I got around to uploading some photos from our Olympic experiences here. Unsorted and raw, straight from the camera. Enjoy!

The Canadian Royal Mint hosted a pavilion for Olympic visitors to Vancouver for the 2010 Games. The Mint you say? How could that be interesting? I had exactly the same question, initially. The pavilion is down the street from my office so I see what is going on outside every day. And every day the lines have been getting longer. By mid-day the wait to enter is six hours or more.

Turns out they are showing off the medals created for the Olympic event winners. If you wait in line, you can see and hold the medals. How could I resist? Eileen and I went early, lined up at 7am and waited two hours in order to enter. We had fun in line, talking with other people who were equally interested. The people at the front of the line arrived an hour before we did. The picture here is us with the gold and silver medals on display. We also saw the Paralympics medals.

Some interesting trivia about the medals we learned during our visit to the Canadian Royal Mint pavilion:

1. This is the first time the medals for the Olympics and Paralympics were cast in the same theme
2. These medals are the heaviest medals in the history of the Games (over 500 grams each)
3. These medals are not flat, which is a first for any medals
4. Each medal is unique, comprised of a section of a larger artwork (also a first for Olympic medals)

It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and well worth the wait to get in to see these fabulous artworks.

Today is the opening ceremonies here in Vancouver and the Olympic torch has been touring around town. This morning it went by very close to my office so I just had to go see it. Very, very neat to see the flame as well as see how many people came out to see it too. Quite exciting here in Vancouver these days, the city is really jumping. Here is a link to the video I got with my phone, enjoy!

This weekend I managed to spend some time preparing the “backbone” of my outdoor Robo-Magellan robot. Basically I drilled and tapped some holes in extruded aluminum angle stock. I ended up creating a jig on my Sherline mill so it was just a matter of clamping down each piece and run the program to drill the right holes.

Here is another picture, from the top, that shows the two plates connected together before mounting the second set of wheels.

Next up is to machine motor mounts then construct an upper deck. Hopefully I’ll get some time soon to tackle those challenges.

Yesterday afternoon, for absolutely no apparent reason, my stock WRT54G wireless router stopped communicating with the outside world. I could reach various computers internally and even reach the configuration for the WRT54G but otherwise couldn’t surf.

I downloaded a firmware update and that didn’t help either. I downgraded the firmware to something quite old and like magic it worked again for all the computers in the house except for my Dell laptop (seemed like it could no longer authenticate). Sigh. The diagnostics built into the Linksys firmware to troubleshoot this sort of problem is pretty much non-existent.

I was ready to run out and buy a new router today but figured first I’d give some of the alternative open source firmware a go to see if they might have some better diagnostics. Before long I discovered DD-WRT and proceeded to download and install their “standard” edition.

Happy-happy-joy-joy. After installation all the computers in the house could access the internet. This firmware actually resolved my original problem, which likely was either a faulty firmware issue from Linksys or some compatibility problem with Shaw’s network, I never did figure out which. Another benefit was having access to the transmission power control. I was able to increase the power slightly to get better reception on the far side of my house.

The user interface is very well done (equal or better than the original Linksys I’d say) and the whole thing is open source. How cool is that? I’d highly recommend it even if you don’t have problems with the stock WRT54G firmware. Plus they support a wide range of consumer routers.