I went for a run this afternoon – and I think I did about 2km. It was tiring, and my legs are still complaining about it. Come to think of it I am generally exhausted after it. Not just the legs. But it was good for my lung capacity and my general fitness. It was also good to see that council is replacing an old bridge.

I have at least partially solved the problem with the serial port on the PIC. I have traced it to trying to send too much information out the serial port. The chip as far as I can tell has an 8 byte input and output, and what was happening mostly was that I was trying to send too much debug information out the serial port when I should have been listening for serial data.

So I wasted a few hours this afternoon searching for a problem that did not exist. I have wasted too much time on this project this week. Still the learning curve has been interesting, and despite everything I am generally liking PicBasic Pro.

The IgNobel prizes are out, and Australia have picked up a few awards… The PEACE prize went to Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie “Star Wars.”. The CHEMISTRY prize went to Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?