Temporary Server Rack

PitelSPOT server will shutdown on December 31st 2009 and will not become active again until Janurary 6th 2010 (at earliest).  We are moving from Illinois to New Jersey and are taking the server with us. We are also changing services from DSL to Cable. We are keeping out fingers crossed that cable upload speeds are faster than out current DSL speed.  Comcast does not guarentee bandwidth like DSL does.

1. Peanut butter

The jump from low-fat peanut butter to the organic version is the most noticeable. To make peanut butter “low fat,” it is essentially diluted with corn or soy products. Organic or all-natural peanut butter actually tastes like peanuts and is generally not as sweet, if it contains sugar at all.  Organic, no-stir peanut butter is about twice as expensive as regular peanut butter.

2. Yogurt

I started buying organic yogurt for myself  and continued to buy Grant cheap stuff because he said he “couldn’t tell the difference.” Well, I definitely could. Once I started eating organic yogurt, anything else tasted like corn starch. Not surprising, because corn starch is high on the  ingredient list. Eventually I caught Grant stealing my yogurt and he admitted he prefers the organic version.  Now it’s all we buy. The bad news is that it costs about twice as much as “regular” grocery store yogurt.

3. Maple syrup

We bought “real” maple syrup when there happened to be an enormous container of it at Sam’s Club. Everything is different. It tastes totally different, has a viscosity closer to water, and requires refrigeration. Typical grocery store call maple syrup is generally corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup with coloring, flavoring, and preservatives added. Real maple syrup easily costs two to four times corn syrup-based products and (aside from what you might find at Sam’s Club or Costco) comes in much smaller containers.

Camera: Still Photos

The N85’s camera has become a substitute for our relatively bulky “real” digital camera. It performs well in high (bright sun) to adequate light. As previously stated, the photography style in which this phone shines is macro. Its optics will auto-focus at a very short distance, allowing photos such as the bug-and-flower picture below.

The primary weakness I have found is the quality of photographs in low light. The dual LED flash supplements dim ambient indoor light, but is not sufficient for a dark area. The resulting images are off-color and grainy. I am not sure whether the xenon flash on the Nokia N82 is significantly better in these situations. I don’t find this a major drawback, as available lighting is adequate most of the time I want a photograph taken. Below I have provided a few examples of lower-light photos.

Camera: Video

Video capabilities of the N85 are on par with our “real” 5 MP digital camera. Similar to still photograph performance, the camera does well in adequate light, but videos in poorly lit rooms are grainy. With the 8 GB of space standard on this phone, I don’t have to worry about keeping the videos short. The N85 allows me to capture candid moments with sufficient quality to post a video on YouTube. I doubt any other phone does it better, though you could certainly find newer digital cameras and obviously digital camcorders with better performance.

Other Features

Somewhat odd perhaps, but I will classify making phone calls under this category. I appreciate the N85 as a camera. As a phone it is sufficient but not exemplary. This may be remedied by eventually reading the instruction manual, but so far I have found no way to reach certain features, such as call logs or profiles (e.g. silent, airplane mode), without a number of click-throughs. It also has a tendency to not alert me to missed calls until far after the fact.

Second caveat is the screen. It is impressive indoors, but almost unusable outside in bright sun. This can make it difficult to take pictures outside, as it’s hard to verify they are in focus.

Final Thoughts

The N85 obviously does have weaknessess–lack of a touchscreen or full keyboard, internet browsing is difficult, plus those two mentioned above–but overall I am very happy with the phone. My primary motivation was to use it as a more convenient substitute for our traditional digital camera, and in this capacity I think it has exceeded my expectations.  However, if  texting, e-mail, or web browsing are important, the N85 may not be the best choice.

Fig.1 Why Visio Library Sucks

The advantages of the PitelSPOT Electrical Shape Library and the PitelSPOT Engineering Template are:

• Symbols align to a 0.1″  grid. This grid work great for those small double column articles required in IEEE journals and conference papers.
• The Engineering Template will setup the grids and snaps  for you. To use, go to File=> New=> New Drawing from Template=> then select PitelSPOTEngineeringTemplate.vst.
• Symbols are minimal. Use the connector tool to join shapes.

The presently supported shapes are shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. List of Included Electrical Symbols

Version History

• 06-17-09: FREE DOWNLOAD: PitelSPOT Engineering Template for Visio Version 1.0
• 06-17-09: FREE DOWNLOAD: PitelSPOT Electrical  Shapes for Visio Version 1.0

The dowloads listed are for free. If  there is a symbol missing, make your request in the comments below. Bribes/gratitude in the form of donations are welcomed via the Paypal link below.

