Our school was recently lucky enough to witness the construction of a sand mandala. What I didn’t realize is that the tools that the monks use to place the sand makes a really interesting scratching noise. They used one tube with a small channel in it that had ridges on the top. This was scratched with another tube, which lets a small stream of sand flow. The organizers ran a short question and answer session to answer the reasoning and representation of the mandala, and then preceded to perform a ceremony and wipe away the sand into a jar, which was then transported to a nearby lake. They were working on this particular mandala for about a week, from nine to five.

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I give you: ‘Doc’ Brown and Pythagoras!

Doc is the one on the bottom.

They’re gerbils purchased from the local Petsmart. I need to make their power generating wheel now so that they have some utility other than looking cute (see xkcd #231). Anyway, they’re quiet, not smelly at all, and don’t seem to bite (although they don’t enjoy being picked up yet).

Right now, they’re happily digging, digging, digging.

Knots

• I got some new books for the holiday… One of them is The Ashley Book of Knots (Amazon link) published in 1944 by Clifford W. Ashley. Consider this the grand-daddy of knot tying volumes. It’s definitely a reference for any application that you can possibly think of (it even includes necktie knots). I had some 550 paracord that’s been kicking around, so I tried my hand at some of the decorative things. Below is a ‘Carrick Mat.’ It’s a very relaxing thing to do.

I have a coaster now.

Club Websites

• Also, I spent part of my semester designing a new website for one of my clubs, Order of the Golden Lion. Unfortunately, TCNJ hosting has just about every php function disabled (upload, gd library, you name it), and they use postgreSQL. The design isn’t built from scratch (no time, and others know better), and is not as pretty as MTW’s Asian American Homepage, but it works well enough. It uses Drupal, which is a different approach to Content Management Systems than Wordpress is… think Wordpress stripped down to nothing, and it’s up to you which modules (read: plugins) to install. The grand plan is to roll out some package of Drupal for the school so club websites are better.

Standards!? Who needs standards?

• RJ3Labs is now fully w3c compliant! Wooooo! Thanks goes out to the creators of this theme. Also, check the links pages for some new things.
• New CAPTCHA to catch evil spambots.

Upcoming Events

• You should all go see my buddy Vegas Lancaster doing his comedy thing in NYC at the Triad Theater on January 19th. Check the website for details.

Stay Tuned!

Just a quick post post/update:

Check out my friend Ed Koloski’s deviantART page with some of his fantastic pictures of fireworks and urban decay. He currently shoots with a Nikon D200. *someday…*

I’m currently finishing up the last week of school, so I’ll have some posts on my CNC machine on the way. Stay tuned.

It seems lethargy is proving to be quite a hurdle… I’ve been sick the last few weeks, and I’ll be pushing out updates soon. In other news, I got a Weller WESD51 soldering iron, and I’ll be posting a review soon. Sweet!

I think I have figured out a sytem for updating the website. Small updates to a project will go into the regular blog. Upon completion, I will organize select photos into the a formal project write-up. Small projects (”One beer projects”) will be a single blog post, but may get a spot on the projects page, just not the sidebar and a stand-alone page. Hopefully this will work out?

I had a little trouble with getting the static Wordpress pages to have comments. A quick post to the support forums yielded a solution within the hour from “pramodd.” You can check out the solution here.

And just as a quick aside: It’s quite a bit of work going through all the pages and uploading everything. It will get there this week.

Welcome to Version 3 of my homepage. I think I have finally found what I’m looking for: ease of updating. I decided to go with a robust template whose link you can find on the bottom of this page. For those of you who are scoffing… (Bassett, I’m looking at you)… I decided that my time can be better spent rather than hacking together something that barely works and isn’t w3c compliant. Now that I can easily post my projects, expect many more things on the way. Here’s a list!

• Pythagoras Cups
• CNC Machine
• Hilsch Vortex Tubes
• Hard Drive Speakers
• Jacob’s Ladder
• Tesla Turbine
• Baja SAE Things
• Project Organization
• Time Lapse Camera
• Cannons

Alright, this is a big list. I plan on getting information on all of these things here. All of my project pages will have commenting enabled, so people can leave useful information.

I’ll be working to get this template not to look like every other wordpress template on earth, but I’m still pretty happy with this one. Whatever the case, I hope that you will read my site for the content and not be driven away by my inability to make a nice webpage.