My Blog

Marie Swaisgood, Mom’s twin sister, passed away on Tuesday, Decenber 11th, 2012.

Marie had suffered a seizure just days after being moved to hospice and never regained conciousness. We are grateful that Mom was able to travel to Ohio to say goodbye.

So, this semester I had a lot of classes that have both periodic and final projects. I thought people might enjoy looking at some of the things I have been working on throughout the past few months.

In my Computer Graphics class we have been building some pretty neat interactive graphics, (best viewed in the Chrome browser). Here is the page that links to each person’s projects and then you might have to click on a “something”.html file to see the project. Project 8 is the final project I did with a partner, based on the board game Abalone. While it currently doesn’t have all the features of the physical game (no lateral moves, for example, and no winning detection) I worked a ton on this project and am very proud of it. I am planning on working more on it during Christmas break and Interim, so we’ll see if it ever gets “finished”.

In Web Administration we have been learning how to build websites, so here is a link to my fake portfolio website and my testing site, where I try things out before putting them into the website I am working with a partner to build for a local non-profit. The non-profit’s site is hosted at a real domain, www.cradlesofgracebyroncenter.org and my teammate and I are very pleased with how satisfied they are with our work.

In Software Engineering I work on a team of 5 people, who (instead of making an app for an Android phone like the rest of the class) are making a remote control program that works through the internet to play movies and audio on a Raspberry Pi. With our program installed, someone could hook up this tiny computer to their TV and the internet and control the media playing on their TV from anywhere with an internet connection.

My fourth class was a math class, Advanced Logic and Computability, so there were no team projects in that class. Only a few homework assignments where we programmed simple computers called Turing Machines. I spent a long time working on one of those, because my computer broke in the middle of saving my work, so I was having dreams about the code for a few nights. Actually, I have had dreams about almost all of my classes: nightmares about usability testing in Software Engineering, about repeatedly typing commands to install new things for the website, and about doing vector math to improve my Graphics final project.

The only class I did not have nightmares about is my PE class, Cooperative World Games, which reminds me a lot of the PE we used to do when I was younger. We played all kinds of different games, and always tried to find one each class period that was from another country. Teams of 3 or 4 people from the class led each time, so that was another team project I had to work on, which just happened to be due the same day as almost all of my other stuff. So, after all of that I survived to the end of the semester, through all the presentations and exams, and am ready to enjoy Christmas at home.

We lost our “kitten”, Velvet, on Wednesday, September 19th. She passed in her sleep after a long and spoiled life.

We will miss her company, her purring, and the way she always knew when we were blue or not feeling well.

Avast! Another year be under the keel and it be Talk Like a Pirate Day once more!

In me voyages I stumbled across a troupe of performers that I be enjoying, Alestorm! They be calling themselves a Scottish Metal Pirate Band and they be a sight to behold and while the sounds they make could shiver me timbers they speak me language!

Me mates do think me a bit odd for switchin’ between traditional shanties and the likes of Alestorm thoughout the day on me magic box, but they be daft!

So, ye scurvy dogs, may the the winds be fair at ever at yer back!

— Cap’n Rich

This year was the first time I flew back to school after the summer (leaving the family in Florida this time, too), and also my first year not to live on the third floor where I always have (I already walked up by mistake once and almost said I lived there still!) I am now in one of the upperclassmen dorm in the third wing of the building I used to live in (and on the 2nd floor). I have my own room for the only time since I was very little!

I have moved things into my room, but am still working on motivating myself to unpack. Part of the delay is due to the fact that I spent part of Sunday and most of Monday on a trip up to the UP (Upper Peninsula) so I could walk across the Mackinac (pronounced MACK-in-aw, like the city even though it isn’t spelled that way) Bridge between the two parts of Michigan on Labor Day.

Apparently this is an annual thing in Michigan (55th annual according to some people’s T-shirts), where the governor makes a speech and half the bridge is closed to cars to allow normally forbidden foot-traffic. It was really neat to get to walk across the bridge we drove over last year since I remember thinking how neat such a thing would be back then while riding in the car. I tried to get some pictures of the bridge structure, but since it was so crowded there are people in most of the pictures.

Oh well, then you get a sense of how it felt to walk across with the thousands of other people who crossed the bridge that day. I especially liked walking across the grates so I could look down at the water so far below without being at all worried about falling or dropping anything.