Downgrading to Wordpress2.7.1 was really simple:

• Download the previous version.
• Drag the files into your Wordpress installation directory.
• Log-in into the admin menu.
• Wordpress will request to automatically update your database. Agree to the update.
• Everything should be back to the way it was. It was for me.

Readers, keep me posted on when this major bug gets resolved. Thanks.

    - Single-Phase Grid Connected Control
    – Direct Digital Synthesis
    - All Digital Phase-Lock Loop
    - Software and Hardware in the Loop Experiments
    – Rapid Control Prototypes and System Products

 G. Pitel, “Fast power converters and rapid digital design,” UILU-ENG-2008-2509, CEME-TR-2008-02, December 2008, pp. 92-109.

1. Establish a set of encoding, tagging, and album art rules and save it as a text file in your top directory. For example: (downloadable version: musiclibarystd_revb)
   

   ==Music Library Standard Revision A.04==
   5/31/2009
   Grant Pitel
   Adam Pitel–CODING–
   LAME 3.90.3 Quality: 220 kbps VBR / 44.1KHz / Joint Stereo–TAGGING–
   (Rule 1) 
             General Folder structure
                  <Genre>/<Artist>/<Album>
             Special Folder structures
                  <Soundtracks>/<Album>(Rule 2)
   File Naming
             All files must cohere the following format
                  <track number> – <artist> – <song title>
   Exceptions:
             Compilations
                  The artist who performs the song goes in the composer tag
                  In the artists tag enter “Various Artists” and rename the file such that coheres to the following
                  <track number> – <album> – <composer name> – <song title>
             Soundtracks
                  Sound track songs contain “Various Artists” in the artist field. 
   The file name should neglect this field as follows.
                  <track number> – <album> – <song title>(Rule 3)
   Albums with multiple CDs
                   The album tag should contain the CD number so it looks like the following
                   <album (CD #)>
                   Folder structure and file naming remain the same
    
   – IMAGES –
   (Rule 1) All album art needs to be embedded into the music file
   (Rule 2) Each album directory needs to contain an image of the album cover “folder.jpg”

2. Download all your music to a temporary holding directory. This directory will be for all your untagged music. The music will automatically be added to the correct file/folder as you’ll see next.
3. Use Mp3tag to tag, embed album art, and automatically organize the file structure according to the above rules. After tagging the album from Amazon, you can then use that Tag to rewrite the filename and folder structure. Using the above ruleset, the following format string is used in Mp3tag to go from Tag to Filename: “D:\Music\%genre%\%artist%\%album%\$num(%track%,2) – %artist% – %title%” See example video below:
   
4. Disable unnecessary tagging features in iTunes and Windows Media Player such as “Retrieve additional information from the internet” and copy library to a new directory.

Please feel free to share any of your music organization methods in the comments below.

This article covers chapters 1 and 2 of my disstertation. These chapters cover:

- Dissertation Introduction
- Voltage Source Buck Converter Modeling
- Boost Converter Modeling
- Voltage Source Inverter Modeling

G. Pitel, “Fast power converters and rapid digital design,” UILU-ENG-2008-2509, CEME-TR-2008-02, December 2008, pp. 1-14.

5. Lois & Clark

This one goes way, way, waaaay back–think middle school. It’s scary, and somewhat depressing, to think how long ago that was. Anyways, it’s impossible to remember exactly when I started watching, but I know that Lois & Clark was the first TV show that I truly committed to viewing weekly. Lois & Clark exemplifies a common theme in shows I enjoy: writers that spend years possibly building up to romance between the main characters, or at least teasing viewers with the idea that it might happen.  It also set the bar for my perception of actors and actresses in modern remakes of the Superman franchise. Certainly no other Lois Lane has outdone Teri Hatcher. None come even close, really, and Kate Bosworth’s Lois of the recent Superman Returns film was so awful it was a distraction from the rest of the movie. And of course, compared to Dean Cain, Smallville’s Tom Welling (below)  is a total wimp.

4. Smallville

I admit I only started watching Smallville because Grant wanted me to. It was, in fact, the first  show we regularly watched together and we still watch it now, years later.  Despite its longevity, Smallville is low on my list for being such a roller coaster: some weeks the show is absolutely great, and other weeks it’s so terrible I think I might start bleeding out of my eyes.  I boycotted Smallville  for a almost an entire season when the writing was especially bad, thinking it was a lost cause. Grant continued watching, and eventually I came back. Luckily the eighth season has been much improved, though I have also re-calibrated my expectations to a drastically lower level.

