A Thousand Words

I do believe I have about finished the major design work on the site and settled on a theme that seems to suffice, for the moment at least. I reworked a few minor items, mostly noticeable only to myself, and added a "StumbleUpon" link for the entries. It seems to be what all the cool kids are doing these days. Alright, so perhaps it is mostly us geekiarchs. The remainder of the site shall forever, or at the very least a few days, be a work in progress.

Now, while I seriously doubt I will be able to produce a thousand meaningful words on the subject, I thought I might spin a few about the top banner image. I had a picture taken of a few odds and ends that tend to continuously find there way onto my workbench. Not being content with a mere photograph, I was required, per the code of all who work with technology, to "tweak" the image inside Photoshop to suit my tastes. As I look at the image for ways to best describe what is there, I am struck by just how delightfully the picture has captured my passions.

Going across from the left to the right, we first can see the head of my digital calipers. Unfortunately, the Sherline Lathe would not quite have squeezed into the 944X160 pixel image, but suffice to say the two really go hand and hand for me. I have only been machining for a short while now, 6 odd months, but there really is no replacement for properly manufactured parts, and the curly-qs produced are an added bonus. Of course the Maxim's Maxim had no small part to play in my diving head first (more of a belly flop, truth be told) into micro-machining, but that is a story unto itself.

Moving along we come to a circuit board, complete with all manner of components firmly soldered into place, not to mention a few LEDs. And who doesn't like LEDs? It is not just any circuit board, but rather the controller board for the Sandwich Line Following Robot by David Cook. Properly named "Herbert." The robot, not David. Of course all my robots are named "Herbert," is it really that surprising?

Resting atop the PCB board are a few miscellaneous parts including a micro servo used for, you guessed it, robotics. Directly below is yet another in the series of the robotics madness, a standard universal breadboard, showing off the latest in fall fashions with it's test circuitry all ready to assist in the solar charging of the NIMH battery pack used to power Herbert the gutter bot, with it's MAXIM (no relations) 8212 IC and MOSFET accessorizing the package. Excuse me, I seemed to have geeked out there for a moment. I am sure I have a prescription for that some place.

Now where was I? An Intel Pentium chip WITH MMX technology of course. Leading us into the Information Technologies field and my love for computers. Yes, I am as surprised as you are that I still have one of these processors. No, you can not have it. It was used in the picture mostly because I did not have a spare "modern" processor floating around, and I was afraid the 80X286 processor in my closet would have dated me too badly. I have a sixteen year old daughter to do that.

The last two objects rounding out the image are a soldering iron and a spool of inductive coil (aka copper wire), pretty self explanatory. Not quite the extravagant finish one could hope for in such a list. If only Sherline produced a Mill that would fit in the picture, now that would have been an ending. C'est la vie.

Oh, incase you were wondering (because who wouldn't, right?), the binary code at the top and bottom reads "I Am. When?", and the vertical states "Now" Four words instead of a thousand, but they will do.