gbobeck's Journal: Christmas and a New Project

Its been a long time since I last wrote a journal. ..

My family and I decided to spend Christmas plus a few extra days (read: Dec 21-26) in downtown Chicago. We stayed at the Residence Inn, which is just a few blocks away from the famed Handcock Center, Water Tower, and my University, Loyola University (Water Tower Campus).

Overall the trip was fun... Spent most of the time playing tourist. Got to wander the Mag. mile and browse through the overpriced stores. Got to play consumer and complain that CompUSA has shitty service (and threaten to not make our next big corporate purchase there for the Comp. Sci. department).

We also got to visit the Field Museum and see everything it has to offer. Now that was fun. :-) They have a lot of great new exhibits that are worth checking out.

For Christmas dinner, we ate at Bijan's Bistro. Overall the food was ok. Everything upto dinner was good. Unfortunately, my steak was ice cold, and after two valiant attempts, the kitchen staff was able to raise the meat temperature to body temperature. At least my dinner was free, as well as free coffee and desert for the rest of us. I may go back there some day when it is not an extreme day.

Anyways... my newest project for ChiOSI is a distributed weather monitoring system. We are using sensors from ibuttonlink.com for this project. The project itself will most likely be done mostly in python.

Already I have hit a snag: OWFS has nearly no documentation and both the release and CVS versions of the software are broken somewhere. Making matters worse, there is no Gentoo ebuild available. So, until OWFS gets installed, I'm stalled.

My next journal will be posted after I get OWFS to install OR after I find a suitable alternative.