A time to breathe

I'm just starting to wrap up a project I've been working on way to hard! I've been neglecting my personal life, health and no doubt my sanity as well. I tell you, working almost day and night for weeks on end is no fun. However, the project in general was quite cool. I learned a lot about LabView, Compact FieldPoint, signal processing and made some new contacts, but I'm ready to take a breather.

I've got a lot of things to say and do. Chief among them is submitting my tax return. This year is the latest I've submitted my return so far. Hope it is not a trend.

Things to say

• Eddie Baumgardt, my brother-in-law, joined the blogsphere as well. If you know him, go visit. His blog is more interesting than mine :)
• Marguerite is still enjoying her visit in Canada. She posted some very beautiful pictures on her site. I'm just a sucker for nature photos.
  
• Kent Beck from Extreme Programming fame (or is that infamy?) will be visiting South Africa next month. A couple of us at work will go listen to his talk in Cape Town. Maybe I will post some comments afterwards.
• The other day I came across Lucy. From the website: "Lucy is our long-term, pure research project to develop some novel theories about the fundamental operating principles of the brain.". Lucy is a robot, but the main action is happening in the AI software. Lucy's inventor (Steve Grand) was also the brain behind the Creatures series of games. Check out his current research on his website.
  
• Car trouble again. Our VW Golf Chico has a mysterious electrical problem that only surfaces when its raining (and this time of the year it is almost always). During wet spells, the car's electrical system will just switch (may sort?) out for very short while. It has happened three times now that the electrical system shut down completely (even the radio resets). So far the car always starts again, but it is not fun when your car dies on you while you are doing 120 km/h on the highway. We've took the poor car to two shops now (including the VW dealer in Somerset West) and they couldn't find the problem. What to do?
• Project Aardvark is coming on nicely it seems. I'm quite curious about what the product is. It seems I won't have to wait for too long the get the answers.
  

Things to do

• As I said earlier, I need to make SARS (South African Revenue Service) happy and submit my tax return. Each year, SARS is making the process less painful. I quite like the positive attitude that SARS tries to portray. Instead of the traditional warnings of criminal punishment, they rather inform the public what the taxes do for them and the country in general. SARS further tries to help people complete their tax return as well. Every Saturday they have a group of people stationed at the more popular malls that can help you with those darn forms. They will of course never be able to make it completely painless. There is always a good amount of pain involved if you hand over a fair chunk of your income to the government. I'm developing a back pain just thinking about it!
• I've got a lot of Cybot construction to do. Cybot is a mail order robot targeted at kids (like me) . Every two week you get a magazine and some parts that you have to assemble. The robot is quite advance already. At this stage it can run around autonomously, one can program it to run around according to your design, control it via a handheld device and control it via voice commands. Pretty sweet toy. Future improvements include a soccer playing module, camera module and tracking orbital module (a separate robot). Anyway, I took a lot of pictures with my old cellphone (small resolution though) and will take more with my new cellphone (1.3MPixel, much better). I want to organise them all and post it on my website at some stage.
• Finish reading "G0del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" so that I can get to read the 20+ other books I've bought, but haven't read yet. I'm about one third through and its really excellent. The book has been published 20 years ago and is still a must read. It can be quite "heavy" on the mathematical side (all the formal system goodies), but the lessons learned is remarkable.
• I would like to write a bit more about LabView and my experience with the development environment up till now. Watch this space.
  
• I would like to spend some more time on my AI research. Maybe, write some basic programs to test some of my evolutionary programming ideas, etc. There are two things that I would like to do in the short to medium term. One is to write a Corewars warrior evolver (a program that generates and evolves warriors). The other is to write a reasonably good AI for the Diplomacy board game. The first one seems the easiest and I will probably start there. More about this at a later time.
• The final item on my TODO list is to have some fun. Anyone got some?
  

Anyway, I've meet my babbling quota for today.