Hello world

Well I've been meaning to make some kind of website about my projects for quite some time now... my last attempt did not get much further than a nice template. You can see it here. It's been about a year since I did anything with it.

I have a problem with finishing things... once I learn enough to do it, a lot of the challenge is gone and I lose interest. That is why I stopped working on that website (it took a few hours) but it is also why I started this one.

This blog is all about documenting the few projects that I have actually spent the time to finish without losing interest. I hope that it serves two purposes. First, it provides a place for me to share my projects with others. Second and more importantly, I'm hoping that it will help me follow through with other projects that I might not otherwise.

To start this thing off, let me just list off some of the projects I might write about that I've finished over the past few years.

• Control Zune mp3 player with steering wheel button using a dsPIC (just finished, September '08)
• Folding basket opener/closer made from acrylic (finished March '08)
• Automated solver for minesweeper-like game using AutoHotKey and Matlab (finished April '08)
• Automated game playing program for a fun little web game called cyrkam airtos (finished October '07)
  
• One legged balancing robot, master's thesis at UCSD (finished June '07)

Timeout, I really don't want to write anything else about my thesis. I already spent countless hours building and controlling the thing, and wrote 140 pages on it. A link to my thesis is here, and a youtube video is here:

Moving on...

• Puzzle solver for an obscure online game using Matlab (finished around Jan '07)
• Magnet hovering apparatus (finished in late '06 I think...)
• "Worms" simulation using VBA in Excel (finished summer of '06)
  
• Puzzle solver for a sudoku-looking-but-far-from-sudoku game called Picross, using VBA in Excel (finished sometime in '05 I think)

Well I've probably gone back far enough with this list. Of course there is more, but my memory is bad and I'll probably only elaborate on half of the list as it is.

Let me finish this off by saying that this blog is not about me, it is about my projects. Although I'm sure that writing about the things that interest me will inevitably paint some kind of picture about me, I'll try not to fill in the blanks myself.