Debounce anyone??

Maybe its the cheap buttons I picked up from Radio Shack or maybe it's the program. But I cannot seem to incrment the counters I have written in my code only once when the button is pushed. Clearly someone else has run into such a problem and solved it. If it's you please let me in on a secret. I have started looking at libraries people have compiled for a solution as I could not get it to debounce properly or only increment once and not twice (on the way up and on the way down).

The two toolboxes The "Button" library and the "AdvButton" are up for it hopefully. I tried the "Button" library and it sort of worked but I think the switches are just two noisy with lousy contacts and cheap parts. I ordered some new buttons from www.sparkfun.com and those will hopefully solve the problems I have encountered because new and bigger programming parts are looming in the future.

Tomorrow is the UWM Career Fair. Time to get dressed up and play ball with future recruiters. I will be there most of the day trying to fenaggle an interview with SOMEONE.

Today also marks the ninth day of Protests in Madison.  Now as a future employee of the private sector I am divided on the issue. I think the teachers union needs to make a few concessions. However I feel teachers are being constantly picked on by government.

Education I feel is the foundation of our society. when Egypt and Tunisia Roll into the modern economic system we will have even more workers willing to work for less hungry for whatever they can get. This will only increase the pressure to create better thinkers at home who can solve problems easier. If we drive the teaching profession into chaos or any sort of situation where students cannot thrive we have only shot ourselves in the foot. the children of today will be running this place tomorrow making big decisions on how our country runs in the future. I wish teachers were given the respect they deserve and the profession of teaching was ranked right up there with a doctor or lawyer. Let us all today, take a moment and thank those teachers who've made a difference in our lives.

Reading is a necessity but not a luxury at the moment.

How is it that hundreds of pages of very rigid technical manuals need to be read with the reader not having time to cover them all. It's like needing Cliff's notes for Cliff's notes. I suppose than it should be called "Cliff's Notes Once Removed".

I did actually get the foundation of our senior design project completed and started writing some of the functions. The code isn't that complicated until it gets to the part where this thing has to communicate with the outside world via internet. Yea I am going to have to read all those technical notes as well. Let's just hope the processor I ordered gets here by Saturday so I can spend vast amounts of time trying things out.

My blackberry is on Gag order.

No phone calls. 18 job applications submitted and not one single phone call. I hope I don't have some evil gnome or split personality that logs on to my job sites late at nights and changes my resume to include something like "Greatest Achievement to date: 15 drive-by shootings and no jail time."

I hate looking for work....

I'm not exactly submitting my application for the CEO ether. Most are in fact "Mid-level" which I may or may not qualify for depending on the job. Mostly not. My guess is that someone in China or India is doing the job I would have been hired to do except they cost much less.

Meanwhile I am still reading about Fisher and his chaotic but elegant pattern algorithms. My latest results from the last homework actually worked out to my advantage. Now give me my freaking "9" okay?! See it worked

The top one is the actual classification done by a multilevel perceptron that stems from the data below. The last image is what the function spit out which is (and I think, still learning) the attempts to minimize the error as a few points were not totally captured by the algorithm. Ho-Hum. I really am curious as to when if ever I'll be expected to actually write a function that does this stuff. as of now we're using a lot of pre-defined functions. This one would take me a long time to write. But! seeing as nobody care to hire me I think I might actually have that time.

Today I'll admit to being a Nerd.

The last few days have been great but I need to once again focus on my Pattern Recognition programs that are Due on Monday. yesterday was Esankies Birthday so I took her to see "Black Swan" which was a very creepy movie but absolutely fantastic thanks to Ms. Portman. I still am thinking about what happened at the end.

This morning I went to a MATLAB seminar on importing data into MATLAB and manipulating the data by sorting and plotting it in various forms. Apparently I need to "Wow" Dr. Cohen when I turn my programs in for class and I hope that this seminar will provide me with some information on just how to do that. The software MATLAB http://www.mathworks.com/ is a fantastic application for those of you who don't know about it to... well do math in a very hard, fast, detailed, and "number-crunchingly" quick. It is built around matrix manipulation and works very well. I am finally learning how to present the numbers calculated in a much more professional way. I will be posting more code later on as I sort out how to do this.

I will also be posting a lot more on my other two projects this semester. My senior design project which is a ethernet controlled dog feeder and my speed recognition door lock. both of which will be using matlab software.

In other news I got a T-shirt from Mathworks for asking questions. I will wear it. And No, I'm not that much of a geek.

The aftermath of Snowmageddon.

It really wasn't that bad if you stayed inside like a normal person. I suppose in the rare event you decided to stay outside in shorts and flip-flops it could have been lethal but in reality it was just a lot of work. It cancelled two classes putting our senior design group once week behind schedule in the second week. We are however diligently working and plugging ahead. I for one ordered a "PicKit 2" for programming our little microprocessor and getting the heart of the project working. The device assumes for some reason that I want to write all the code in assembler which is just not the case. Assembly language is really low level and cumbersome. it's free software for assembler compilers but I'd rather spend the cash and save the headache. I'm instead writing it in C. I am currently going through the tutorials in the users guide. although they themselves are in Assembler I am more focused on what this software can do that the actual minutia of the code. Hopefully I am full immersed in this in a week or two. I'd love to had the processor working perfectly by spring break allowing me some breathing room.

Here are the pictures I took of our place after the storm.

Just before the blizzard.

Homework was done and that is both good and bad. It is done but the next class we get another confusing topic and yet another assignment. This one I'm a bit nervous about because most engineering text books teach you the nice easy linear way of doing something and then move into "Non-linear" where things get extremely messy. This is the "Linear" Chapter and while I understand most of it .. some parts are one big long "WTF"??

In other news we're suppost to be getting a huge blizzard tonight 13-18 inches total but in all seriousness. the more they hype it the less we actually get. Almost as if there is a linear relationship between the two.

Mickey, my parents dog is staying with me this week and I actually really enjoy his being around. He dances for you every time you come home. Even if you've been gone for maybe five minutes. Somehow he thinks the fact that you disappeared and then came back is AMAZING on the order of someone setting foot on the moon. Today after I have some coffee I am going to study for a while and head to the gym for a bit since I missed it yesterday.