Weapons of choice

About the site

The previous site layout was bland, uninspired, and colourless. One day, I thought that maybe I could go one better, so I uploaded a new layout that is bland, uninspired, but has a colour, that being blue. That's progress, I think.

With the layout change went the old pages as well. I will port some pages, and will find a more appropriate home for others, probably on a personal journal external to this site. I'm still trying to find a direction for this site, but if anything, it will be less personal and more technical.

As for the domain itself, I'll have you know that my spelling is impeccable. I do have a penchant for making up terms and words outright, though, and was at my most industrious in grade school. Nowadays, I settle for constructing meaningless anagrams out of existing English words, or stealing words from other languages. Sometimes, I'll anagram those too. To what end? Just because.

About the radio ninja

There once was an article floating around the internet talking about GSM and perhaps GPRS, and the Finnish operator Radiolinja was brought up. Also brought up was an off-topic comment on the confusion between Finnish words and Japanese words, as they can sound alike.

And that was that.

Tacking on ninja to other terms makes little sense other than to imply that the bearer of such a moniker is awesome at what they do. Still, only a certain kind of person will nod enthusiastically when hearing such terms as packet ninja, code ninja, or rocket ninja. Regardless, it has a nice ring to it, and although I've generally moved on to other gaming nicknames, I still use radio ninja as a TFC alias from time to time. In real life, I'm not a ninja of any sort, although I have rocket ninja-like days when the deities of low latency, sleep, and ambient temperature conspire to create perfect gaming conditions.

I've long decreed that any depiction of the radio ninja must have said ninja in the possession of an antenna. What's a radio without an antenna, anyway? I also thought that it would be awesome for the antenna to stick out of said ninja's head. Make of that what you will, but I am not crazy until proven otherwise. However, beyond one tentative sketch that only re-confirmed what sixth grade art class told me about my non-existent drawing skills, the radio ninja would continue to manifest itself as only a bizarre term and occasional TFC nick.

Until now, that is.

What I've drawn up in Microsoft Paint, of all things, is a heinous and incomplete schematic of what might be a receiver front-end, if you look hard enough. Without any kind of isolation, filtering, or amplification, the antenna input is passed to a mixer with a local oscillator input of essentially zero. I think it's safe to say that downstream processing is not necessary, hence the unconnected output.

You may wish to punch me now, and I don't blame you, but there is no denying that I've dressed up a mixer to look like a ninja of sorts. I may have had to split the multiplication sign to form eyes, and shaded the top and bottom parts of a circle, but if that's not a stereotypical ninja-mixer, then I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. Of course I do, and therefore victory is mine.

About the author

Some people blog. I write. As such, I consider myself to be an author, although I haven't been doing much writing these past several years. In that time, I've made it through university, and will hold an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering once convocation is over.

That's about it. I'll let my writing speak for myself.