I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=41358BA1DE3D28BC

Today on my way to school I missed the early train and had to wait a whole 15 minutes for the next one. I knew I was late getting there so I ran from the car when I saw two trains at the station, but half way there I saw my 8:04 train pulling away.  The 8:19 train is much busier and as we stopped at Campbell station and the number of people on the train doubled, the train operator yelled out “lets get this party started”.  I take the 8:04 train usually because that gives me enough time to miss a train, like I did today, and not be late for class.

Its official, we’ve set a date and time for DevHouse 15. It will be located at my house in Los Gatos on February 3rd from 1pm to ~2am. So pack up that laptop, bring some snacks or drinks to share, and your projects to work on and tell your hacker friends to come! We have room for 100+ attendees and hope to fill up the house.

More information can be found at http://shdh.org

Today I decided to figure out how snow machines work, you know, the kind that the ski resorts use to make snow when its cold but not snowing. I found this cool site, http://www.snowathome.com/ which has several different plans for making snow machines of different kinds. I chose this one because it was the only one that didn’t require a pressure washer, only an air compressor. On the down side it doesn’t have the highest output but we’ll see how it works, that is of course if we get another cold enough night. I’ve setup the air compressor in the sound room so I can run it at ~4am without disturbing anybody while I make my snow.

I found most of the parts at The Home Depot tonight with Matt Jeff and Jeff. It cost me ~$34 including a new garden hose and seems to spray the water in a fine mist that will hopefully make nice snow if it gets cold enough outside. The only issue with this method for making snow, at least with the way its currently built, is the possibility that water will push back into the air hose and into the air compressor. This would destroy the air compressor and would most likely cause other problems since the air compressor is practically inside. The weather report says it wont be cold enough tonight so all I can do now is hope it stays cold for a while. You can see my pictures of this build on flickr