Twisted Beginnings?

Well here it is. My first blog. I probably shouldn’t be writing right now. I completely spaced a paper for my online english class that I really ought to be editing right now, but alas it is Spring Break, and who the crap cares about english anyway? Having not touched a journal since I got home from my mission last November, this all feels a little bit…well…unnatural. Why am I even doing it then? Well basically it comes down to this: My life feels…incomplete. It feels like I’m doing something wrong. A good way to analyze one’s life, I have learned, is to write – about everything, about nothing, it all helps to reveal one to himself.

Well I am still dating Breeanne. I’m nto entirely sure how that is going to be honest. It seems like she is being very unstable emotionally, but this is really not the topic I wish to write about tonight. Tonight I just want to get a post out and begin a new habit. So a little bit about my life as it stands, then. I am still on very good if unstable terms with Breeanne. She is dating Nolan in Provo simultaneously, and is on a business trip in Washington DC right now. She is completely traumatized about talking to her boss tomorrow morning about another offer she has with a company called the Generations Network; taking that position would mean she moves to Provo. Not sure how I feel about that. She still thinks I’m in love with Mandy Prestwich. Now everybody thinks I am not allowed to be friend with an ex. I think they all suck. She was my best friend for a long time – just because she made a mistake (yes she admits that getting married was a mistake) does not mean that we have to stop being friends. Especially seeing how I don’t really have anybody else except for the ballerina in my life right now (Oh yeah, Bree also thinks I’m in love with the ballerina).

As my parents are on a cruise right now and it is spring break, I have plenty of time for projects. It has come to my realization that I have lost track of half of the things that I have accomplished, so I think I am going to start documenting them. Since I am also an intern at a company called Control4, I have been given equipment to “test”. I hooked up a Media Controller and and Mini Touch Screen over the past little while, and I have spent a great deal of time this week ripping music and updating it. Thus far I have all of the CD’s we own on it, all of our pictures, and today I learned how to set up live weather and traffic reports on the touch screen. It is so freaking sweet – the problem is that nobody else shares the same vision. It is Emily and I – that’s it. I additionally made a switch for the garage door. I have always been irritated by the use of a car-remote attached to our key ring to control the raising and lowering of our garage door. Well I finally took the initiative this week to remedy this. I took an old rocker switch from downstairs and hacked it. By pulling the switch completely apart, I was able to drill out a cavity in the black part (at the expense of a still-paining thumb that got eaten by the drill) in order to make a recess large enough to embed a “simplified” pushbutton switch. I think attached a spring I found in the rocker button and attached a piece of a chopstick to allow the trigger of the pushbutton. I will say – this has been the most professional project I have done, considering cosmetic appearance. If I didn’t know any better I would say that it had been professionally manufactured. It is firm, it is 100% reliable, and dang it looks good.

So now that I have the switch all set up, I am just waiting on some parts I ordered off of Ebay. The next hack is to figure out how to interface an X10 system with Control4. My biggest lead on a method right now is to create a dummy serial driver and use that to control the Firecracker X10 interface by binding lights and the such to it through programming. It will be messy, but a heck of a lot cheaper. Especially when you consider that an X10 module is 5 – 7 dollars as opposed to a single Control4 switch which will run anywhere from 75 to 200.

Well I think this concludes my first post. I have training early tomorrow morning (a complete joke. I’m sure I’ll write about it later) but until then…

~ by bnjmnmrtn on March 19, 2008.