Voting (by sarah)

Barbara gave me a lift up to vote - now I'd read the stuff that had been sent through but realised I had decided who I wasn't going to vote for ie all those nasty fascist parties that seem to be creeping out of the wood work but hadn't actually gotten around to deciding who I was going to vote for.

So I had to recall on the spot who has promised what and hope I got it round the right way and feel sad that no one actually represents what I want - there is no one I agree with entirely so have to go for close as without being scary - this does not strike as a partically good way of running things but never mind - at least I got to vote and used the right people died to give me.

I would also like to point out that going up in Mag (the sunshine yellow MG convertable) with Barbara felt I was risking life and limb as she doesn't wait for you to strap in ectera!

Sorting things out (by sarah)

I'm currently sorting things out for a fun weekend of family wedding and meeting up with people - there have been a few hicups already ie getting the wronge weekend for the wedding in Al's diary and concequently issues with his dad's visit!

A friends just had a baby so I'm bring some things down for her as well and have made the wedding presant and card.

I have also been sorting out paper work and my craft supplies and through talking to the local arts and craft people have been instilled with the idea of selling the cards I've been making.

Generally I've had people saying I really should be displaying my art work and things but I just don't know how to do this and have no money to join anything or hire galleries etc...

As Alaric said in hind sight giving up the art classes and writing group to go back to my course right at the point lots of things fell to pieces for me (Alex dying, mum's last lot of cancer and the realisation that we had miss understood/miscalculated money issues plus the situation with being stuffed by my main client) was a bad trade off.

I'm not even sure if I blogged back in the autum that one of my pictures was on display locally thanks to the art teacher.

This is leading me to thinking though - I love science and geology and feel it is part of me but it is easier with pain flare ups and tummy stuff to be at home writing, making websites and doing arty things - but what will make me happy?

I have never react well to having to choose between the two Art and Science. They are not even distinct in my mind but then I have a slightly odd take on things and veiw it all as creative.

I want to try and finish at least the first year of my course but it means more money we don't have but on the other hand if I don't we loose that money already invested in it.

And then the art world is so uncertain - publishing is going through the mill at the moment - big changes the industry are failing to cope with and so traditional avenues are closed but I have noticed new ones opening up - but I am beginner at this game and have no idea how to muscel my way in.

I interact with an extended communitee of writers on twitter but mainly we discuess our kids and the like. I also have science friends on there and a healthy dose of computer people and a few arty crafties but this is only making my dissusions harder.

I am all of these things but modern society doesn't really allow for Jack of all trades especially one who has intermitent health. And so by not choosing I risk achieving nothing.

But I don't think I can choose - my life feels unbalance when I do not have a mix of things.

And at the same time I feel that the house and Jean are priority - I get sick even for a few days and the house descends into chaos and I can not really allow this and so I feel an instinct to nest build until it is all easy to maintain with out me looking over everyones shoulders all the time.

I started this post thinking I was going somewhere and that I had sorted part of my life out but realised as I was writing it that it is all still open questions and discuissions to be made.

The Dr pointed out that I was one person and one person only - I am trying to take this into account with what I plan to do next.

FORTH (by alaric)

Recently there's been some excitement in some corners of the programming languages community over the fact that Forth Dimensions has been scanned in and OCRed and is now available.

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Assertions (by alaric)

Assertions are a useful tool in defensive programming. If you're writing a bit of code that assumes some condition to be true, since that condition being true is a design constraint of your system so it can only possibly be untrue if there is a bug elsewhere in your code, then it can help to put an explicit assert of that condition before your code.

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Bench PSU made from an old PC power supply (by alaric)

My first PC compatible was an actual PC. As in, the original IBM PC - not even an XT. It died a death, but I salvaged the power supply from it, with the nice red switch, to be a bench PSU for my electronics experiments:

It supplies -12v, -5v, 0v, +5v, and +12v. Which served me well for some years, but these days, everything's 3.3v or 1.8v. And my termination setups - first wiring directly into the row of screw terminals on a breadboard, then later a bit of wood with metal strips nailed to it so I could attach croc-clips easily - all left something to be desired.

So I got busy and built this:

Complete with a power LED so I can see at a glance if it's live:

Inside it's quite simple. Most of the terminals are fed directly from the PSU via the black cable, but I added an extra wire for an earth connection to the chassis (which I checked was really earthed) for ESD wrist straps. I mounted 3.3v and 1.8v linear regulators on a bit of stripboard along with the LED and its series resistor, and hooked it into the 0v and +5v lines.

Job done. Now the last bit of major infrastructure I need set up is to get Ethernet into the lab so the PC I have in there for driving the dev boards can access the Internet and my version control system...