Today, after the 5+ miles (not including to and from the actual bridge part) of a hike, I can definitely feel it. At least it was downhill after the halfway point, and there was usually a nice breeze. Now I’m sitting in my dorm room with two fans on high to keep me from sweating. I’ve only had one class so far, the rest start tomorrow, but I have been having fun visiting with people! I’ve got some more guests due back soon, so this will have to be all for now. Until the next interesting event at college!

-Ashley

It started a few years ago, when we got our education in pesky non-pest removal. Florida is full of ants, insects and various things that you must hire pest control for, unless you like having those things crawling around on the inside of your house. But once you get to the mammal type pests over a certain size, you have to deal with a different type of company. So that is why I called them non-pests, otherwise the pest control companies should take care of them, right?

The first time we actually needed help was when some raccoons had figured out how to push on the aluminum soffit under the roof edge to make a hole large enough to get into our attic and we heard them roaming around up there. We looked online and found out that the longer you took to get rid of them the bigger the mess you would have to deal with, and the larger the overall cost. We wanted to be nice to the animals and hired someone to make sure that they were no longer in the attic, to seal things up, and to remove the animals that had figured out that we had an attic. (Apparently wire and the correct type of foam is both a raccoon deterrent as well as it being considered rat and squirrel proofing.) This company was good, but unfortunately too good. Since they placed multiple traps, to catch the animals that might be exiting the attic as well as entering our fenced yard, they ended up catching quite a few raccoons, as well as an opossum. They were kind to the animals and would relocate the animals elsewhere, but every time something was caught there was a fee for relocation as well as resetting the traps that the raccoons had removed the bait (marshmallows) from. It is really nice having a conservation area behind our backyard, but there is a potential for an endless supply of wildlife to be removed. Once we became fairly certain there was no way there were any raccoons in the attic we put an end to our paying for any more rodent road-trips.

We are not sure why they seem to enjoy our house, especially the roof with the solar panel, as evidenced by the debris left there. Our next door neighbors’ house is an exact mirror of ours, so it should be just as appealing, and the neighbors on both sides have bird feeders that double as mammal feeders for the squirrels and raccoons, so they should like their houses better, but they were surprised to hear we had any trouble.

The next memorable time the raccoons invaded they tried to dig through the window in our loft, that is easily accessible from their favorite roof. After making a hole in the screen they continued digging, even after we lifted the shade and came face to face with them. It was dark at the time so I think they could see us better than we could see them, but they continued trying that unsuccessfully for quite a few days.

It seems that it is this time of year that they care that our house exists, even though they don’t care every year. So the day before we wanted to leave to bring Ashley back to college last year, pieces of the foam from the rat proofing started appearing in the yard. We made a quick makeshift repair, since obviously the warranty had long since expired, and hoped for the best. We found a bit of that in the yard later also, but not enough that they could have gotten back into the attic.

During all the invasions the raccoons had decided that climbing up the corner of our screen enclosure was the most popular method of getting up and down off the roof. Sadly it has caused the screen there to get quite shredded. So the point of this entire post is that the raccoon(s) have made such a large hole that they can get into our screen enclosure, and we got some pictures. It is slightly unsettling that the raccoon stayed around while I got Rich, Amber and Alyssa from inside the house to see it, and that it stayed there until we got some pictures. It figured it was safe where it was and didn’t have any reason to go anywhere until Rich shook a can with pennies in it to scare it.

Hopefully they will soon lose interest in our house again for at least a year. It is funny how something can be both cute and annoying…

Karen

So much for weekly progress, I’ve only just posted the second video, of whitewater rafting this time, and it has already been a month!

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In the meantime, I put up three short videos on my own account, which you can also view by clicking my name in the “Other Sites” section at the bottom of this page. There is a GoPro 2011 Trip Trailer, pictures and video from our 2004 Disney Cruise, and a silly video that Alyssa and I made while Amber was at camp. I hope you enjoy them!

An inside look at what would have been my third full length animation film credit and the closing of Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida.

Hard to believe that was over eight years ago…

— Rich

So I finally got around to editing together some highlights from last summer’s trip when we were using our GoPro camera. The first video of more to hopefully come out weekly, has been uploaded to Vimeo for your viewing enjoyment!

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Since the summer of 2012 is half over, it seemed like a good time to finally post about our 2011 summer trip.

As per my now standard practice, the posts have been back dated so that they appear “when they happened”. Jump straight to Day 1 to start reading!