - which I like - but will probably sound different come the end of the album. You see I'm going to take care and craft my tunes this time around rather than taking 1 take, messing for 3 hours on a Sunday afternoon or 2 hours Tuesday morning and boosh ...

Aside from that - another reason I've been busy is

I'M MOVING OUT OF YORK!!!

... at xmas

... and my Boss knows so I can start getting excited already!!

I'll be heading down South for sunny Brighton, well Hove actually, well just Hove and probably not very sunny as it will be December ... whatever ... it's going to be great to be close to Gill - we've done tooo much travelling up and down the country this year and it makes sense :-) xxx Hove is only bout an hour away from my family - my Mum and Sister and my niece, nephew and new nephew I haven't even seen in person yet. Will also be cool to hang out with some of my friends - it's been ages guys ... oh and the SEA - Yay! If all goes to plan I want to walk out of my front door, look right and see the sea every morning ... sweet!

And I think that's enough of an update ... I'll post more regularly from now on I reckon ... probably the next time will be when I get back from my boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads in two weeks time ... unless of course I fall in and drown, the boat drowns or Gill drowns me that is ....

Right ... where's that marmalade sandwich?!!

xx

Well I've been 32 for over a day now and have been sitting here reflecting. Sometimes I'm happy with the world and thank God for giving me the chance to experience all the things that make me happy. Sometimes I'm annoyed with the world and wonder about why I bother with it when the majority of things seem to suck.

But to be honest, wether happy or sad, every experience is worth having because it gives meaning to being alive. A sad experience emphasises happiness and vice-versa.

I feel like I'm pretty much in the middle of the scale. In my life I think some of the bad things have been pretty gnarly, but no where near as gnarly as the bad things that others have suffered like the jews during WWII, the poverty-stricken in 3rd world countries or those that have been dealt the dreadful hand of disease etc.

Another thing that struck me is that most of my hero's haven't even lived this long. Jimi Hendrix, for instance, died at the age of 28! Twenty Eight?! Blimey - everytime I think of him or see his pictures I look up ... I can't believe I'm older than he is/was?!

And on that note, I'd like to remember some people who have meant something to me in my life and who never got the chance to live that long. It's wierd as now I have been stuck up north for so long I hardly ever get to see my real friends and to be honest the following people are still just as much alive to me as the rest of them in my mind:

Tanjeev Chadha
http://archive.bournemouthecho.co.uk/2001/4/21/102008.html

Tanj was a great kid. We kind of helped each other out during the turbulent times of school/youth. I'd give him somewhere to crash - he'd go out and sort breakfast. I wonder now though if still alive, would he have gotten over that dodgy scouse accent that he started to parade around ?! Rest in Peace mate ... will never forget ya!

Ben Nodes
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19960403/ai_n14051612

I didn't know Ben too well. He was a year below me at school. But I do remember one summer, in Bournemouth, some kid came up to me and said Ben wants to speak to you - he's outside Happy Land. It ended up that Ben had been having a pretty heavy time and was in need of a chat with someone who, evidently, had also had his fair share of pretty heavy times. We chatted, it didn't help that much, but nevertheless I remember it well. After everyone had left school, a lot of my mates used to go out raving, as well as Ben. From time to time I'd go too. Anyway, Ben died at one of these raves and I never really got a chance to chat about our 'chat' outside Happy Land all those years before. He seemed another great kid and I'm sorry his years ended so abruptly.

Howard Miller

Howard was a brother of my Mum's boyfriend. I'm not sure exactly how old he was when he died but I think he was around 32 .. .possibly 34. Anyway, out of all my mum's bf's brothers at the time, regardless of how 'naughty' he may have been, Howard was the one whom I looked up to. He was pretty cool, and made people laugh. Unfortunately life must have really pissed him off that little bit too much and he is with us no more.

Taffy

I went to University for 3 years in Bournemouth. Taffy was, hmmm, a live wire. Although I was never one of the 'popular' posse as was he, I connected with Taffy on a certain level and we would have pretty serious chats every now and again. Actually sometimes they weren't really even chats - more of a nod in recognition of stuff or both a frown at someone who may have said something unknowingly naive. Anyway, I was pretty much gut-wrenched when I found out a year or so from one of my other Uni friends that Taffy had died. If your listening dude "You fucking nutter!"

---

Anyway, for those of you still here, if you do get pissed off with the shit, or if you do feel over the moon with something groovy, or whatever ... please appreciate that your feeling something ... because any feeling is surely better than no feeling at all?

Bless you all

x

Haven't written anything for ages so here's a brief catch-up:

• Peru was great!
• Jungle fever wasn't so great
• Nor were the broken ribs!
• Missed out Xmas
• Missed out New Year
• Been working like a crazed man since
• Been making more tunes like a crazed man since
• I still love making music!
• Piranha tank has 8 occupants
• I still love my P's!

And thats about it!

