Hop to it

Now that I have a charger for my digital camera, I put it use taking some snaps of my hops vines in the garden.

Willamette Hops

Centennial Hops

The trellis itself.

Growing got off to a slow start, but ever since the Willamette vine reached the trellis things have really been taking off!

It's a shame that I've now used that blog title and will now be required to come up with new bad puns regarding hops.

License Plates

There was a SNAFU with my registration and car tax this past week that led to a trip to the DMV, a trip to the county court house and then another to the DMV. When I made it back to the DMV I was quite ticked with the system. To make up for it and improve my day, I purchased the following plate:


I consider this a response to the "In God We Trust" plates that everyone and their brother is running around South Carolina with:


I would like to thank the Secular Humanists of the Low Country for making such a plate available.

Update (20070516): Hosting my own plate images, let me know if they still don't work.

Long time no blog

I realize it's been almost half a month since my last post, but end of semester duties and such take precedence. So in no particular order...

Seahorse: I've been made a co-maintainer and have mostly been focused on bug fixing and mentoring our SoC student, Pinar.

Open Street Maps: It owns my soul and is my new favorite form of procrastination. There is a warning on one of their pages about mapping becoming compulsive. I apparently read the warning and continued without a slackening of pace. OSM has replaced my attempt to use Google Maps' MyMaps feature to detail Clemson University. I have mostly been prepping for a future job with the NRO and updating the map via Yahoo!'s donated aerial imagery. If you've ever wondered where trains go and come from, the imagery is a good way to find out and why not map the tracks at the same time? I have purchased a USB GPS receiver (I know the box says Microsoft, but the receiver can be used with pure FOSS in the form of gpsd.) and can't wait to hit the trails with my bike to map the Clemson Experimental Forest. This may be the final straw in purchasing a N800, although if some kind embedded developer were to intervene on my behalf I may be interested in performing a Maemo port of Seahorse :).

School: Grades aren't in yet but between a take home exam and an in exam presentation, I can't help but believe the semester ended well. Hopefully, the metal shop will find the time to machine the parts I need to make measurements for my Master's thesis so I can wrap that up in time for August's graduation deadlines.

Conferences: While I probably will be unable to make GUADEC, my paper entitled "Prolate Spheroidal Monopole"
, the subject of my Master's thesis, has been accepted for presentation at the North American Radio Science Meeting in Ottawa from July 22-26. I'm already planning on trying to crash the Ottawa Linux Users Group picnic that week, but if there are any other Gnomies that would be interested in sharing a pint or signing GPG keys that week shoot me an email.