RobotSkirts

My grandmother on my mother’s side passed away today (My grandma Phillips died in April). A recent letter from my mother mentioned that she had helped my grandparents with their absentee ballots on the 21st. Does my grandmother’s vote count? According to this Slate Explainer, the rules, like all election law, vary from state to state. Some allow the votes to stay and some demand they be pulled. I called the county election commissioner and asked what the laws were in Nebraska. She said that if they had the ballot already, it would be in the system and counted. Now this is not a definitive statement on the law, since if there was a law it would be hard to enforce. I’m not going to be an alarmist about dead people voting, but I did find this quote from a 2004 USA TODAY article interesting:

How many of those voters won’t be alive on Election Day? Considering that an average of 455 voting-age people die in Florida every day, and that the 2000 presidential election was decided by a mere 537 votes, dead votes that slip through the cracks could become a meaningful bloc.

This weekend was BarCampLA 6. BarCamp is a self organizing conference. It has sponsors, is free to attend, and speakers are all voluntary. It was hosted at Mahalo so I decided to give a talk titled “Intro to Hardware Hacking: @sweetums pulls random crap out of his office”. I tried to cover a broad spectrum of what you can hack in hopes that people would see something they personally identified with and would use as a starting point. I started with consumer devices that were hackable. Then went to kits that you can purchase. Finally I covered tools and resources. Managed to fill the whole 50 minutes.

I happened to be presenting in the Mahalo Daily studio with the green screen in the background. I made sure to pose appropriately in case someone wanted to photoshop it. Thank you vissago for the photos.

At long last you are to have a report from the Curtis Phillips family! We wish for each of you the very best in this coming year. We really mean that invitation on the map we designed and are sending: “Won’t you come visit us?” We love company! We’ve had a lot during this first year here and it’s made our move easier, because we’ve seen folks from home often, and new neighbors here have made us feel welcome.
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I was with a group of random conference attendees eating lunch at LayerOne, when we realized we were all from Santa Monica—it was fairly obvious for how much we were complaining about the temperature in Pasadena. We decided to start meeting up in Santa Monica on the only schedule that ever works: every single week. I pick a bar and post our 8PM Wednesday meetup to Upcoming every week (add me). We don’t do any serious business, besides challenge coin jousting, but it’s nice to have good friends and likeminds get together. We’ve met for 11 straight weeks. It’s good a recluse like me has a regular event like this; at least I know I’ll make it out for one night a week. Next week is Black Hat/Defcon, so we’re taking the week off.

I had just stepped out of the shower and the whole wall I share with my neighbor appeared to move. I didn’t know what was going on. I heard rumbling and wall was moving, “Does my neighbors closet shake my apartment?” I placed my hands on the wall and tried pushing. Nothing happened. The moment was gone and I left for the office. When I arrived I was asked “Were you riding during the earthquake?” That was my only indication as to what had happened.

I noticed that every picture of me on the main page has a beard. A glorious beard. Well, that’s not in line with reality, so I have provided the picture above of my daytime habitat.

My mechanic is awesome. I mentioned earlier that the panel truck had blown a power steering hose. Being new to LA I contacted the only hotrod person in the area I knew, which led me to Morgan Auto Service. It’s within 2 miles of my house. I took the truck in, they replaced the hose, gave it a much needed oil change, and got it back to me within the day. Much better than the epically bad service I received in Vegas.

While in the shop, Dave pointed out that it looked like the shifter was about to break. I told him that it actually had broken and he was looking at the repair. I didn’t have time to fix it then. About a month later the headlights went out (the electrical system is the weakest part of this build). I took the truck in and had them fix the lights and investigate the shifter linkage. The whole column would have to be replaced… or we could convert it to floor shift. I went the floor shift route. It’s an automatic so I chose a short shifter and had them put it as far forward as possible. I think it turned out really well and they even recut the custom floor mats to fit perfectly.

The panel truck maybe problematic, but it’s a huge relief to finally have competent mechanic close by.

Immediately after moving to Santa Monica, I headed to Cleveland for Notacon. Well, not right away. First, the power steering hose had to blow on the panel truck while visiting Sarah.

Notacon is a hacker convention, but is interesting for featuring Blockparty, a demoparty. You can find my posts about Notacon on Hack a Day. The conference was okay. The 12 hours it took Holiday Inn to get me into a room were freaking awful. Cleveland sucks. Knowing my track record for hating on places, I’ll end up moving there some day.

Okay… I’m going to attempt to get this blog back on track by doing short daily posts, not necessarily current ones, but what I’ve been up to in the last four months. Looking back I realized that I never announced what I’m doing right now. I’m working fulltime as Head Editor of Hack a Day. I left AOL/Propeller.com at the end of March. I’ve been writing quite a few posts at Hack a Day while trying to acquire more and more contributors.

I haven’t been posting much here, but I do post quite frequently to both Twitter and Flickr (thanks to my geotagging/autouploading N95).

Then they won’t have to struggle for years trying to get on the front page of google. I wish that T.S. Eliot guy would die already though. This meme brought to you by C.K.