JestinStoffel.com

My wife is constantly trying to get me to meet new people here in Kansas City, specifically some guys I can do "guy stuff" with. This is probably because she is tired of me trying to get her to do "guy stuff", and she's hoping I can get it out of my system elsewhere. I keep using "guy stuff" in quotes because, A, I like needless punctuation, and B, the stuff I do is hardly considered "guy stuff" by most guys. What she is really sick of, is me trying to lure her into doing "nerd stuff".

Jestin and I may have figured out a solution to his sedentary ways. While I am trekking back and forth to school everyday, toiling under the strain of my massive backpack, he is sitting on his butt about 18 hours a day, and spends the other 6 on his back sleeping like a turtle. Ok, it's not that bad, but I do worry about his health (not to mention Murphy's). So now we have bought two cheapo pedometers, and whoever logs the most steps per day has to do that day's dishes. I already lost yesterday...but today I will reign in victory!

Today I decided to purchase a microcontroller that had been recommended to me by Vince Thompson of the Kansas City Robotics Society. It's an Arduino microcontroller, which is a device that can run software on it to control the flow of electricity it certain circuits. This device will allow me to connect sensors and actuators to it, and therefore build a robot around it. So far, I am not too impressed with the programming language, but I intend to keep learning and building different systems with this device, both in hardware and software.

This is a screenshot of the widget I have been writing in my evenings. This is for a greater geocaching project I am working on.

This is another image that I created in the GIMP by watching PixelPerfect on revision3.com.

I've really done it this time!

About a year ago, my older brother got me into geocaching. I still haven't actually done much caching itself, but I have started to write some code that would be helpful to geocachers. I use the term "code", because as of yet there is no real application that is of much use to anybody. Everything I've written so far is just libraries that would be useful to anyone actually writing applications for geocaching. So far, all my code is written in C# for the Mono platform.

The internet has recently been buzzing about the Johnny Lee wiimote head tracking video, as well as Johnny Lee's other work in wiimote hacking. As soon as I saw these videos, I downloaded the head tracking code and started to attempt to port it to Linux. The code is written in C#, which has become a specialty of mine, and I know that the Mono Project is far enough along that you can expect most things to work.

A few weeks ago at a meeting for the Kansas City Linux Users Group, I was approached by Vince Thompson of both the Kansas City Robitics Society and the Kansas City Space Pirates, a group attempting to win a NASA prize for advancing space elevator technology. He had been looking over my shoulder as I was working on a C# Wii remote library that I have been developing.

I had to write about this. Last night, the wife and I were coming back from a late night trip to buy a 5 dollar DVD (we've all been there), and we came across an SUV with 3 distressed women in it. The women had been on a late night trip of their own, when their vehicle ran out of gas. We helped them push the van out of the middle of the street, and then went to a nearby gas station to get them a gallon. As we were leaving, we noticed the police car in plain view about a block away, attempting to catch speeders.