Words from the null.

It is just passed midnight on Friday morning. Fall semester has ended, and aside from one group paper to get in by 6pm today, I'm done until January. Well, sort of. I still have a bunch of stuff to get done over this break for next semester, but I at least have a little bit of breathing room.

In November, I signed up for the Reddit Secret Santa. The project sounded interesting, and aside from knowing I would be financially broke, I decided to participate anyways. I'm extremely happy I did. I sent some beer related stuff (http://redditgifts.com/gallery/gift/beer-brewing-bonanza/) to someone in Kansas. In return, I got a USB Humping dog and coffee greens (http://redditgifts.com/gallery/gift/caffeine-and-humping-dog/) from someone in New Hampshire. What I find particularly interesting about this whole project is the variety of effort expended in internet stalking the santee's. From the letter I received, I am uncertain how much stalking my santa did, but it really doesn't matter. I'm thrilled with the gift I got. Roasting coffee is something I've been wanting to start doing (to add to my brewing hobby and whatnot). In a related note, roasting grains is something I would like to at least try at some point too (hint, hint). Much less, on Sunday (and this is after the gift was sent, but before it was received), I drove a friend to the airport, and this topic came up in passing. All in all, its been a pretty awesome holiday so far, even if the last few months have been incredibly rough, and I don't have any money to buy presents with. I might have a little bit of time to come up with something to give out, but I don't know whats going to come of that quite yet.

Now, with that out of the way, a couple quick notes about school. This is my third year at DigiPen, though I'm a few credits short of actually being classified a junior in terms of credits. It may well be the end of my junior year before I am one. But that tidbit isn't really that important. What is important, however, is that it is this year in which I get to help build a game console. I don't think I've mentioned this much before. It may have come up when I mentioned I was accepted. Anyways, last years class developed a hand held system known as the Auger, with the intent of doing some cool stuff with augmented reality and games. We are doing something kind of similar, but with more powerful hardware and our goal is portability, but not hand held. I'll try and get some more stuff up on what we're doing soon, but for now, there isn't too much to report, unfortunately. What I do have, however, is to say that we are using the BeagleBoard to experiment with the OMAP3530 Arm Cortex-A8 based microcontroller. this is one awesome little piece of hardware, though we realized too late that the BeagleBoard is much more limiting than we had thought it would be. The OMAP3530 has a bunch of pins dedicated for I2C and Camera I/O that is not accessible on the BeagleBoard. They didn't route the pins anywhere. The next revision of the board is supposed to have that available, but thats not coming until May or so. So! We will most likely be building our own little prototyping board to give us access to just what we need, and ignore the rest. Should be interesting.

I have more to say, but I think I'll leave that to its own post later. I want to talk a little about getting linux running on it and some of the plans I have for my board, as well as some of the plans we have for our console. Good times ahead.

With all of that said, its nearing 12:30am, and I should probably get some sleep. I need to work on getting better sleep and getting more energy to take on next semester (much less the next couple weeks). I have plans to go to GDC as well, but that is still undecided. More to come after I my mind rests.

--nullpuppy(out)