Boris Smus

Since moving to the states, I have had nothing but grief from the .ca at the end of my all-purpose email address. Even in Canada, people would constantly confuse z3.ca for z3.com, resulting in email bounces. To resolve this problem once and for all, I decided to switch to Gmail like all the cool kids. I registered boris.smus long ago out but never used it. The first thing I did was try to link my z3.ca to the Gmail. When I couldn’t figure out how to do that, I deleted my Gmail account in order to re-create a new pre-linked account with the same name. Sounds innocent enough, right?

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In anticipation of 48-739: Making Things Interactive, I’ve been itching to build something interesting. I decided to create a printing plotter out of my brother’s Mindstorms set. There are already many excellent plotter designs floating around in the Mindstorms community, so I decided to try something new. Plotters typically draw straight, edge-aligned lines, since they have a caret motor which travels along the x-axis and a feed motor which aligns along the y-axis. There are many variations on this theme.

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For the last few days, I’ve had the chance to get my feet wet in the developer sandbox of Google Wave. My first impressions are very positive. I am as awed now by the scope and potential impact of Wave as I was after watching the hour long video from Google I/O.

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One day I wanted to add a feature to Guitar Unleashed which exists in some of the better guitar tab sites. When a user hovers over a chord, they are shown a diagram representing the guitar fret with overlaid finger positions required to produce this chord.

Many of the most popular sites do this by showing  a crude, plain-text representation of the chord. For example, a C chord is shown as follows:

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In late March, I was completely thrilled to hear that the Carnegie Mellon University Human Computer Interaction Institute accepted me into their Master’s program! In addition to admission, they offered a very juicy scholarship to spend part of the time on the beautiful island of Madeira. CMU was my most far fetched reach school, so I attribute this wonderful fortune to a clerical error made by the admission committee.

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