So I was doing some research on building a Tesla coil, (one of those mad scientist looking contraptions that shoot huge, but harmless sparks out) and came across what might be the very definition of the word "geek", and not in a bad way in my opinion. Anyway, these guys built one of the aforementioned coils and developed a way to rapidly turn it off hundreds of times a second based on input from an audio source. This allows them to generate a variety of tones, as the rate at which it's turned on and off varies the frequency of the sparking you hear, generating notes. How do you make a geeky pursuit even geekier? Throw in a tribute to a classic video game.

I spent a LOT of time playing Mario Brothers (thanks Mom for such an awesome Christmas present over 20 years ago) so this made me grin the whole way through.

I also have my schedule for the fall semester almost complete. I'm in the 1st wait list spot for one class, but everything else is good. The best part? Every single class has "Engineering" in the title. No more unnecessary physics*, questionably useful ethics, or boring economics classes. I haven't been this excited to start back to school since my return two years ago. It doesn't hurt that I've spent most of the last several weeks out in the sun all day splitting wood, but that's beside the point......

*this only applies to last semester's physics which focused on quantum mechanics. Interesting stuff, but unless you're building very tiny aircraft, not really applicable to my field