Quantifying kung-fu skill!

I'm back from engineering camp. Don't worry, it was really awesome, but I'm exhausted and don't want to talk about it.

I've determined that every kung-fu star is great in his own right, but after a while, we all go back to thinking "Yeah, but Bruce Lee is still the best." Maybe it takes a few seconds, maybe it takes a few minutes. I think we should have a scale on which to judge kung-fu stars, based on how long it takes before one goes back to drooling over Bruce Lee. But what would this unit be called? A Bruce-Lee-Hour? I need some help here.

More focus on projects.

Okay, I finally got into the prototyping room today. Financially and physically a vortex tube is most likely not going to work, but that's okay because I got to play with someone else's today. So instead of that, I'm going to play B, which is a DIY cotton-candy machine. Rock on! I'll still try making the steampunk blinds, too.

Blag again!

So, here I am at Rose-Hulman's Operation Catapult, and I just now got my internet back. And by "Just now" I mean about an hour ago. I've been checking my comics and stuff ever since. And now I've come at last to this, my final tab, my own personal blag.

For the next two weeks or so, I am going to be learning CAD programs and messing with milling machines and lathes. I will build a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube and maybe a miniature version of my idea for Steampunk blinds. I promise to post pictures as soon as I bother to take some pictures. Woo.

DIY Morning Sousalarm

In Los Angeles, 105.1 FM used to be a station called K-Mozart. It was light classical, without any opera, unlike the other classical station, KUSC (boooooooo). However, KMZT was not very profitable and its owners decided to replace it with a country music station, forcing us to listen to KUSC. KMZT can still be found on 1260 AM, but let's not kid ourselves: the quality sucks.

What I miss most about KMZT is something called the morning Sousalarm. Every weekday at 7:15, they would play a Sousa march to rouse sleepy listeners. Sure, most of us were awake by then, but it was still fun.

I sorely missed that Sousalarm. So I made my own.

iPods have this wonderful feature enabling them to act as an alarm clock that plays music. However, it's kind of difficult to find, which is why I'm making this guide. You need an iPod (god I hope you figured that out by this point) and a decent set of speakers. Now, load as many Sousa marches as possible onto the iPod. If you have Sousa CDs, great. If you're going to download them from the internet, that's okay too. I promise I won't tell.

Once they're loaded, make a playlist for the Sousa songs (or whatever the heck it is you want to hear when you wake up). You can do this in iTunes or by highlighting the artist's folder and then holding the centre button (which makes a playlist called "On the Go" followed by a number). For some reason, the iPod alarm clock can only play a beeping noise or songs from a playlist.

Anyway, go back to the topmost menu, and select Extras > Clock. Here, you can pick any of the clocks shown. Then, go to Alarm. Set Alarm to "On" and Sound to the name of the playlist with the songs. Then, set Time to 7:15 am. It's not a Sousalarm if it doesn't go off at 7:15 am. Hook the iPod up to the speakers, make sure it's at a reasonable volume, and turn the iPod off. At 7:15, it will turn itself on and start playing music. If you don't want to hear the songs in the same order, setting Shuffle to "All Songs" will also randomise the order of your morning playlist. Sweet deal.

ZOMG

There was no post on Wednesday. You can blame the above film. It is so mindblowingly awesome that all I could type was, quote:

"hrgch, gaaarkch, qwhoooooo...glarble!"

...and I decide that would be worse than no post at all. This gives you a sense of how amazing this movie is. It's like this movie was tailor-made for me personally. I expect a certain amount of crap in kung-fu/wuxia films: stupid visual gags, corny dialogue, and stunts that are obviously filmed and then reversed (like throwing a silk shirt carelessly and having it land--perfectly folded and ironed--on a throne). Iron Monkey is perfect in its corniness. It has precisely the right amount of corn. Then, of course, there are the fight scenes. They're extremely well-choreographed and take place in unique situations. One of them has a government official throwing heavy metal rings (sewn into his 50-foot-long robe sleeves, so he can retract them--like a fishing lure) at people for really no good reason. The very last fight scene takes place on a whole bunch of bamboo poles, about ten feet above a raging inferno on the verge of consuming the very supports on which they are fighting. Unlike other "action" films, which spend far too much time on some obscure device called "plot development," Iron Monkey throws that scramble to the wind. On the rare occasion that an explanation is needed, Yuen Woo-ping (The director or choreographer of a metric buttload of excellent films) manages to work it into a fight scene, so as not to dilute the awesome with boring standing-and-talking. And als--oh my God, they made a sequel.

I'll be back later. I need to go find Iron Monkey 2.

At long last!

It is done!

Anyway, the applet is just a silly little thing. After you unzip it, open web.html in Internet Exploder. Then select a duration from the ones at the upper-left, enter notes using the keyboard buttons, and watch as they show up on the music bars. Then, push "play" and the applet will play the music back for you, but as if the sheet music were upside-down. In other words, this:



Would be played like this:



However, there are many limitations. It must be run in IE, it's written in Logo (*shudder*) and requires a special plugin, it's bulky, and it's really, really, really freaking stupid. Plus I think I'm the only one who ever thinks about crap like this.