an update

Recently, I don't think I've been very good posting about the things to which I've been up. And since it it o'dark early, and I'm still up, I'm going to fix that.

• Printing press: Haven't touched it in weeks, been too busy. I'll get back to it after Houston and...


• GYRE: So, the space robot is about to fly again. In about 2 weeks time, in fact. Hardware ships this Thursday. We're in pretty good shape this year. In the words of hello_mike: It totally fucking works. I spent the evening doing some fun and completely oldschool interface coding for it. I had forgotten just how evil ncurses is, but oh well. Nothing will be controlled via Makefiles this year! So far I have resisted the urge to write a ridiculously flashy AJAX control panel for it, despite all the practice I'm getting at that thanks to...


• Codename: Timehat: Large gobs of my time are being eaten up by a web app I've been working on since April. Some of you know what it is, but I'm not ready to talk about it publically yet. Watch this space in a month or two, though. It's starting to look pretty awesome.


• midint research: Due to a really great conversation at Beth's a few weeks ago, I decided it was finally time to answer to my own satisfaction the question 'What changed since the 19th century that made conventional warfare always end in ugly prolonged guerrilla warfare?' So what time is left over from the above is being spent reading lots of rather dry geopolitical and military theory.

parkour

I haven't been doing much parkour for the last few weeks, due to STP and a very annoying coccyx injury. But I have continued improving my upper-body strength, and I just tested myself on a small run around campus. It's always an amazing feeling when you find your body can do something it never could before.

I'm still not great at wall runs, but I'm not just hanging there useless anymore either. And I finally managed to do a couple kong vaults! They were ugly, but eh. Hopefully now that I've got past the mental block about diving headfirst towards hard objects, I should be able to refine the technique.

My main problem is that I still feel far too self-conscious to practice much by myself. Parkour isn't the most subtle of activities -- it draws a lot of attention.