The Ambivalent One

I met you 9 years ago. You were brand new and I had wanted you for so long. We had some great times together. You faithfully carried Christine and I on our long drives to nowhere. Our trips to Montreal. You even brought us to Florida once. We cruised around in the summer with entirely too much bass thumping out from your open windows and moon roof. Good times. The best of times. You were a great friend.

I hope you understand. Christine and I are going to have a baby soon. So we have to move on. We need something more practical and fuel efficient. You will live on in our memories.

Everybody, I would like you to meet our new car! I’m sure you will all get along fabulously!

We just had an appointment and I got to hear Mila's heart beat again. I find myself worrying increasingly between appointments. I'm going to have to get a doppler so I can check her heartbeat myself... I saw one that lets you record. I could make a techno track. Her heart rate is 120bpm.

Sean

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

This is a shot of the sun shining through the clouds. The nuclear air-blast
effect was achieved by simply by increasing contrast. Believe it or not I
didn't change this to grayscale or de-saturate it. Was just starting to get
gloomy out. I think it looks very ominous.

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

The JB Weld worked great. I should be receiving the parts for my solid state hard drive this week. Next step is to build the frame surround for the LCD and then the box to hide the guts. I think I will use aluminum duct sealing tape to line the inside for EM shielding.

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

Due to a motherboard driver issue that I couldn’t be bothered to pursue I have had to install Windows XP instead of Xubuntu. For ten dollars I also upgraded the processor to a 1Ghz Pentium 3. Made quite the difference in terms of performance.

Below you see a photo of how I plan to mount the motherboard on the back of the LCD panel. I will be using JB Weld to attach motherboard risers to the metal plate that has the LCD fastened to it. I put the PcMCIA NIC next to it so you nerds could get an idea of the size. I’m really looking forward to crafting the case for it.

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

Sean

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Here it is splayed across my desk. I'm assembling the components and testing before building the case for it. Once testing completes I will replace the hard drive with 8gigs of compact flash memory so the is less noise/heat/power consumption. Not to mention saving space. I will also replace the CPU heatsink and fan with a bigger passive heatsink.

I'm in the process of installing Linux.

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

I tend to get a little stir crazy in the spring. Strangely it means I go to the gym less… I want to run outside but it’s still too cold on some days. I know I know. Plenty of people out there running already. I need it to be a little warmer. Besides, I’m already registered for my first race of the year. It’s the Minto run for Reach. It happens April 26th. I look forward to it!.. But I digress…

It’s the time of year that I get the urge to build something. Last year I got to build a fence. This year it will be a little nerdier. I will be building an LCD Touch screen photo fram/tablet PC. My friend John kindly donated an extremely out of date touchscreen point of sale system for my endeavour. Below you see it gutted… I was too eager to get started so I forgot to take a photo pre-dismantling. Forgive me.

The guts consist of a FLEX-600 motherboard with a Pentium III 900Mhz processor. I could probably overclock it a bit but that likely won’t be needed considering it’s just for photos. It has 384Mb of SDRAM. The motherboard has a built-in LCD connector which will be powering a 13 inch LCD with an eTurboTouch T6 touchscreen kit. If I can get the driver for the T6 to work properly this will be running the Xubuntu lightweight Linux distro. If not I will have a trimmed down install of XP. I will be adding a wireless adapter with the hopes of using a Flickr screensave to pull images live from my Flickr account. As soon as someone finds a clever way to do it I also want to try and have it display my current location using Google Latitude.

With the physical clearances for hardware I hope to keep the unit under 4 inches thick and I would like to give it a piano black paint job.

As I write this I’m installing linux to see if I can get all the hardware to jive. Once that’s done I will build the chassis. I keep all 2 of you updated with photos as this progresses.