So it's been a while since I've updated, blah, blah, blah, you've heard it all before.

Just after Nan Desu Kan there were a large set of exams at CSM that I had to take care of, which caused my productivity to go down the crapper. Here's my update for the month of October thus far:

The "Walkman"
This device, as featured next to me in my webcam section on my profile, is HUGE, HEAVY, and fun to play with! What is it you may ask? IT is a 60's and 70's era 28 channel Reel to Reel Data Acquisition System or DAS which is the precursor to modern day DAQ's. What does that jargon filled sentence mean to those non-engineers? It's basically a HUGE tape recorder but instead of audio it records data from various testing equipment, and you can record 28 sets of data at the same time. Imagine recording 28 different music tracks of a CD and playing them back at the same time! What am I doing with this, you ask? Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure. My roommate found it on craigslist for $50 and we thought "when is another opportunity like this going to happen?" and bought it. So like the little Jawas we are, we took it back to our home and played with it a bunch. Yay spinning Tape! Uttini!
-Ideas for its uses for us include: Mad Scientist Decoration, digital video recorder(a slow one at that), network activity monitor(the tapes spin up), and others.

Servers
I've been interested in making my own website / dedicated ftp server for a long time, and another weird opportunity came for me to buy something. A $50 rackmounted dual 2.0 Ghz Xeon processor server which is currently at a friend's house. With this I can learn Linux, a little more programming, PHP, html, and whatever else involved with this sort of thing. I think it will be worthwhile.

The XBOX 360 RROD
My 360 got the dreaded Red Ring of Death a few weeks ago. I did some research and found out that it could be fixed relatively easily and for cheap. I got the special tool to unlock the xbox without breaking it and took everything apart. I removed the heatsinks and replaced the thermal compound with arctic silver, added the heatsinks with new machine screws and turned the xbox on WITHOUT the fans. This is a required step in order to resolder the chips to the motherboard. A stupid mistake by microsoft yet again. I've resurrected the poor thing, and hopefully it won't crap out on me again, seeing as I'm going to add better/more fans to the case.

So that's what has happened recently...
Here's my list of current projects in order of importance:

-Finish Furring Animatronic Wings
-Add some more deviations of my OC Skaros
-Make an avatar
-finish writing my Paranoia RPG campaign
-fix up the 360
-study my ass off for School of Mines exams
-bill of materials for Tesla Coil - 12" sparks baby!
-Design next year's costume for NDK - More animatronics but it's a secret! Shhh!
-Modify my dragon costume so that it looks nothing like a blue shiny Charizard - seriously, I could do so much better than that, given more time of course
-learn Linux / PHP / programming

So there's my wall of text for the moment. Now it's time for me to crash.