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I can’t believe I haven’t written on my blog in almost a year. I recently spoke with some friends and they had commented on the fact that I hadn’t updated my blog in forever so it is thanks to them that I even remembered that I had this sitting here. A lot has happened in the last year, and I have met several of the goals I had planned. More specifically I purchased a condo with my brother right at the new year (Jan 2010). For the last 6 months we have been in the process of renovating it. Given we both have full time jobs we have had to keep to only the weekends for working which slowed our progress greatly, but things are finally just about to start wrapping up. The condo is a 3 bedroom 2 bath with about 1200sq ft of space. We have a 1 car detached garage. Secondly, a few weeks ago I finally said Good-bye to my trusty Jetta of 7 years and bought myself a Porsche Boxster S which I am absolutely thrilled with. It has been a lot of fun and continues to be so. Recently I sat down and started to try and figure out what I would like to accomplish this year before I turn 24. I have always thought it best to build goals around the center of my year which is my birthday. So, here is the “short” list:

• I plan on taking another test flight at the flight school again in the next few weeks to re-affirm that I would like to pursue my pilots license.
• I would like to pay off all of the renovation costs for the condo this year.
• I want to establish an emergency fund in case any unexpected circumstances should arise.
• I would like to get roughly 30% of the Porsche paid off.
• Finish the condo renovations (there isn’t that much left, but this will feel like a huge accomplishment)
• I want to release an Android app into the market place. (I don’t even care to charge for it, just want to get something out there)
• Save for a trip up the coast of CA into OR
• Join PCA (Porsche Club of America) and participate in at least 1 race type even

I’m sure I’ll have a few things to change or add as I ponder on this list, but it should get me thinking and started.

It’s been over two months since my last post. It’s hard to believe how fast time flies. So much has happened over the course of the last two months I feel it’s time for a bit of catch up. School hit a rock bottom this quarter. I only recently realized what was happening and began to question what I was doing. It’s going to be extremely difficult to pull off the grades I need this quarter to move on to several new classes, but I’m going to give it everything I’ve got to make it work. My first hint of what was going on occurred midway through this last quarter when I bombed my Statistics mid-term. I immediately dropped that course. As a result I will be taking classes this summer, on my own dime. This doesn’t put me in a very good financial position. It is imperative that I sort everything out this summer. According to my guidance counselor I’m currently a year and a quarter away from graduating at UCI. That means it will take a quarter longer than I had expected, and that’s assuming no more screw ups and all the classes I need are offered when I need them. So, the gloves are off. I have felt more myself in the last week or two than I have in I don’t even remember how long. It’s amazing what the mind can do. I have been more focused, and happier overall. All it took was hitting the reset button. I’ve started making head way on my personal projects as well as my business projects, and it feels good to be making progress on so many fronts at once. I don’t even remember the last time I was happy that I was busy.

So, heres how the projects stand. I began working on my car pc. I grabbed a low powered machine last weekend for about $250. I spent the last week and a half swapping distros and playing around with settings. I hit my lowest boot time with the Ubuntu Server editions at around 10-11 seconds. I most recently tried installing a full Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop and to my great surprise I’m getting a boot time of ~15seconds with only minor modifications. So, I have decided to continue using the Hardy Heron desktop as my base operating system. I also have worked on setting up this machine as an access point. I found the necessary code spread across the internet. I will post a step by step once I have completed the install on the new machine. With the access point I will be able to easily attach my iPhone to the car pc for syncing and other data transfers. Today I was working on pairing the iPhone over bluetooth to the Ubuntu Desktop. Lets just say I didn’t have complete success, but I learned a ton about bluetooth and in the end I did manager to pair the two devices although I am still unable to transfer audio between them. I can’t seem to figure out if its protocol or device class related. Perhaps I will learn more after Monday’s Apple conference. As for business related things, I have secured an office to work in over the summer. I’m hoping that by separating myself from home I will be able to focus more on my code. Well, that’s all for now. I will be posting various step by step processes that I used to get different parts of my car pc to where it is currently.

