Thoughts

I'm slowly becoming a machinist for an incredibly tiny part production company ( Inspire Products, Inc. ). Not a manual machinist, mind you. A better title might be a machine programmer, though my official title is manufacturing engineer. Whatever you call it, my position sometimes requires me to run CNC machines overnight or over the weekend, especially when cutting molds. These machines can sometime fail and require maintenance. We have a camera set up so we can check the status of the machine lights, but that doesn't always tell us a lot (especially in the dark when color is indistinguishable) and I don't intend to nervously watch the shop camera on my time off. However, if I were notified of a status change, then it would be a lot easier to enjoy one's time off and simply go in to solve the problem as needed.

I've actually been working for several weeks on setting up a Raspberry Pi to serve a simple website from home. I haven't posted anything on it yet, probably because I always falsely assume my blog posts must be extravagant. Well, I don't have time for extravagance, so I'm keeping it simple here.

There was a point this summer at which I decided to learn something a bit new. I had seen other people include animated GIFs in their email signatures, so I decided I wanted to animate Cal Poly's Mechanical Engineering Department Logo. Figure 1 shows the original image, taken from  http://me.calpoly.edu/openhouse/ . Figure 1: Original Mechanical Engineering (Cal Poly) Logo A gear in motion is a perfectly simple way to add a little "cool" factor to your email signature. This blog post aims to introduce you to some of the (free/open-source) tools I used to animate the logo. However, if you merely want to use the animated GIF in Figure 2 , skip to the Using The Animated GIF  section.

I've begun to learn a little bit of python because I'd like to make a script (that works in Windows or Linux) for finding duplicate files (whether the filenames are the same or not). This will mostly be useful in cleaning up my music library, for I'm suspicious that playing around with different programs has created more duplicates of my music files than I have already found. Yes, I realize that someone out there has probably already written a script for such a task, but where would be the fun in using that? This is how I practice my love for programming.