paulog · the life of paul grzymkowski - [ log.paulogy.com ]

It’s a Friday night, and you’re having some people over to watch the movie Crash.  It’s about 7:30, there’s seven of you (5 guys, 2 girls), and you’re getting hungry.  What do you do?

WHAT DO YOU DO?!?

Order pizza, right?

Sounds good, in theory.  But sometimes things don’t always go as planned…

Have you ever looked at an inanimate object and wondered to yourself (or to someone else) if it was male or female?

Wallet?  Male.
Purse?  Female.
Necktie?  Definitely Male.
Paper towels?  … uh, Female?  Maybe?  Hmm…

Well wonder no more, object sex is here.

TLG 0.7 Beta is a transistor-level layout synthesis utility developed for Magic in C.

If you understood fewer than four words in that last sentence, then this entry is most likely not for you :-).  While you may never fully understand or appreciate this project, know that at the very least it was the final requirement that enabled me to receive my Master of Engineering degree.

And it worked pretty damn well.

View the full (53 page) report here.

[ sometimes there can be great beauty in chaos ]

Using VLSI design and cutting-edge 0.5 micron CMOS microchips to do what any pre-schooler would know how to do already.

Think you know Tic-Tac-Toe? Think again.

See it here, and here.

“ECE 476 student masterminds, Vic Aprea and Paul Grzymkowski, have forever altered the fabric of teaching at Cornell University. Their groundbreaking efforts in vertical plotting technology have provided accurate graphical solutions for even the laziest of professors.”

See what happens when two Cornell students, two stepper motors, a whiteboard, and an Atmel microcontroller unite in an unholy explosion of pretentiousness…

[ experience the rapture that is VP · SQUARED ]

It’s amazing what you can create using only MS Paint and a little bit of free time.

Check back occasionally, as new comics will be available “whenever the hell I feel like it”.

Enjoy.

[ go mental ]

As an early assignment for Architecture 132 - a class at Cornell I chose to take in part because it filled a history requirement, and because I’ve always been somewhat interested in architecture - we were asked to draw “every place we have ever lived”.  For me that was somewhat easy since, up until college, I had spent my whole life in the same house.  The point, I think, was to reconsider what is needed in a dwelling, and to compare our relatively lavish houses to a gallery of “primitive huts” we had just learned about.  Or something.  Admittedly, the well-attended course wasn’t that well-organized or coherent.

Regardless, it was an opportunity to draw again.  Something I hadn’t spent nearly enough time doing since my days in middle school.  So, with much excitement I chronicled my various dwellings, from childhood up until the present (as of Spring 2000).

Hello.

This is a game I created as a high school senior project.
I call it…”DIRT“.

When I was a kid my Dad and I used to play drawing games. Sometimes he would draw a primitive shape or letter and hand it to me, and I would have to turn it into something interesting. An “S” might become a snake, a square might turn into a simple house, etc. Then I would make a squiggle of my own and give it to him to finish, and we would go back and forth like that until one of us ran out of ideas or got bored. So I guess it wasn’t really much of a “game”, but I liked creative drawing so it was fun nonetheless.

Often my Dad and I would play the game on my Magna Doodle. You remember those things, right? It had a magnetic tethered pen, a couple of geometrically shaped stamps, and a slider bar that erased your work like “magic”. If yours was anything like mine it probably looked something like that picture on the right except instead of a kitty it probably had some assortment of genitalia drawn on it. Well, maybe not back then, but if you rummaged around to find yours now I bet it would. Because really, what good are creative kids’ toys if your college buddies can’t defile them with their dirty minds later in life?

Anyway, the point is I used to really enjoy drawing, and “The Line Game” as I think we called it was one of my favorites. So I was somewhat pleased when, in my Senior year high school Psych class (of all places), I was presented with the following assignment: