We have also finally added ALL of our wedding pictures, and pictures in general from our last trip to India.

They can be found in our Photo Album page or by clicking the following: Photo Albums.

Here’s a sample, hard to believe this was nearly 2 years ago!

This change in temperature allows for the perfect conditions for brewing beer. I’ve been involved in Zymurgy off and on since I was in college, and have brewed most all types of beers to varying success during that time. At one point in time I was a purist, brewing only All grain beers… Now a’days I’ve given into extract brewing… And I have found that Northern Brewer provides very high quality kits, and strongly recommend them for beginners and lazy long time practitioners as well. This year Geetha and I will be putting up 3 batches: California Common, Bavarian Hefe Weizen, and a Belgian “Strong” ale. That’s 15 gallons of beer… hmm…

My second Fall hobby is robotics… Specifically the design and building of little autonomous devices that skirt around the house under their own power… Mostly I’ve built straight from kits as to learn the basics of circuitry and electronics… This year I’ve jumped off the deep end and have actually aquired the equipment necessary to actually program embedded microcontrollers, specifically the microchip PIC based MCUs (16F877A). Long and short? I’ve been spending quality time wrapping my head around hex numbers and assembly programmers, and toying with such fun stuff as hardware based PWM, and the like… Yes, declaring my geek pride to the world, but for some reason these types of challenges I find so totally intriguing…

That’s it for now, I may create new sub-sections of the blog to account for my adventures this year into these two hobbies… Maybe even perhaps draft some “how-to” on microcontrollers as the general information available to newbies is relatively scarce…

The house is languishing in need of repairs, my student loans need to be checked up on, the lawn needs to be mown, I need work with Geetha to book at least our flights to India this December… etc… Seems like the the only think we “make” time for these days is work, and if it isn’t work, it just kinda never get’s done.

I guess this is my confession, of course, it is a confession that will go unread, as it would appear that no one has actually checked these pages in quite some time (which of course is, in and of itself, symptomatic of the subject of this post, because I have failed to keep these pages up to date out of sheer laziness).

I recently attended a seminar on “leadership,” in which it was put forth (If I can rememer correctly), it takes doing something 21 times to create a habit, 100 times to create a behavior, 1000 times to become nature. Or some such…

That being said, I will attempt to update this blog, once a day for the next 21 days and see if a habit will truly be established…

I thought it would be cool to be able to automagically mark the sites listed in my blogroll if they had updates within the past 24 hours… So I played with a simple function to read the rss feed of a WordPress site, and calculate the age of all the articles… Not sure if I’ll go much further on this considering that not everyone uses WordPress and it could be a veritable nightmare trying to generalize grabbing the date from various rss schemas…

The second thing I tried, and this could only come from a sleep deprived brain, was to write a function to do a rough calculation of the moon’s phase based upon the current date. Generally my insomnia follows the phases of the moon, so I think yesterday around 3am, I was curious what the current phase was… :-) Well I found an algorithim written and C, which nearly literally translated to php, and viola… I thought if I could find some opensource images, I’d write a little plugin for wordpress that would allow users to “stamp” their posts with the phase of the moon…

Anyway, if you’re curious about these silly functions I have published a new “page” on the site for me to test them: php tests.

Along the lines of 3/4/5 and many other interesting dates we’ll encounter in this first decade of the new millennium…

Undoubtedly you’ll notice that today is 5/5/5.

But did you notice that it is also the 125th day of the year, and 5*5*5 = 125?

(It’s also the 5th day of the week, depending on which calendar you observe…)

Scary isn’t it? Anyone from the Indian side of the family care to comment on if this is Auspicious or not?