wolfwings

...note to self. When replacing feet-soles and one person strips while another re-glues, make sure to tell the first one how much and where the original adhesive was if you were happy with how everything held up, or even if not.

Switching from an entirely clown-shoe-long Vans shoe covered in something milky-clear and then stuck down onto exercise mat tends to result in a much more durable link than a big dollop near the ball and another big dollop near the heel. Especially with the feet themselves are big floofy ones with big hunks of foam underneath that stick way out over the clown-shoe in the first place so they have gobs of leverage. *laughs*

Anyways... let's see if the silicon-based Liquid Nails type 207 sticks between the shoe sole and exercise mat, Vans have remarkable chemical-resistant soles on them. Low and medium-temp and even high-temp hot glue just rolls off them like water on a duck's back, hoping this does the trick. If it doesn't, well... at least I have a nice pair of Vans. *snickers*

At least that's sorted now, once I let the stuff cure for the day and test tonight. On a different note... finally saw Terminator Salvation in theatres (yay, $2 theatres!) and I was honestly fairly pleased. It wasn't (and nothing will likely ever be) T1 or T2 quality, but it was a good popcorn muncher.

Okay, I have a BlackBerry. 320x240 screen, works pretty good for SSH and all that with an LCD-aware bitmap 4x7 font. MidpSSH, works on any phone that can run Java, blah, blah. Problem with that? It's designed to work on any phone from my last 96x64 screen Nokia up to 640x480 smartphones. So it's universal, which means it doesn't take advantage of any newer abilities really.

So I'm stuck paging through menus, and can't use the trackball like arrow keys, or the volume buttons like page up/down like I'd immediately think I should. And whenever I connect somewhere, I have to actively go into a menu and pick 'type' before I can start actually typing commands, despite having a full QWERTY keyboard on my phone.

And... well, it's emulating a vt320 terminal, rather extensively in fact, so it's slow from all the useless cruft it's trying to emulate that... well, I can't even find anything to test the vt320 capabilities. I just want a cell-phone OpenSSH client, in effect. Thankfully, it's open source. Unfortunately, it's Java. I think I've gotten the BlackBerry SDK working, just trying to import the MidpSSH project from the source-files on the developer's website.

But... that ends up in a detour. The largest problem with the vt320 emulation is that it's this truly massive hodge-podge of vector and text abilities, and this poor Java applet is trying it's best to emulate all this crap. So... I start from scratch, making steps from the get-go to minimize memory read/writes, and pull up the ANSI escape code spec-sheet. Huh... this isn't too complicated, implement most of it... have to deal with various issues since I implemented the screen as a rotating ring-buffer of lines, nothing very complicated here.

Then I start testing it against the output of various Linux applications. Nano, lynx, links, they all work near as I can tell. As do various ANSI animations, aside from the color-system not being implemented yet. So then I start building test-cases for the color-codes, to vet them against my intended target: The Linux console. One typo later in a test-case, and I end up on a side-road finding out something: The Linux console doesn't implement most of the ANSI escape codes dealing with scrolling, only screen-clearing.

Suddenly the code that was the most complicated to even get working in my implementation just goes out the window. *laughs* But, scrolling the screen one line at a time now only takes one increment, one compare, one possible subtract, one multiple, and two writes. So... I'll live. Now to wire that test code up to the MidpSSH...

This is something I can definitely get on board with. Stop with the stupid 'If you want to X... press... 1... If you want to Y... press... 2... Se Hable Espanol... press... numero LQDGFEWQRQE!@#!@' crap, cell-phone companies.

Play my recording, beep, record what's said. Nothing more, that's all I want you to do. Don't add preface noises, don't read extra crap off, your job is to say only what I tell you to, and beep, like any other good answering machine. And if I'm calling for my voicemail? Start playing it.

Though the last bit... may go away. Need to start pushing more folks to my Google Voice account number, the voice-mail there is so much more convenient. =-.-=

...the first monthly Fursuiting gather at Zona Rosa went off excellently!

Picture Gallery

Still need to finish tagging up the sevreal hundred images in there... merf.

Local Motor's is calling it the Rally Fighter!

Seriously, compare:





It even has approximately the specs I was aiming for with the AMC Eagle build I'd been working on... 3.0l Straight-6 diesel! *purrpurrpurr*

Heads up, if you signed up to request a number back when it was still Grand Central, check your e-mail box! I did, and just got my phone number offer.

(785)WLF-WNGS

...upgrading from living in a crummy (albeit spacious now that I'm the last one here) apartment.
...upgrading my laptop to 8GB of RAM.
...upgrading my phone to a BlackBerry 8820.
...upgrading to owning two fursuits, one still in the 'finishing concept art' stage but both mostly payed for.
...upgraded the local furry community to have a very successful brunch event I hope to keep monthly or better.
...getting the local fursuiting community together for more regular events I also hope to keep monthly+

A lot of it was just really good timing, I'll admit, like some fursuiters about to move out of the area in a couple months and some that just moved IN this month will make the first 'semi-official' fursuiting event fairly large (9-12 suiters + 4-6 handlers confirmed so far), and the brunch was just dumb luck of me knowing about a restraunt that specialized in delivery, but that has a good amount of table-seating inside that sits mostly unused. NewEgg had a sale on the RAM. Upgrade cycle came up on the phone plans. Etc. Even the second fursuit was based on lucky timing heavilly, but I'm not complaining in the slightest.

I just hope the next three months are half as good as this month's been, leading up to MFM. =^.^=

Let me fix a little box-fan for one, the C-clip holding the fan-blade tight against the motor's drive-shaft had worn loose, letting the fan-blade mount polish the drive-shaft to a mirror shine. So... no grip, no fan-blade-spin, no air.

About 90 seconds ravaging that mirror finish with a butter knife, two inches of double-sided packing tape wrapped around it, and wedging the fan-blade assembly back on... I have a working fan again. Quietly drying out my fursuit head, I couldn't resist romping around my apartment for 5-10 minutes just because, one of those, "Pinch me so I believe it's real!" type of things... I really did buy a fursuit just to have something to suit in for the next couple of dozen months until my own gets made. =^.^=

And squee... makes me even more excited about adjusting it to really fit me well. Need to do a couple minute things, re-glue down the flaps of fabric holding the digitigrade padding in place, that's honestly about it. And shorter the legs up by hemming them internally, no major issue there either.

Anyways... gonna go zonk out soon. So... g'night, everyone!

Had to re-sole the feet I was using after the last run, they got thrashed soles after Wild Nights, and at RCFM one nearly failed and I had to band-aid it with hot glue. Stomping around Zona Rosa blew the other one out, and both heels detached... yeah, time for new soles on those feet.

So, MUCH pulling and grumbling later, Pistol got the foam-rubber exercise-mat soles out, and I peeled all off the glue from the sole of the mind-condition Vans inside. Cut out new soles... stick the first one in, glueglueglue... wait, why is the shoe flopping around still?

Yup... low-temp glue and high-temp soles = no stick. So... off to pick up some high-temp glue and a high-temp glue gun tommorow, we'll sort things out then. =^.^=

But yeah, definately looking into getting a pair of Vans now after wearing the maround and marvelling at how comfy they are. =O.o=