It’s early Wednesday morning and I have finished tackling the mind-numbing task of upgrading my WordPress engine to version 2.5. Not only that, I’ve finally uploaded some of my blog’s pictures that were missed when I transferred this blog over to my new domain.

This should be a fine summer; with my kids with me for almost seven weeks this year. It’ll be different than previous summers since I am not living in Van Horne. Living in Iowa City should be really good for no only myself, but the kids as well. I’ve already planned a series of events to get them accustomed to the downtown area. I have the kids making periodic trips to downtown Iowa City (only a few blocks away) to take snapshots of the real locations depicted on the University of Iowa‘s version of Monopoly. The entire family has been playing Iowaopoly for a couple years. I’m looking forward to see how the pictures turn out.
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Even though they are working hard on ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen‘, the comedy group, Riff Raff Theater, has now announced they will trash (what could have been awesome) the theatrical slaughtering of Isaac Asimov’s ‘I, Robot‘ series.

For those of you who may want to write and submit jokes for this movie, head on over to Riff Raff Theater and check out their to-do list.

If you would like to learn more about the original series (of which my son, Jared,  has read them all), check out the link here.

It’s been a busy semester as Team Wombat has been working at a feverish pitch in order to successfully complete their senior design project: The RFID Hacker.

For those that don’t visit this blog often, our senior design project is a device that will read and write RFID tag information. What is RFID? Well, you know when you walk into FootLocker at the mall and the security alarms go off? That’s an RFID tag system. The book you bought at Barnes & Noble still have an active RFID tag embedded in the spine of the book because the bookstore clerk forgot to disable the RFID tag. An RFID tag is much like an electronic barcode, except you don’t need to wave a laser at the purchased item in order to determine it’s sale price.

Why build an RFID hacker? Well, RFID is used for security purposes and we at the University of Iowa Engineering College have an RFID security ID card so that we can access the Seamans Center during off-hours. RFID technology is great, but since it is an open-source technology, almost anyone with enough time and electronics background can defeat RFID security measures.

So far, our project is going well. We’ll be populating our 2nd printed circuit board throughout the upcoming weekend, not to mention the final project report AND a huge poster for our final presentation. For more information regarding our progress and more about RFID technology, visit our senior design project website here.