Author: Nate

... for Tony Romo when I play his team in rec-league basketball.

10. Someone told me you're Tony Roma, I love your ribs.
9. Do you play rec league football? Our team could use a backup QB.
8. Aren't you the place-kick holder for the Cowboys?
7. I was hoping Jessica would be here, but I guess you play better when she's not.
6. Has anybody ever told you that you look like you could be Tony Romo's little brother?
5. Don't quit your day job.
4. How does Jerry Jones' butt taste?
3. I hope we play you guys in the first round of the playoffs
2. I watched a lot of film to prepare for this game, well, if Dukes of Hazzard counts.
1. Sorry, I'm usually better than this, but I just got back from Cabo.

P.S. Jason Witten is on his team too. This should be fun...

Okay, as if the multi-colored ribbons and "in memory of" window stickers weren't annoying enough, behold the latest, and possibly most annoying trend in automobile accesorization: window decals for each of your kids' extra-curricular activities.

Often seen on the backs of Plano-resident-soccer-moms' SUVs, these ubiquitous distractions do nothing more than communicate to other drivers that you have one or more bratty children that are most likely undisciplined heathens, pushed into athletics by their over-bearing parents. These things are like letter-jackets for parents who wish they were still in high-school and want to show off their children like merit badges. I finally snapped when I saw a Yukon with no less than 13 of these things, representing all the various interests of only 3 children.

I'm not discouraging kids having extra-curricular activities, or active parenting, but if little Connor or Madison happen to be members of the pee-wee soccer squad, don't delude yourself into following the unwashed masses and believing that you aren't a good parent if you don't clutter up your car with an homage to them.

As some of you may have heard, the pre-eminent virtuosos of alternative rock, Smashing Pumpkins are re-uniting (at least the members that matter) for a new album entitled Zeitgeist, which is set to be released July 10th, 2007.

I heard the first single last Friday on Sirius, got it ripped, and have posted it for your listening pleasure. It's called "Tarantula" and it's fast, heavy, with a raw sound.

Here it is, Smashing Pumpkins - Tarantula.mp3. (3.51 Mb) Enjoy!

Tommy gave me a parallel character LCD that he's had stashed away for a long time. He was on the right track, just never finished it. I looked at what he'd made, based on the original schematic. I hooked the LCD to a DB25 connector that was already soldered to a ribbon cable, hooked it up and it worked.

I noticed that the brightness and contrast knobs were set and didn't need to be adjusted. One pot was even set to 0! After a few minutes I was able to boil down the circuit to just use one 50-ohm resistor.
Here is the final "simple" schematic:


This schematic should work on any Hiatchi HD44780-based character LCD, so long as it only has a single 8-bit connection, like the Seiko L2014.

update: You may also use this LCD screen test app to check your LCD: http://www.neodux.com/projects/lcd/LCDsetup.zip

Grendel sez: You da man, sir. Thanks. Here is a picture of the LCD in action. Videos are here (2.5Mb, avi) and here (6.9,avi).

update: I (grendel) just got the LCD working under linux using lcdproc/LCDd. Now, if only I could figure out how to get lcdvc to work with it, I'll be even more pleased.