Thursday, February 15, 2007

Failure!

PHP scraper

I tried Tom's PHP scraper example for HOURS. Seemed like the Xport was working but I could never get it to connect to the internet. I tried many different things, and found one problem: the Xport was wired incorrectly and kept resetting itself. After that, it still didn't work and drove me a bit mad. I finally gave up and talked to Tom, and it appears my home modem/router setup might be the problem. I hope to return to this when I get more time, to get it working.

The code I was using was straight from Tom so I definitely feel it was my setup at home. Aggravating!!

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Rise and shine... or else!

Project 2: Future of the bedroom clock

This was a group project. JennyLC, Jaymes and I had a lot of fun brainstorming. It was good to get to know Jaymes as he's a first-year. I haven't had a lot of contact with that group of students, but they all seem to kick ass. It's a little intimidating!

After batting around some ideas, we really decided to get down to the essence of the task. We simply want to make sure you're out of bed when the alarm goes off. All three of us agreed that the snooze feature—appealing though it is—is detrimental to anyone trying to get out of the house on time. We all bonded over a common behavior: addictively hitting snooze over and over and over again.

Our solution to the bedroom clock problem was to develop a bed that would become inhospitable when it was time to get up. We briefly considered a bed of nails, where the nails would be stored inside the mattress until the alarm went off (the alarm would trigger the nails to extend and poke the sleeper.) Another idea was to create a ridgeline down the center of the mattress which would slowly increase in height until the sleeper was rolled out of bed and onto the floor. We finally settled on tilting the bed up, so that the sleeper would be faced with a choice of 1) hopping out of bed or 2) sliding down to the footboard in a heap. (see illustration)







Props to Jaymes for finding a sweet British accented female voice for our countdown.