So much has happened since my last update! Pumpkin Man was fleshed out, and we’ve “performed” twice now! As the voice of Pumpkin Man, I’ve had a terrifically spooky time interacting with the friends and neighbors who came to see him.
For the previous post click here.
Since we last checked in, Pumpkin Man’s cybernetic brains developed the ability to start up automatically and self-update. Also, there’s a new control interface for operating all eight relays. And perhaps most importantly, the team working on his physical form have made great strides. He now stands triumphantly!
For last week’s post click here.
This week, I worked on a recording system for Pumpkin Man’s control interface. This enables us to prerecord a sequence of motions and play it back later.
My friend Sam DuBois has enlisted my help in building Pumpkin Man for Halloween 2020. Pumpkin Man is set to be a larger-than-life being with a 🎃 for a head who interacts with passersby. The project is reuniting Sam, Kai, and me, the team behind 2019’s Avenue Adventure. My primary focus is on developing the computer control systems to bring Pumpkin Man to life.
Today at my internship I merged a PR that broke the master branch. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a big deal. As soon as the issue was reported to my team, I knew which commit was to blame. I pushed up a branch that reverted that commit and waited for it to pass CI. On the recommendation of my mentor, I sent a Slack message to the whole engineering group letting them know that someone had broken master and a fix was incoming.
My internship wasn’t originally supposed to be remote. But I’m enjoying many aspects of working from home. For one, my work environment is mostly under my control. In an open office floor plan (which seems to be popular), I would be subject to ambient noise and visual distractions. Besides that, I have a variety of locations available to work from — my desk, the couch, or even out in the backyard in the sun (highly recommended!
I came up with this set of ten cards from the game Dominion. It is centered around the Tournament card from the expansion Cournucopia, and tries to allow the players to accumulate plenty of money. This makes it a game show of sorts — players compete for earnings while pitting themselves against the other players.
Oberlin College announced a plan for the 2020–2021 school year that, in my view, has some major problems. This post contains the email response I sent to President Carmen Twillie Ambar.
Dear President Ambar,
Just for fun, I signed up for the DEF CON CTF 2020 Qualifiers this weekend. I didn’t successfully solve any challenges besides the (deliberately easy) welcome challenges. But I spent a while working on “uploooadit,” a web challenge focusing on a Flask app. This post is a write-up of my unsuccessful attempts at solving the challenge. The Challenge The challenge links to a simple website and provides the source code, written in Python with the web framework Flask:
I don’t have much to add to my reflection on week 2 of online classes. I’ve continued weekdaily naps, as well as walks and runs. My attention and promptness to my schoolwork was not as good this week as it was in week 2; in general, I was more distracted from work, so I started it later in the day. One welcome improvement is that my politics professor has shortened class slightly by removing the full-class discussion that would follow the small group discussions.