Summer update #1.

Allison don’t read this until I talk to you or it will spoil all of the cool stories I have for you.

My phone is fucking indestructible. I was talking to Sticky on it in my grandparents’ basement yesterday and it slipped out of my hand, hit my foot, and proceeded to slide at full ramming speed across the floor straight into the sump pump well. When I pulled it out, it was still in my call! Then it shut off and wouldn’t turn back on until I dried it out. After that, I called Sticky but I guess my microphone was waterlogged because he couldn’t hear me, but I let it sit overnight and it works perfectly now. If you have problems with breaking things like cell phones (ADAM!) then I suggest you cancel your fancy-schmancy GSM service plan, sell me your V3 Razr dirt cheap, and I will give you my TDMA Nokia 2260 for free! You will never need to buy another cell phone again.

So, I was just out with some friends the other night, practicing a healthy lifestyle by playing some Ultimate Frisbee in the park when all of a sudden the Po-po rolls up on us three squads deep and gives us what-for. Turns out that when the sign said ‘Park closes at 10PM’ it meant that night. We thought it meant on school nights, honest. Here’s the funny part: it was graduation night for MHS class of ’05 so about 75% of us there had just graduated and we were all sober and exercising, while the rest of the grads were out drinking and the cops busted US! How’s about some o’dat for irony? Some good quotes from the experience:

“It was messin’ me up cuz I saw something flash red so I looked up for the frisbee and it was gone, then it flashed blue, and I was like ‘that aint right…’ and then I was like ‘awww….hell nah.'” (we were playing with a red glow in the dark frisbee)

“See what really messed us up was that we had even teams, then you showed up but you only brought three guys…”

“Guess you guys really met your quota tonight, eh?” (20 tickets x $50 apiece = $1000 Oh boy oh boy)

“Lawrence, you’re up. What now, Mr. MIT? Let’s see you engineer your way out of this one.”

“Way to go, Karna. You go from giving the salutatorian speech this afternoon to getting a ticket tonight. What next?” (we just kept dropping hints that we were pretty much the best kids in town: Navy, Marine, Army, Air Force, MIT, the salutatorian, a national gymnast, a pair of second-year college kids done with or almost done with their majors, a future rock star, what isn’t there to love? The cops never did take the hint)

“Of all the parties on graduation night in Mundelein, it’s the Ultimate Frisbee party that gets busted. There are drinking parties that I know of right now.”
“Yeah, dude, I’ll even go find them for you.”

So that was fun. At least the cops were good enough sports that they took pictures for us.

Sticky and I pulled all-nighters working on his physics project. Here’s the kicker: he turned it in after he got his signed diploma. I know, right? So he and I worked on it all saturday night until 6AM, then slept from 6-10 when we got up and he went home to get ready for graduation. We made a computer-controlled LED array. Right now it’s just a 4×4 array and the LEDs aren’t soldered to the board, but when it’s done in it’s final stage it’s going to be a 7×9 array in the front grille of an Antec case. It’s going to be pretty sweet. I’ll get pics up on this thang eventually (meaning when Stickmasta gets them to me). Oh yeah, and I suffered several burns in the process of soldering the like 200 joints we had to solder on the circuitboard.

I put a new headunit and speakers in my car with the help of Sticky and Harry. It’s there to accomodate my new hard drive mp3 system that I got from teh w00t. It was pretty cool, until in the process of modding out the hard drive cartridge with a new hard drive, I pulled the ribbon cable that hooks the eject button and the LEDs into the main board off. Now I have to either come to terms with the fact that if I put the hard drive in, it’s never coming back out, or I have to find a way to connect the eject button to the main board without the ribbon cable. And, if I do any soldering, I need to make sure I don’t burn the board. Oh well.

Somebody gave me a free computer on the last day of school as I was moving out. I was literally carring a load of my stuff out to Pat’s truck and this guy stops me on the stairs and offers me a broken computer. He said it wouldn’t turn on. I got it working in 10 minutes. So that was a nice little surprise: a free 1.3GHz computer. Not bad, eh?

Well, I guess I’ll just keep truckin’. You do the same. I need to figure out what I’m going to do about my job interview tomorrow. Peace.