It finally came through!!! I’m officially employed part time by Arbitech. I begin Monday morning at 9:00am. I’m extremely excited. I can hardly wait to get started, so that I can further a bunch of my projects. I have some new things I want for the Jetta specifically a front upper tie bar and a lower sway bar. I checked out the Neuspeed products and think I’m going to settle on those. This will also enable me to buy some more home automation devices. I have been enjoying my current setup. Along with a new job the iPhone SDK was released today. I was amazed at the progress Apple has made on the iPhone. The SDK is by far the nicest looking development toolkit I have ever seen. All of this came tumbling down when I finally saw that Apple is releasing the SDK for Mac OSX only. No Windows, no Linux, no good. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do about this. A Mac Mini maybe my ultimate response since they’re the cheapest solution. Those that have known me for any length of time know my opposition of all things Mac. The iPhone was my first step outside that box, and now it may force me to take another step. I have NOT given into the Mac force. I’m simply using the only tool I can to do something I have been wanting to for the last 12 months. For now I have many other things to focus on, and I won’t be able to do too much with my iPhone. Finally, the cherry on top of my day. For those that like peanut butter, you know who you are, without hesitation I offer up the Fat Burger Peanut Butter shake. This was the greatest shake I have ever had!!!

Well, not to much happened today overall, but I’ll catch you up on the little things. First, I called up Starbucks to see how the applications were moving along. They’re still going through the stack from Monday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for that phone call. Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll hear something. Next up, a client of mine who is an avid VW fan like myself informed me that there is a beautiful Audi A6 S-series at our local VW dealership. I drooled on the pictures for a bit. I was seriously considering until I saw it was automatic. After slapping myself back to reality I realized that for a much smaller cost I could mod the Jetta further and escape starting another car loan. I think I will keep with this plan. Every once in a while temptation springs up and I want to get a new car so bad. Luckily it usually turns out to be a passing thing. If all goes well with Starbucks hopefully I’ll be posting some Jetta mods in a few months. I have started brainstorming my plan of attack for this new business venture with James. I still have a lot of research to do and hopefully this weekend I’ll get some time to do a bit. On my wireless video syncing front I did further testing today. I tried a bunch of scripts that are currently available for converting video for viewing on the iPhone and iPod Videos. None were super advanced and resulted in either poor quality video or unplayable formats. I have decided to pursue writing my very own script to do the conversion processes using ffmpeg. This will be my first major shell script so I’m guessing it’ll take a few tries. I got part of the script squared away this evening when I came across a post describing how to parse out values from the command line. Credit goes to prowla for this line found here. Using prowla’s command as a basis I have come up with a line to get the values needed to calculate proper aspect ratios:

tcprobe -d 0 -i filename | grep “frame size” | sed ’s/^*-g //’ | awk ‘{print $1}’

This returns just the frame size of the video that you input. From there I will parse the height and width and perform the division to figure out the appropriate conversion size and to add the proper amount of padding to the top and bottom of the frame. I’m going to try and make a bit more progress on this tonight. Once this is complete and I can properly calculate the values I will write a basic ffmpeg command to convert a video. I have settled on using MPEG4 compression, or lack there of, for compressing my videos. I have not had a single successful conversion with H264 that was playable on the iPhone, until I figure out the B frame settings and all of that I will stick with the easy solution. Once the videos are converted I will write a script to SSH them into my phone each morning at 1AM or something around then. If I can accomplish this I will be only a stone throw away from having a fully wireless media flow with my iPhone.

Me and two of my friends have been helping my boss do a major network migration this weekend. We started Saturday morning and finished last night. I’ll be going in tomorrow morning when everyone is back to help out with any minor issues. I’m really excited. This was a great income boost. While working I started drawing out my dream data flow for media between my devices. I’ll upload a picture later, but the idea is that TV, music, and movies will be connected to all my machines and will be wherever I want them when I want them. So, auto syncing of the latest shows to my iPhone and in time a machine in my car. I started work on this last night by constructing a little computer to work on downloading torrents. I will be using TED to fetch the torrent files for the various shows I want. Then I will use some kind of cron job to add the torrents to TorrentFlux. I have chosen TorrentFlux because of it’s web interface. This way I can queue up my own torrent as well. Ideally this will become my download server after I develop some kind of Rapidshare downloading site. Well I’m off to get some oil for the Jetta and grab an application for Starbucks. I’ll be going to the hiring fair today. I’m hoping I can get a job.

Well, today was good. Finished a presentation in English so I’m off the hook for Tuesday. Nothing major going on. Cruising home and within a mile of being home I look down at my tach and BLINK a yellow light clicks on. Yes the CEL was my Valentine’s day present. Turned out it was another P0420 code - CAT under performing. Thankfully I was smogged last year so in June I should be home free. Since I installed my big bore turbo inlet I periodically am visited by this CEL. Good news on an entrepreneurial front. I found out that a niche I thought might exist is looking more and more likely to be a great business opportunity. I will keep you posted of my progress on that and my other projects as we venture along.