It feels odd not having to wake up and go to class anymore in the morning. Caught up again on my electronic mailing lists – debian-devel, kernel, PIC, and so on. Started reading about state based design from Automated Manufacturing Systems. Went to Sonic on the way back from work to get a delicious strawberry limeade.

Finished drafts of two sequence charts. Covered most of the chapter on event-driven responses such as latches, timers, and counters in Automated Manufacturing Systems. Also read some introductory material in the OpenGL developer guide.

A final lunch with the D-Pad crowd, packed in a table at Denny’s, the traditional ASMS post-party hangout. After returning home and getting situated, experimented with the raytracer POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision) to create some basic models. Hopefully I’ll be able to work with this language a bit more before school begins in the Fall. Covered a few more pages in the EMACS manual, but nothing remarkable. A history test looms in the distance.

Attended an ASMS alumni party, affectionately named D-Pad 1.5, and graciously hosted by Booze, the focus of course, being video games. Lots of multiplayer Nintendo Gamecube goodness with Monkeyball and Super Smash Bros. Melee, followed by a few takes of the classic Super Mario Kart on SNES. Lots and lots of fun and a good time was had by all.

A faily mundane day until I took a trip early in the afternoon to St. Cyr, Inc., a manufacturing firm located in Lucedale, Mississippi, to deliver some equipment. While there, got a peek at the PLC racks and motor drives enclosure and saw a demo of a conveyor unit at work making – what else, but rolls of toilet paper!

Before heading off to work, performed a quick Windows 2000 Professional install on a PC that will soon be connected to a PCR machine at the university. Read a fairly short and interesting primer on logical actuators (such as solenoids, valves, cylinders, and hydraulics) and also quickly covered boolean logic design and karnaugh maps in Automated Manufacturing Systems.

I’ve got a US history test tomorrow covering Progressivism, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Today at work I parsed (somewhat unsuccesfully) ‘exotic’ ladder logic code in order to generate factory floor sequence charts and alarm schedules for a well-known packaging solutions company. And of course, a quick trip to the library to take home Understanding the Linux Kernel and The Art of Electronics. But when to read them!