I don’t get very many full weekends off. Whenever I do, it feels like a special occasion. If I’m getting more than a day off at a time it’s usually due to holidays. I need a break. I need time to sit on my ass and be lazy, or just be domestic and do something in my house.

It feels as though I would benefit from taking a break from worrisome things. I need to avoid the news for a while; to avoid twitter and other sources of information about the world collapsing in on itself. Looking at my timeline, you’d think the sky was falling. Anti-vaxers are going to kill us all with long-dead diseases. Ebola is going to mutate and make everyone hemorrhage to death from their anuses. Bobby Jindal is going to run for president, win, and make the national religion Christianity and force prayer in school.

Everyone just do me a favor- Ignore the drunk rambling guy. He means no one any harm. He’s just having a rough few days at his place of employment and is bashing the keys on the keyboard with regrettable zeal. Yoink. Taking that one back.

Anyways. Carry on.

I have an educational copy of Pro/E (a.k.a. PTC Creo 3.0 Parametric). It was easy to download. It was easy to activate. It’s not all that easy to use. I get some simple concepts and such, but I really need a decent tutorial on advanced use, or at least practical application for semi-complex geometry.

In short, I need help.

If anyone knows the best resource online for beginner tutorials, I’d really appreciate it. Just email me. Or get hold of me on the about page of my blog. In any case, I’m grateful for all help provided.

Technology is incredibly pervasive these days. I’m looking at getting myself a parallax propeller chip to toy with soon. I don’t want a fully assembled kit, I’m looking at buying a 40-pin dip and a bread board. The most expensive part will be the USB Prop. If anyone out there has cool projects made in SPIN, shoot me an email. If I get into it soon I plan on putting the code and photographs, as well as electronic diagrams on my blog. I’m going to use this guide to start with. It looks like an excellent starting point that doesn’t require more than an eight dollar chip and a few bits and pieces I should already have.

I saw you casually glancing at me while tweeting on your MacBook Air, sipping slightly on your venti horchatté. You’re judging me for my shitty laptop running crunchbang, my disheveled appearance, and the fact that I’m drinking plain coffee. You’re elite. You’re a part of the hacktivist collective known as “Anonymous”. Or you’re part of the penetration testers who narc on anons because you believe they dilute infosec with garbage.

I guess this is just a blog post to write a blog post. It’s pretty nice to be able to write whatever the hell I want, have it available publicly, and yadda yadda.

I’ve been climbing ladders at work. It seems I’m valued (so far) by my employer. I guess I deliver on more than just promises, I innovate. I save money and increase revenue. I guess having me around is a huge bonus for them.

Living. That’s what I’ve been busy with. But I think I’m going to share a tidbit of knowledge to the poor kids out there who either aren’t smart enough to pirate a copy of Minitab or aren’t fortunate enough to drop $1500 on statistical analysis software. I’m going to show you how to do binning with Excel (and potentially LibreOffice / OpenOffice).

Excel binning is the easiest. It’s also a great deal more flexible than Minitab.

I’m giving Bleep a try. It’s the Bittorrent “Secure Communication App”.

No idea as to how well these people can be trusted with secure communication. It’s an appealing idea; secure distributed communication with no central point of failure. We’ll see.

If anyone has any information on security or audits done, I’d be more than happy to take a look.

For now, here’s my Bleep contact info:

96fe28f64665e5b7dec0ba85141ce33474304906c513c5e3ef65305702cc0367,redlegion

I’m also giving “Tox” a shot. ID here: