You may have noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated in a couple of weeks. The reason is because I have found some work which is what I have been doing for the past week. That is also the explanation for my disappearance from the internet during the day time. A lot of you wouldn’t have noticed due to going back to school or being at work or uni or whatever. So that is the reason for the lack of blog updates and why I haven’t been spending as much time on the internet.

It has become much harder to manage time that I am doing things, especially when there are some other things I want to be doing and other responsibilities taking up my time too. I may have to drop half a dozen to a dozen TV shows from my weekly schedule just so I don’t have such a huge backlog of things to watch over the weekend. I have also gotten back into gaming on the Wii after finding some cool games to that make me want to go back and keep playing. I’m sure you will hear more about that on this blog. Not necessarily game reviews or such (unless you want that) but I may mention a few games here and there.

So this blog doesn’t completely die, I have a few blog post in the queue, some completed and some nearly there which will be able to be finished off and posted in a few minutes which will hopefully keep this blog updated over the next little while while I’m working and then when University starts. I do have a handful of other ideas in line for posting here too so really all I need is time and motivation to get some of these things put out there. So that explains where I’ve been, what I am doing and what is happening in terms of this blog.

Our last unit in Electronics at school was Robotics. For this, we got to use the Lego NXT robots and program them to do different things. This was the unit most people were looking forward to because it means we can play with robots, Lego, not learn any theory and it was a very easy standard to achieve. There were many different robots, all built differently, that all did different tasks. Most of these robots did obvious things like Line Following, Object Avoidance, Light Sensing and such.

The one me and my robot partner, Martin decided to do was the Line Following Robot. it seemed like a simple enough one to do and shouldn’t be too much of a problem. After doing the starting paperwork, we then got given one of the Robot Kits. Lucky for us it was already pre-built so we didn’t have to make it from scratch. This allowed us to quickly getting into the adding of sensors and the programming. The annoying thing about the robots was the software used for programming them. It was a flowchart based language which was really annoying, and even painful due to the really slow lab machines. But it wasn’t too long till we hard a nearly working robot. After some minor tweaks in the power levels, we have a fully functioning line following robot.

Because we did that so fast, our Electronics teacher made us an “extension course.” The original course was a curvy lined course, which was pretty simple to achieve, but the advanced course had sharp angles in it, which required different programming techniques and such to get around it. After a bit of fiddling around with code, we couldn’t get anywhere near getting it to work on the new course. In theory, our ideas would work, but in practice, weird things happened. It just never seemed to work. It required some more thinking and different approaches.

After looking at some other robots on YouTube, I came up with the idea of adding a 3rd sensor onto the robot. This still didn’t work, but we did once get it to go around over half of the extension track, but it struggle on some of the angles over 90 degrees. This is when we admitted defeat. Unfortunately when messing around with the new course, we seemed to have lost out curvy lined program that we needed for the assessment. We managed to modify one of the 3 sensor codes to work with the curvy line.

Some of the other cool robots was another pair that made a line following robot. It also went around the curvy line but it hopped around instead of going around more smoothly. My friend Aaron made a light sensing robot which found the darkest place in the room and went there. This worked alright, but it was pretty average. My other friend Morgan made a Collision Avoidance Robot (again,) but this time with the Lego Kit. His seemed to have trouble at times which it strangling itself and hitting into things. Another pair did this same robot except took a different approach. It worked pretty well and looked cool. There was also a completely original robot that another pair made, and it was put on a table and avoided falling off the edge.

Making the robots and programming them was really awesome, and it was really great to see other peoples ideas and robots doing the same, and other tasks. This was definitely the best part of the year because robots a the best! Now all that I have to do is finish the paperwork for the standard so I can get my credits for this unit. I wish I had some spare money lying around so I could get some robots, I love playing with these things!

After the big blog update a week ago, a few more updates have happened elsewhere. The first is the yum9me.com main page. The old page has gone and been replaced by a simple page, written by TheSkorm in a few seconds. I like it over the older one because it is much cleaner, it works correctly on more browsers (curse you Internet Explorer!) and there is less clutter and jankness to it.

The second update was to my tumblelog theme. After using the dashboard theme for a little while, I started to lose interest in it and wanted a new theme, I just hadn’t seen any that I liked. That was until I saw a theme ported from a WordPress theme on Alisha’s tumblelog, that’s when I knew what I wanted. I decided that I would use the WordPress theme on this blog, and hopefully one day, she would be able to release the theme to the public.

Well that day did come shortly after, and managed to get back on my radar so I grabbed it. It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it so I modified it a little. The main modifications are the removal of the Disqus comment integration, and the Last.Fm and other site integrations. I also removed the followers down the sidebar. My intentions were to have a few links down the side for Mobile, Archives, RSS ect. I did have this working for a moment until during some other edit of the theme, it broke, so I completely removed it.

