Hiatus update

It’s been a long week.

First, I’m still on hiatus, life is still hitting me pretty hard. No, it’s nothing to do with my health or anything – just a lot going on all at once, ya know? I’m working at staying positive.

And speaking of work, work is a wonderful distraction from life’s problems. My project went well last week – even though I’m about a week behind on it and I’m being given a new project on the 9th. But I made a required breakthrough - Yea! However, I’ll probably work on it at least a day during my 5 day Independence Day vacation.

The hard part of my project was making it “speak” on two horizontal lines during the vertical interval of a standard NTSC video signal. Luckily, the new Microchip PIC24 (PDF link) was able to do this using the Serial Peripheral Interface. After I set everything up, all I had to do was load the necessary bytes into the buffer and let it go. The hard part was setting everything up, figuring out timing, creating the necessary bytes to simulate a pulse-width modulated signal, teaching the microcontroller how to interrupt on the correct line… you know – doing that whole Engineering thing.

It was fun watching the camera system pan and tilt to my whim. Now I have to turn my code into something legible by the software team – as a hardware engineer I only really needed to code enough to prove my concept.


I have been doing a bit of reading. I finished the “His Dark Materials” trilogy the other week, started reading “Intelligent Thought” and have started making notes on “More than a Carpenter” by Josh McDowell. I’m still re-reading “Misquoting Jesus” (and writing a lot of my notes in the margins, highlighting the heck out of the book, and adding notes to my study Bible – with highlights.) Dr. Ehrman’s debate with Dr. Craig over the question of historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus (link to PDF of transcript) also has a slice of my attention.


I’m not sure, at this point, when I’m going back to blogging regularly. I just know I will, at some point. Writers have spoken about writing as a sort of a drug, and I’m beginning to understand that – I have a need to write. I’m just lucky that I can publish what I write and that some people find me somewhat interesting. I’ve passed a quarter of a million words in this blog so far, and I do not intend to stop.

On that note - I've a question for my readers (all three of you, right?) I'm thinking of quitting Blogger and getting a real web presence, but I'm not interested in doing any coding of my own. I have no clue how to hire a site designer, nor how much a site design will cost me. I'd like to talk to someone about this, and will start doing my own research on it - but if you're interested in helping me out, then shoot me an email and we will talk.