Category: Personal

Updated Resume

Steven A. Cholewiak Leave a comment

I’ve updated my resume web page to include information about a conference paper that I co-authored with Dr. Hong Z. Tan at the Haptic Interface Research Laboratory (HIRL), where I have been working for the past semester:

Cholewiak, S., & Tan, H.Z. (In Press). Frequency analysis of the detectability of virtual haptic gratings. Proceedings of the 2007 World Haptics Conference. Tsukuba, Japan: WHC.

I have also included information about published papers and presentations in which I have been acknowledged.

Added Translation Plugin

Steven A. Cholewiak 4 Comments

I’ve added the WordPress Global Translator Plugin to Semifluid.com, so now anyone can easily translate my English blog posts to:

  • French (Français)
  • Italian (Italiano)
  • German (Deutsch)
  • Portuguese (Portuguese)
  • Spanish (Español)
  • Japanese (日本語)
  • Korean (한국어)
  • Chinese (汉语)

You should see (and use!) the translation links at the top of every page in the upper-right hand corner. Please let me know if there are any problems or issues.

Update (01/23/2007)

Unfortunately I’ve had to disable the Global Translator Plugin because it has been having some compatibility problems. Hopefully I’ll be able to update the plugin soon.

Some More High Voltage Videos

Steven A. Cholewiak Leave a comment

Last night a number of events conspired against me and my geeky endeavors:

  1. My flyback transformer driver was working intermittently for a period of time then suddenly stopped working. It seems as though there is a problem with either the 7805 or the PIC12F683, but I can’t pinpoint the problem because of events 2 and 3 below. I’ll have to double check to make sure that I didn’t accidentally fry any components with, ironically, static discharge.
  2. My multimeter was accidentally left on the last time I used it, so the batteries were dead and I couldn’t check the voltages at different points in the circuit (to determine whether the PIC was switching the driver MOSFET). Why does this always happen at the most inopportune times?
  3. My PIC programmer is no longer recognizing any of my PICs. I’m hoping that there’s just a problem with the firmware and that I can fix it by borrowing a friend’s programmer to reflash it, but nothing I could do last night would make the programmer recognize PIC12F675s, PIC12F683s, or PIC16F628s. Maybe this is a sign that I should get an ICD2…

So, in short, it was an overall crappy night. So, here are some of the latest videos with the high voltage flyback transformer zapping some more beer, rum, and just plain arcing just for the heck of it. I’m heading back home tomorrow for Thanksgiving tomorrow, so I won’t be able to debug the problems until I get back. Read More

Transitioning to a blog

Steven A. Cholewiak 1 Comment

I’ve been contemplating changing the format of my website to a blog for quite some time. It’s taken some self-motivation on my behalf, but I’ve finally taken the plunge. There are a number of features that I’ve wanted, but haven’t included until now, including:

  • Comments
  • Uniform style
  • Efficient categorization
  • Ease of content creation
  • RSS

This format is new and different for me (I’ve been hand-coding all of my pages up until this point), so please excuse any formatting and stylistic issues. I’m going to redirect all of my older pages to the new posts, so hopefully there won’t be any issues with broken links. As always, I appreciate any and all feedback, so please free to let me know if the website looks horrendous or if there are any typos that pop-up.