The Clever Monkey

The nostalgic soundtrack at this coffee shop is strangely soothing.

I’m pretending to work while Robert Plant’s solo offerings give way to Boston’s “More than a Feeling” and then Van Halen’s “Panama”, and a crowd of nice slavic ladies raucously catch up at the same shared table. The ladies are also strangely soothing.

The idea is to change my surroundings in order to get some busy-work done, or at least started. The intention:

• Run through some Java coding interview stuff for my call with [REDACTED] this week
• Get ROS installed on my Lubuntu VM for fun (and, potentially, profit)
• Restart preparing for my Amateur Radio Basic Qualifications

Even though my basement computer shack workstation runs Arch, I mostly did that so the DistCC based build system for Arch Linux ARM on the BeagleBone Black (BBB) would be easier. That project was shelved, though, and now the BBB is running Snappy Ubuntu so the path of least resistance was an Ubuntu Core workstation. So, I’ve been doing a little light Snappy hacking.

But then I had a chat with a local start-up about ROS at the past Maker Expo and it turns out that Ubuntu is an easy entry into that, as well. Since both the Arduino and the BeagleBone offer interfaces to ROS, and ROS is of interest to at least one start-up in town, why not see what it’s all about?

The Maker Expo is also where I chatted with someone from RAC who convinced me to just finally pull the trigger and get my no-code Basic Qualification, so I’m going to do that. I’m a little rusty on the Industry Canada rules and some of the parallel vs. serial RC circuits stuff, so I pulled out my flash cards and RAC manual to bone up a bit on that.

Perhaps soon I’ll have a new job, a haircut, and a VE3 call-sign.

Little of that will happen, though, until I stop writing, and start studying.