honeybear.org

So, I’m watching “Cribs” on CMT and it’s pretty lame. These NASCAR drivers and country singers have the most boring houses I’ve ever seen. They all have friendly dogs and comfortable furniture. We have comfortable furniture and an arrogant pomeranian, and people get arrested outside, so I think our place is much more interesting.

I’m going start writing in this thing again. So, it’s early Sunday morning and my cats are knocking shit off the kitchen counter. Apollo snuck into the cats’ bathroom and got himself a couple litter critters. I don’t know if that caused his atomic flatulence tonight, but I think it’s a reasonable guess.

We had been loosely watching Fried Green Tomatoes, which I learned is very long. As I was trying to better myself by reading Wikipedia and Apollo was trying to walk on my wife as she dozed, I started noticing blue flickering in the window above our door. I thought, “wait a second, could it be?” And it was. 

There were not one, BUT TWO cops outside. We live in a first floor loft in an apartment complex that hugs the edge of a pretty upscale town-center style strip mall in Fairfax, so considering the high crime in the area, this was no surprise. I only caught the tail end of the sting, but two people were carted off in one of the cars without its flashers or sirens on. So, I guess they’re trying to keep it hush-hush. I recognized the Maserati being searched too. We often admire it in our garage and we caught a glimpse of it’s owners, now on their way to the clink, the other day. 

I’m obviously kidding about the high crime remark. I was hoping for belligerent resistance, cops yelling, drunks getting slammed into anything, even a field sobriety test…anything, but it was pretty subdued. There was some crying and then it was all over. Now there’s just this nice-ass car parked out front. I’d gladly park it for them, but I didn’t think of offering in time.

OK, enough of this. 

Radio/programming victories

In chronological order:

1. Kicking GNU Radio’s ass
2. Demodulating a Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) waveform with a Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK) demodulator
3. Learning that the demodulated bits are always inverted for no obvious reason
4. Writing bitstuff and unbitstuff routines
5. Implementing proprietary scramble and unscramble routines to make real information look like noise
6. Learning the signal from item 2 was GFSK and not GMSK, even though it was supposed to be GMSK. 
7. Creating a GFSK waveform using a continuous phase frequency shift keying (CPFSK) modulator.
8. Achieving end-to-end, digital communications using items 1-7 with a little silver box which came with minimal documentation.
9. Writing no-return-to-zero (NRZI) encoding and decoding routines

Hell yeah!

Apparently, my cat Snickers ate a fly today. I was at work and my wife was home sick. She says the sound of buzzing coming from Snickers’ mouth was very strange.