3. The X-Files

Like Smallville, The X-Files was bittersweet: at times great, but ultimately, an extreme disappointment. I started watching the show on a friend’s suggestion and was immediately hooked. This was partly because of the quality of the show, and partly because I thought David Duchovny was cute. Please keep in mind I was, what, thirteen years old? (Now apparently a sex addict, he is 100% off my attractive list.) The X-Files was a staple throughout high school and stayed with me until undergraduate. I have great memories of packing into the lounge in Cornell’s Clara Dickson Hall with numerous other students, ready to watch new episodes on a big-screen television. Unfortunately The X-Files jumped the shark somewhere around the sixth season and I was officially done with the show shortly thereafter. Years later I returned one last time to watch the series finale. The X-Files does have one unique, if largely unknown, distinction: this show invented the concept of  a “shipper“  fan, as in the teenage girls (and teenage-girls-at-heart) who long for a romantic relationship between platonic characters, analyze episodes to seek signs that such a relationship is imminent, and discuss the topic endlessly on internet forums. This is the same phenomenon that gave the world irritating acronyms like Bennifer, Brangelina, and TomKat, in case you were wondering where those came from. Nowadays you can find internet fans discussing couples such as Skate (Lost, Sawyer-Kate), Chameron (House MD, Chase and Cameron), and, believe it or not, Hilson (House MD, House and Wilson).

2. M*A*S*H

M*A*S*H likely seems anachronistic, but I really did watch it throughout high school. It is the only show that I watched purely in syndication, because its original run ended before I turned two years old!  M*A*S*H deserves its spot for several reasons. It wins the prize for hours watched, as this was the only show I could watch daily (two episodes per day in the afternoon), and holidays usually brought a M*A*S*H marathon of 12 hours or more. M*A*S*H also has the honor of inspiring the names of two pets, a dog named Wally, after Walter “Radar” O’Reilly, and a Siamese fighting fish named Potter, after Colonel Sherman Potter. Finally, the intriguing parallel between the 4077th MASH unit and my childhood phone number ending in 4077 was not lost on me.  The beauty of M*A*S*H is that it is a little bit of everything: comedy, medical drama, and a “best buddy” story with misfit doctors (Hawkeye and Hunnicut).  There is also the endless immature banter between the male characters and their superior, Margaret “Hotlips” Houlihan.  If this seems somewhat familiar, it’s intentional–I seriously wonder whether the writers of the next show on this list have taken quite a bit of inspiration from M*A*S*H. However, what especially keeps me thinking about M*A*S*H is a single episode in which an autoclave freakishly explodes, seriously injuring several characters. I know it’s totally stupid, but that blast still lingers in my subconscious when I use the autoclave at work.

1. House MD

I have watched House MD less than six months, so it feels a little disingenuous putting it as my number one show. However, in that short time  I have gone from zero to caught-up-with-season-five, and I can honestly say that unlike Smallville or The X-Files,  there was never a real dud among any of the episodes I saw. I think the reason why is that House’s formula appeals to me, and House adheres strictly to its formula. Grant finds this monotonous, but I apparently can’t get enough of the convulsions, pleural effusions, and bloody projectile vomit. The diagnosing never gets old, either–my inner scientist loves the technical jargon– though at this point it’s pretty clear that any guess made in the first forty minutes of an episode is wrong. I’m still amazed that they managed to use Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba I learned about in a medical parasitology course. The writers now seem to focus less on the patients and more on the relationships between the main characters, House and Cuddy ( “Huddy”),  which appeals to my inner hopeless romantic. It’s actually more of a six year old hopeless romantic, as I yelled and hid under the covers when they actually made physical contact. My favorite reaction video to the recent House-Cuddy romance can be seen here.

Honorable Mention

MST3K

South Park

Lost

Heroes

Firefly

The above sums up how I describe my new cell phone, the latest electronic toy added to our menagerie. After  years of merely getting by with a free Motorola Razr, I am now living large with a Nokia N85. As with most Nokia phones worth owning, the N85 is not available from AT & T. It can be purchased unlocked from various online retailers such as Amazon.com.

Oh N85, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. The stunning OLED screen is excellent for viewing videos and pictures or playing games.
2. The combination of FM transmitter and standard headphone jack also makes the N85 a capable music player.
3. Two cameras are included, the important one being a 5MP camera with dual LED flash and Carl Zeiss lens.  This lens is protected by a  sliding lens cover that also immediately opens the photography software when engaged. As seen below, the N85’s camera particularly shines in macro shots.
4. The N85 can also record DVD-quality video (640 x 480 resolution).
5. An 8 GB microSD card is included, though that is not explicitly stated on Amazon.com’s website. This is more than enough space to hold all of my music, videos, and photographs. At least for now.
6. I was pleasantly surprised by how small and light the phone is, given all its features.