I also changed the description down the bottom of the theme to match that of the one on my blog, except with a couple of appropriate word changes and rearrangements. This is also where the about button will jump down to, if clicked. I also decided to have the links under the title be for my main page (or as I decided to call it, Portal,) my blog and my tumblelog. I also applied this to my blog.

I like how they both use the same theme because now they seem more unified and part of one system, which they are, instead of two separate unrelated sites. So hopefully all the changes can last a year or so before I decided to change them.

This date, one year ago, was the day I made my first post on this here blog. I am happy to say, my 5th attempt has been successful as this blog has survived a full 365 days and is still here, alive and well and being updated regularly (except for that null last month.) Over this time, not much has changed other than the image thumbnails on the posts and maybe other minor differences that are unnoticed.

Over this time period, I have written 170 posts, containing 64,215 words in total. I average at 377 words per post. My longest post was …And Back Again! containing 1199 words. Over the past 6 months I have had a stat counter, I average at 16 unique visitors per day, with a fair amount of traffic coming from Google searches.

To celebrate this wonderful milestone achievement, I have decided to update the look of this site by giving it a new theme. The theme is called Notepad Chaos and I believe it is a very appropriate theme for this blog. While the theme isn’t “perfect” and could improve in some areas, it is still a well made theme. I would be nice to use this same theme on my Tumblelog but that is just something I am not capable of.

Happy 1st Birthday Yum9me’s Journal! Let’s hope for many more!

As you may have noticed, the last blog post I have made here was exactly a month ago, on the 25th of July. Why has it been so long since I have posted? Well the main reason is the idea well run dry (thanks for all your suggestions, all who emailed in.) Now I have gathered up some ideas and have some new things to blog about after this break. I do think that this was a perfect time to have a break, right before my first milestone, more about that on the date.

So, what has happened to me since I have been away. Well first I got sick and had a week off school. I got sick on the Saturday, which was a week before the school Formal. I went to the doctors and he gave me medication to take but I wasn’t getting any better so I returned to the doctor on Wednesday who though it could potentially be appendicitis and sent me to the emergency department to get test taken. This was a scary thought as I hate hospitals and the thought of having surgery.

When I got there, I waited for a bit and then later got check out, where the stuck a thing in my arm, took some blood and then put me on a drip. I waited for about 3 or 4 hours before the results came back, which showed nothing so I got let go. I had KFC for dinner at 8:30pm which was getting late but I only ate half a burger because I really didn’t feel like eating.

After that I started feeling better but I took the next day of resting, and then on the Friday, although I would have preferred another days rest, and could have used it, I needed to go to school to pick up my Formal ticket for the next day. I already had payed $90 or however much it cost and already had a suit hired for the event.

So the next day, I went to the school Formal. This is a big deal for a lot of people, but for me, it was just meh. I thought I had better go because this would be my only opportunity to ever go to one so I needed to see what it was all about. It is really weird seeing everyone dressed formally. I am not used to seeing people like this. And the event, it was average, but nothing I would have missed if I didn’t go. Oh, also I have to mention how crappy the food was, I wish I had eaten beforehand. There was also an afterparty, but I don’t think I’ll go into that.

Other than that, I have had assessments and have been doing other stuff (iPhone *cough*) as well as the usual. Still have a few things to get sorted out but by the holidays, my todo list should be clear. I still have to start that damn reading log so I can get the English credit I need for University. I did plan on finishing it this month, which is now over, so I doubt that will be happening. It’s a shame because I was hoping to have this of my plate for when the Fall TV shows start their new seasons. Despite my workload, I will be trying to keep this blog updated like I had before my break.

There have been many updates to my blog and tumblelog over the past few days. All the blog changes are hidden away. Peppery has been doing some stuff with servers and what have you, as well as updating the blog to WordPress 2.6. On the tumblelog, the changes are more apparent, with a completely new look. The reason for the refresh was not because I felt like it, but because my old theme had disappeared from the internet. The full story, as what was posted on my tumblr, is as follows.

Yesterday, I made a post about backing up. A few hours later, Peppery, the server admin decided to upgrade my WordPress blog to 2.5.1. Well what happened was instead of upgrading, he ended up deleting my blog off the server. He fucked up. To make it worse, he didn’t have a backup to restore my blog. Ironic how a couple of hours after I write a post about backing up, something goes wrong with my blog and there is NO backup!

At least all my posts and settings were in tack in the mysql database. He managed to restore my blog and theme and some of the plugins. I don’t have a clue what plugins are still missing but they can’t be important or else I would remember them. After he mucked around for a while, everything seems to be as good as rain. The only thing I am missing are PSP themes that were on the server. Lucky that I moved the pictures saved on the server to another host so they will be fine if anything was to happen, like this. Now I just need to restore the themes.