To all my friends and family; have a happy, healthy, and safe Thanksgiving!

Lauren and I spent the day with our close friends Aaron and Jenny at their uncle’s house here in Tucson. It was a wonderful meal with Steve’s “adopted” extended family and friends; they had everything from green-bean casserole, to sweet potatoes with marshmallows, to mashed potatoes, to the required turkey. In my opinion, it was everything that Thanksgiving should be; a great time spent with those close to you.

As pointed out in one of Aaron’s blog posts, this is the season for spending lots of time in the presence of friends and family enjoying their company. So, on that note, again, have a happy and healthy start to the Holiday Season!

Well, I whiffed this years tour and didn’t train enough to feel confident to ride in it. My goal for next year, however, is to train to do either the 80 or 110 mile rides for fun. You can call that my “Pre-New Year’s Resolution.”

I’ve been strangely absent from blogging recently, with only one highly cynical post in the last few months.

Well, it’s all for a good reason.

I’ve been putting in some “free” hours at work (and at home) on a new project. For once in the last year and a half, fun and work are not mutually exclusive. I’ve been working on a DARPA “Challenge” with a few other companies. The goal is to build an autonomous robot that can navigate though a city, avoid hitting cars, light poles, pedestrians, pot holes, etc… and do it as quickly as possible.

I can’t talk much about it, or anything else I do at work, but it’s teaching me a heck of a lot more about engineering that my current position. I get to play with LADAR units, play with MATLAB, design programs to interface with hardware, and watch a robot be built. All in all, things like this keep a engineer happy.

November 7th has come and gone. For a number of weeks leading up to that date, gas prices were steadily decreasing to around their recent low of $2.06 a gallon (in Tucson, AZ) and held there for the better part of the last month. Interestingly, after the election, the gas prices at many places around town have now been increasing and are about $.10 more expensive than they were a week ago.

As the trend started going downward from the cost of $2.50 a gallon a couple of months ago, I suspected that the oil companies were trying to throw a little help to the Republican party in the form of taking people’s minds off of the high cost of gas. I don’t have any proof to back this up, but it’s just a hunch. It wouldn’t surprise me, however, if the prices return to the mid two dollars per gallon before long. Now, lets wait and see if I’m a touch crazy in thinking this or if it actually happens.

Apparently, the new iTunes isn’t as stable as previous releases; I’m betting there’s a new software version that will be made available in the coming days.

I just installed the new iTunes and was listening to some of my music, when I launched a Quicktime movie to watch a “work related movie,” and noticed that the music got all jumpy and sounded like it’s fast forwarding. There were no effects on the movie, but, every time I pressed play to watch more, the music started to become choppy and would instantly clear up when I pause the movie. I tried multiple mp3s to see if one of them was corrupted somehow, but was still receiving the jittery sound. For now, I’ll have to single-task and watch the movie OR listen to music. That’s a touch annoying… oh well…

update… apparently, I’m not the only one with issues…

update #2… The NEW version of iTunes fixes this bug!!!