Walk Softly and Carry a Big Schtick - July 27th, 2006
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08:42 pm
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...The band begins at ten to six when Mr. K. performs his tricks without a sound...
More odds and ends. By the way, I made it to Tulsa, I'm at the Embassy Suites. Wednesday was grueling, I spent 13 hours in airports and airplanes, but today was reasonably productive.
We're working with a nifty little widget. It's a 32-bit computer, has two serial ports, ethernet/internet capability, and has a few general purpose i/o lines too. (So you could hook it up to a motion detector and a buzzer, for example.) And the deluxe model has two USB ports as well. Now imagine that the basic model is the size of a small pack of gum, with an ethernet jack in the end. You need some kind of additional board to plug it in to wire up the com ports, of course, but it's still very small. That's what we're playing with.
We got G.'s laptop more or less working with the hardware; one of the development pieces of equipment requires a parallel port, and we think the reason we were having some trouble is because it's on an old, slow laptop. So tomorrow he's bringing his desktop box. Meanwhile, I don't have a parallel port at all, because I'm on a modern laptop; my parallel port card for my laptop will arrive tomorrow.
I had Kinko's print and bind five technical manuals for me, four of which came on CD-ROM and the fifth (a 400-pager) I downloaded off of the net. So I'm going to ponder those; and, I bought a USB-serial port to play with. I'm hoping to make a little character echo program where anything I type on one port is echoed back on the other one. Maybe I'll have it change the case - so "[Chaz Baden]" would turn into "[cHAZ bADEN]" (but the brackets would be unchanged). I'll do that if I finish early and I'm bored...
And to satisfy everyone who wants to know everything about all these ribbons, here's part 22 in the series. Tonight I'm covering one old and several new ribbons.
Christian B. McGuire came up with this idea, in 2004. He wanted me to make some up for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lynxcat to wear. His concept was to have it be old english style letters, in black/gold. My contribution to the project was to pick the font and get them done.
Typeface: American Text.
These "Dangerous Curves" ribbons will be ready in time for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) laconiv. I've even picked out who I intend to have handing them out. On the highway of life, there are sometimes some dangerous curves...
Typefaces: Blado and Webdings (I modified one of the dingbats to get the S-curve).
   
kgkofmel asked me to get some ribbons printed for her. She's been handing out "Friend of Kim" ribbons for a while (and keeping a ribbon that says "Kim") for herself. I designed this version, where we have a "Friend of Kim" slug (the black rectangle) that the ribbon ladies can use with the "SIG" part hand-set next to it. This is only a mockup of what those three ribbons will look like; I expect the actual production ribbons will have the "SIG.Cons" (etc.) at the bottom of the ribbon instead of in the middle.
Typefaces: Gill Extra Black (I think) and Blado; typeface for "SIG.Cons" etc. unknown. (Goudy Old Style used in my examples here, but that's not what they have.)
Current Location: Tulsa OK
Current Mood:  chipper
Current Music: none, just the shouts of kids running through the corridors
Tags: ribbons
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