So many things are changing for me, moving back home, graduating from Binghamton, and converting my blog to Wordpress. My old blog was run on Drupal, and while I liked having the Drupal framework to mess around with, I never really needed it. In the 2 years I used Drupal, I only used it for blogging. WP makes things look cleaner and it makes life much easier. The switch was pretty easy, which surprised me, and I should be up and running. I want to get this Lifestream plugin thing to integrate nicely, so i can just populate the site between blog postings. Ideally I’d like each post on the Lifestream to have a little more meaning and not just be full of facebook notifications, and also have more pictures (it looks nice with flickr and youtube, but everything else is just boring and pictureless) but getting it to do exactly what I want means changing the plugin code, which will help me with learning how to make WP plugins.

As I mentioned, I have graduated from Binghamton University, and received my Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering Degree. Not having to write film noir essays, and read bioengineering research papers gives me more time to do things I enjoy, especially programming and engineering. I have many projects for the summer, which hopefully I document here. One idea i can now work on is a project manager to gather and organize all the ideas I have throughout the day, so I don’t forget them and miss out on the next big thing. The way I want it to be is every project is always evolving, and projects can be merged together.

Speaking of forgetting projects, when migrating the blog to Wordpress, I had more ideas for my Nixie clock, and i predict a Nixie Clock Part 2, and maybe Part 3 to wrap up the trilogy. I gained a tremendous amount of experience in the past 2 years, and things that seemed difficult or out of my league are simple for me now. I now know how to design, manufacture, and populate printed circuit boards, even with surface mount devices. A new project I can’t wait to tackle is getting my payphone to work. Since my last post, I acquired a payphone, and sucessfully opened it, and was able to place calls. Unfortunately the coin return coil doesn’t work properly, and I haven’t had much time to fix it, but I hope to get Skype calling independent of a PC on the payphone, which may be a challenge, but we’ll see.

Hopefully wordpress and my free webhost will be nice, and not give me any problems, so I can just focus on my projects and not have to worry about constantly fixing and maintaining everything. I look forward to enjoying my summer and the projects ahead of me, and will hopefully post again soon.