Robot Claw

‘Twas a busy week this week, which is a strange thing to say since I don’t feel like I accomplished a great deal at school. Spent far too much time troubleshooting a lab only to find out that the interference we’d been struggling to remove (by optimizing a circuit) was due to our new voltage probes reading a 60 kHz signal from ‘the air’!!

Home time has been spent playing the mighty Final Fantasy XII, which is worldofwarcraftian in it’s addictiveness. In fact, it’s so good that I hesitate to speculate whether The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess (for Wii, due next Sunday) could tear me away.

Last last weeks Doctor Who – Rise Of The Cybermen – was disappointing. I think it was the first episode of the new series I would describe as anything less than fantastic. Sadly, we were unable to see the concluding episode (Age Of Steel) due to our PVR mysteriously not taping it (while we were off seing Borat at the cinema). So I can’t say therefore whether or not the alternate Cybermen origin tale redeemed itself. As it stood though, the Madame Pompadour episode previous was such a tour-de-force of good writing most any episode would have seemed a letdown as a followup.

And yes, Borat was an amazingly funny film. I haven’t laughed that much at a movie in years (if ever).

Not much else to tell except to watch this space. There may be a seismic announcement in the next few days…

I wish I could update this more frequently, since I really got into it for a while. But I just have so much less time now.

My days are about half filled with working on the course I am TA’ing (TA = Teaching Assistant). Which means testing the labs (circuit design and operation), doing the homework and labs, preparing downloadable solutions for the website and doing the grading. The rest of the time I am preparing my oral exam (topic: Patterson Methods) which has a tentative date of October 19.

Our Holly is in fruit, which is the first time I remember since we bought the house:

< Holly

Just now as I was taking these photos our front garden was overrun with a plague of flying ant-like insects. There were so many we could see them eating the leaves away on one of our plants. We blasted them with evil toxins from a can (which I didn’t enjoy doing, because I expect the collateral damage to spiders and the like was high).

KLS got an early birthday present today – a ‘Rose Coral’ DS Lite:

Which is timely, since she only just started playing her new favourite game, Cooking Mama! This is a game in which you cook (mostly Japanese) food by completing various minigames (such as cutting vegetables or measuring rice). She enjoys it a great deal and has been playing it constantly since I bought it for her. Since it’s a mere $20 here in the States, if you have a DS you may want to pick it up.

I just told her I blogged Cooking Mama, which she is playing as I type, and she said she was just ‘making a spring roll’. She was at the stage where she was ‘ripping the heads off the shrimps’ 🙂

Nintendo finally announced the street date (November 19) and price ($250) of the Wii this past week. I’ll be there launch day to buy one (and Zelda, and an additional controller). The idea of a pack-in-game (Wii Sports) is a great one, and I think it will be very successful for them. Not that they were going to have any trouble selling the Wii in the first place…