With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

rumors of my death, etc...

2005 May 18 08:58

I got rather sick a couple of weeks ago, and it took until Monday to get caught up time-wise.

Nothing new on the flying front. The flying club had their annual spring cleaning on Saturday, so pulled the airplanes out of the hangar and washed and waxed then. That was fun; they're all clean and shiny.

I did a presentation at work Monday, and I managed to sneak in a reference to a project I worked on in graduate school. I had a single small reference to it on one slide, and a hidden slide with more information in case anyone asked. They didn't. The project was experimenting with a PCI flash-ADC board (if you want to see it, go to the "project" link and scroll all the way to the bottom). The experiment I was working on as a postdoc wants to build all their own front-end electronics, and this PCI card was a proof of concept prototype. Paul Smith designed and built the board, and I wrote the Linux kernel driver and the software that read it out.

I like Blogger, and it's free. And I was advised that it's the fastest way to get your thoughts on-line. And that's true. Unfortunately, I think they have become so popular that they dare not add features for fear of overloading things. The green font in my last post was painful to do right, and the last paragraph, after the review ended, the links aren't highlighted. Argh. And I went to look at my blog recently, and it wouldn't come up, which turned out to be because blogger itself was down.

So at some point I'll need to be on the hunt for another blogging tool. I think that movable type is the gold standard for people who are serious about it. (I'm not being elitist, that's just what I've observed. Neil Gaiman has a pretty serious blog, and he uses blogger--but his publishing company hires people to make it right when it breaks. Super control-freak propeller-head types who do their own web page coding, which I aspire to be like, use MT. ) Of course, if I want really super mil-spec hosting software, I could just make the jump right away and never have to worry about it again.