Oh - and for any of you that liked listening to my music (?!*%) then I should tell you I deleted my MySpace account coz it was shit. Instead, you can find all my work here: 

• http://music.sjwaller.com

It's a way better place for putting my tunes as I can put as many tunes as I want, sort them by album, users can download in whatever format they wish, read the lyrics etc.

Hope you like the new stuff - Plastic Horizon is this years work - and I'm kind of trying out different genres. Last years Space Caffeine was all about, well, Space and Robots ...

I will try and update this journal more frequently,

Promise ;-)

Toodle Pip for now x

It's Thursday night/Friday morning. My eyes burn. My brain feels old these days. It's amazing thinking back to when I could focus for a straight 24 hours on several projects, a computer game, or something completely different ...

So I'm off to visit Peru in a fortnight for a three and a half week trip with my mate Craig. It's going to be awesome. Just had a Yellow Fever jab today and now I almost want to get Yellow Fever so I can sue the company that makes the vaccine and claim some of my £60 back ...

My Alpkit Filo Goose Down jacket arrived this week. It's great. I do feel a bit like a big green bogey when I'm wearing it though. But I'm sure the warmth, comfort and weight factor are gonna make up for it when I'm more than 12,000 feet above sea-level. If not then I hope I get pneumonia (but not really badly) and sue the company to claim some of my money back ...


Half Man / Half Bogey (and a dodgy grin)

And my exercise machine finally arrived on Monday. It was bloody heavy too. It came in bits so had to put it together which was exercise enough to be honest. It's a shame the machine broke after 30 seconds though. The thought of dismantling it, boxing it back up and trying to sort out collection in the few remaining weeks prompted me to get my screwdriver out and see if I could fix it. I did. Although throughout the repair I kinda wished the screwdriver tore a small chunk out of my face on one of the numerous times it got catapulted across the room from the big bastard spring ... perhaps I could have claimed some money back?


Are my legs supposed to feel like this?

So everything sounds great at the moment ... a whole solid fortnight before I fly to Peru. Easily enough time to get my house tidied before I let friends in to feed my fish. Enough time to get things finished up at work too - so everyone will be happy that I haven't left them 'in it' before I go off for a long leave. And what's that I hear you say? Yes ... your legs feel like that because you score less than pathetic on the fitness scale ... although two weeks hard graft might just be enough to score pathetic ...

But unfortunately I've another plane to catch. And that's on this coming Tuesday. And it's going all the way to China. And it's gonna bring me back just four days before the plane takes me to Peru.

Which is why the last week has been completely mental. I've been working through the day and night trying to sort things out that were supposed to take longer than that ... both for late projects at work and for the paper I'm going to give China, and for my holiday to Peru, and my broken LapTop, and my physical fitness, and my Ro-Ccan-Oover (Robotic/Meccano/Vacuum Cleaner) project, and the snail infestation in my fish tank ...

Don't get me wrong ... it's ultimately all very good and I'm very very grateful to have exciting things to do ... but I can't help thinking it used to be a considerably lot easier ... hmmmm ... or was it?

And please don't draw any conclusions about me from the dialogue - it was completely and honestly a socio-technological experiment to keep us entertained during a typically ordinary lunchtime at work.

... heh ;-)

Another weekend passed and another few days of time well spent doing anything other than what I really need to be doing three weeks before I go on my big hol ... oh well ... robots are cool so it's all good right?

So I was happy when my robot muscles and robot brain arrived in the post last week ... and yesterday I set to work with the sole purpose of stripping one of my Roomba's and interfacing with it ...

Here are a few pics of how it all came together:



There's the Meccano arm slightly re-designed to accomodate the servos. The arm is on a Meccano base that is fixed to the Roomba underneath. It clears the floor by about 1cm and provides a tray area for the little breadboards and the Arduino - which is the new brain :-)



Can you see the thick purple wire? Well, that one connects the Arduino to the Roomba's ROI port so I can gain access to all the motors and sensors also power for the Arduino via the ROI. This afternoon I've been sending various test programs to the brain to try and get a handle on communication through the ROI. Also wrote some code that controls the movement of the arm - although there's no fancy AI or any kinematics going on yet ....



Sadly, my last attempt at flashing a new program into the brain caused some kind of hemotoma which led to severe neural damage leaving the poor thing doomed to repeat some buggy test code forever... It sux - the Arduino seems to run the current program fine - but won't let me upload anything new ... think I fried the ATMEGA168 ... I don't seem to be alone as there's lots of posts about this happening online ... As they are only cheap I will have to get a new chip for the Arduino before I can make a video of my robot doing something clever - definately won't be before I go on my hols as I have so much proper work to be getting done before I leave ... Grrrrrr  :-(

This last few weeks I have been mainly going robot crazy. First off, I finished Asimov's second 'Elijah Bailey' robot book: The Naked Sun. It was great ... as are all his books! Then I watched I-Robot and Iron-Man, and it got me thinking ... I need a robot! ... so after looking around a bit I found two broken iRobot 'Roomba' robotic vacuum cleaners on ebay, bid on them and got one for £25 and the other for £10.



