I guess it's a chess and bugs kind of day. I ran across Scott McCloud's Chess comic after finding a referrer in my server logs from agent.snewp.com, which purports to be "a revolutionary search engine serving today's results for today's searches." Sure. I typed in FPGA Chess and found nothing. Chess as a search term turned up two sites, one of which linked to Scott McCloud (feel like you're reading Connections in Scientific American yet?) who is the author of the excellent Understanding Comics. Which goes to show that I still don't think internet non-stop, since I've been rereading Understanding Comics lately and hadn't even considered looking for Scott's work online.
You're not waiting for a tie-in with bugs are you?
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email thisFrom the FPGA (field programmable gate array) weblog comes this PDF on An FPGA Based Move Generator for the Game of Chess. If you are interested in the software this hardware is hoping to emulate, I would recommend this excellent series of articles from François Dominic Laramée over at GameDev.net:
Hey, speaking of bugs... (tune out now if you can't stand them)
There's that moment at the restaurant when the person across from you smiles to display a big green broccoli tooth wedgy. Or the co-worker's snort of laughter which leaves a booger swaying from a nose hair. This morning as Faith got ready for her trip I noticed a terrifically huge eye booger. We're talking Saint Bernard sized eye gunk. I'm about ready to make an insightful comment when I notice that it has symmetry...and LEGS!
A day just isn't the same after you find a tick. Even if it was barely hanging on and hadn't set up bar yet. Every inch of skin and hair is on red alert, the slightest breeze sets off tick-going-for-my-juggler alarms. Faith will be in a finely tuned state today. I pity anyone sitting next to her on the plane as they'll surely think she's covered in cooties.
Just as well that I didn't discover Zeke's tick until after I dropped her off at the airport.
"How was your day Hon?""Buggy"
Like any obsessive, reductionist, intellectual poser I have classified the various states of self so as to better explain the unexplainable. They range from bad hand weeks, low technology days, ogre hours, on down to fleeting brilliant moment. Yesterday was a low technology day. Yesterday was the sort of day to inspire luddites, if not a whole generation of cartoon writers and slapstick artists. The sort of day when you look into the garden hose as you turn it on...with a rational reason you can't quite remember as you are drying off. Not the day for file re-organization, software installs, or programming at any level lower than turtle graphics.
The best part of a low technology day is that it is often followed by a fleeting moment of brilliance. I'm ready. Poised. Desperate. Stuck on a iterative deepening alpha-beta minimax evaluation ordering function and I need to see the light.
Ugh, I hate ticks. That's one nice thing about Alaska... No ticks, and hardly any poisonous spiders (except for that stray brown recluse that bit me).
We don't have it too bad here, maybe one a month or so. Some friends took care of Zeke once and went down to Cape Cod. He came back covered in ticks! Gives me the willies just thinking about it.