I finished my biology lab report for Tuesday. Adam and I decided to be adventurous and made Philly cheese steak sandwiches for lunch, with sauteed onions and mushrooms. Very tasty. I graded Project 4 in the evening. Nice.

After spending all day soldering, I finished building the QuikFlash board for Embedded Microcontrollers! A unix telecommunications utility called Minicom allowed me to access the board via a serial interface. To download new programs to the board, I set the transfer mode to ASCII and the line delay to 20 ms. Curious, I downloaded a template source file from the class website and successfully compiled it using gpasm for Linux. As a result, I can now develop for the PIC microcontroller without the need for Windows.

Found Ack Electronics on Deering Rd., an industrial and commercial electronics parts supplier. I bought a Kester flux pen from them, for working with the QuikFlash board, which I intend to start building tonight. Added features to a database frontend for a client, using Microsoft Access and Visual Basic for Applications, quoting 150 dollars for two hours of development. I should receive payment first thing Monday.

Mike Reiss, Emmy-Winning producer of the The Simpsons, came to Georgia Tech and gave an amazingly funny and insightful presentation on his life, the history of the show, and the many ups and downs of the longest running situational comedy television series in history. After watching his presentation, it’s easy to see why The Simpsons has been such a monumental success. After all, it’s been around for almost as long as my conscious lifetime. I’m really glad that I attended.

Some minor software updates, including OpenOffice 1.0.2, mplayer 0.90rc5, and a quick Debian apt-get. Since I have no classes tomorrow, Nicky, Alex, and I went to Hooters for burgers and hot wings. We originally went for team trivia but it turned out that it was on Thursday instead of today. Regardless, the food was pretty good and quite filling.

April Fool’s Day! I had a lot of fun putting up a fake website for a day. Adam corroborated the story. It apparently fooled quite a few people. I’m okay everyone. Really. Thanks for your concern. For recitation, Sanjay, James, and I played a small prank on the students by giving them a fake pop quiz. It looks quite authentic, doesn’t it? We gave them candy afterwards so they wouldn’t (completely) hate us.

Nicky cooked some excellent barbeque chicken for dinner.