Afer a bit of tinkering and parts swapping - I now have a perfectly working Roomba (the silver one) cleaning my floors - hurrah!! But the great thing about these robots is that they are totally hackable :-) And this is what I plan to do with the second fella (the green one). He does everything bar vacuum - so it's a perfect platform to build on and have some nerdy robotic fun and games :-) Microsoft have released Microsoft Robotics Studio - which is a great free platform for visually programing robot logic - like controlling servo's, motors, reading sensors etc. and they have support for Roomba too :-)  which makes it a good place to start learning.

However, I also got hold of a set of classic Meccano! Remember that? So today I  have spent a perfectly sunny afternoon being 8 years old again building things with my new toy. The box came with a leaflet for building a crane, a car and a plane, which nice as they are, weren't exactly the reason behind geting it ...

... but this was:



hehehe ...



... can you see what I did there?  hahaha ... it's an arm with 5 or 6 degrees of freedom (shoulder x2, elbow, wrist, hand ... and grip).

To get this moving I'm gonna have to grab a bunch of servo's and a programmable AVR microcontroller. It will take a bit more work interfacing with my Roomba ... and I'll probably have to ditch MSRS and just wire Roomba's sensors and motors into the AVR as well ... but I like a challenge and it's going to be the dope when it's all working.

Watch this space ...

Well, seeing as I'm on a mission in Peru for most of November ... I thought it only right that I purchase my first proper digital camera so I can capture all the crazy things that I get to see :S which means for the last few weeks I've been checking out various cams and stuff online. I kinda wanted to stick to around £150 or less as a budget and hopefully get something not too big, manual control, took normal batteries and had a decent zoom ... anyway ... to cut a long story short I ended up buying a Cannon Powershot A650 IS ... the other choice was a Nikkon Coolpix P5100 ... but the Cannon won coz it had a better zoom and took normal batteries ... oh and it has a fold out multi-angle lcd screen :-)

And as every new camera owner surely must do ... I spent the first evening taking pictures of crap in my front room all up close and stuff with the macro setting:




Oops - that's not a macro shot - that's a picture of my special hat designed to save me from any ill effects that may occur after that LHC machine kicks off ... hmmm ... 

Right ... macro shots of stuff in my front room:



Some may think this is a mouse when in actual fact it's my cunningly disguised spaceship ... guffaw guffaw!!! ...  yeah ... I'm prepared.



And now I bet you are thinking I'm gonna say this is some kind of engine for my gettaway machine? Well no ... it's a close up of a skanky old microphone.



having mulled over thoughts of seas made of grated ginger nut biscuit ... I've settled for the idea that somewhere out there is a whole planet composed of nothing but tobacco. it would have a lump of squidge circling it as a moon, the sea's would be made of Rizla and the sun ... well - that'd just be a ball of flames innit...

*sigh*

Oh, it wouldn't be fair to neglect my little fishes now would it ... so thought I'd check out how the camera was at shooting vids:


Hope you like the music ... and it's not Sunday but who cares right?

:D

So some guy came and picked up the Jardini the other week. Hope he's doing well and not too gutted he is now the proud owner of a mental fish ;-)

As for life aquatic here, I decided to rethink my main tank and try to create an Amazon biotope. So I've done my homework and come up with a 'not-quite-Amazon' theme. In the picture below you can see what it looks like at the moment. I've gone for a gravel substrate, bogwood, Giant Vallis Vallisneria, Common Amazon Swords, and some Java moss. Okay, so an Amazon biotope would normally have a clay/sandy substrate but my experience with growing plants in sand has never been that good. Oh - and Java moss is from Asia ... but it looks nice when it starts to take hold on the bogwood and across the gravel.

Anway, far from finished, check it out so far:



The idea is for the Vallis Vallisneria on the left to grow really high and start to form some cover as it grows across the water surface from left to right. I'm also going to add some surface plants, perhaps lillys or some kind of Duckweed to help keep the tank a bit dim. Gotta find something from the Amazon though.

Oh, and the reason I want the tank to end up quite shady is to make it more comfortable for it's inhabitants:



Can you spot him? This is one of my 4 baby red belly Piranha, or Pygocentrus Natteri if you prefer :-) Okay - so I used to keep Piranha and was always moaning about how stressful they were and how cannibalistic they can be. But this time I only have four and my tank is twice as big as the old 4x1x1.5. And if the plants take off there will be plenty of places for them to lurk between meals :-)



Here's another pic of one of my babies digging through some gravel looking for bloodworm. This dude had a chunk missing from his back when he arrived :-( Hopefully it will grow back nicely over the next few weeks. Piranha have remarkable healing skills - which is good as when the are this size they are very 'nippy' ...



I was sitting really still for about 15 minutes to get this pic. The slightest movement would have them darting back to find cover behind the bogwood.

Anway, it's gonna be interesting to see how the P's get on with the plants and if I need new lighting or a CO2 system. Time will tell ...

I'll post more pics when I get the next batch of plants and also when the P's start getting bigger ... and hopefully it won't just be a tank full of algae :-S