Two new items made it into my geek resume lately:

My own page on freshpatents.com, due to a recently published patent application on the desalination device I've been working on for nearly two years.

Fellow student Brandon Moore and I have been announced as finalists in this year's Collegiate Inventor's Competition, one of the fine programs offered by the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, for the same invention. Many thanks to the NIHF!

Check this space to see how I do—I'll update in a week after the competition.

UPDATE—October 27: Unfortunately, we didn't win the CIC, although simply being one of the eleven was victory enough. Many congratulations and good luck to the winners and other finalists, especially to dedicated inventor and all-around nice guy Dr. Haugland for his grand prize winning nighttime temperature prediction model.

And thanks again to the NIHF and the USPTO for so generously hosting this event, and for treating all of us humble students in a manner we are definitely NOT accustomed to—I've never been met at the airport by my own limo before!

UPDATE—November 20: Thanks are due also to the Palm Beach Post, for running a story about this project in their Monday edition today.

UPDATE—November 23: Last update—I swear I'll start a new post if anything else happens. Another one of our local newspapers, The Boca Raton News, picked up the story: "FAU grad students team up to develop low-cost desalination process".

Finally I am resisting temptation no longer. I did what I always knew I would do and opened up a Cafepress store. My first product: the Defend Lighthouse Point t-shirt!

Why “Defend Lighthouse Point”? Why the carefully rendered silhouette of an AK-47? It's partly a homage to a shirt that Adam Savage wore on Mythbusters that read “Defend Brooklyn”. It's partly a reference to tongue-in-cheek orders I gave my roommate when I was in California during our last hurricane. And partly a ha-ha-only-serious nod to the idea that maybe our little corner of suburbia is worth defending, dammit. Anyway, if you have to ask, it ain't for you!

Check this space for more exciting products allowing you too to “Live the Eiki Martinson Lifestyle”!

Tonight was the first dinner of our second Culinary Adventure Week. The theme: Google recipes! Simply type two ingredients into google, plus the word “recipe”, like so: “chicken bacon recipe”. Then hit the “I'm Feeling Lucky” button and cook whatever comes up! You really place your stomach in the hands of fate with this one—but so far with good results. Even unusual test cases like “italian sausage mussels recipe” came up looking tasty.

Sheraz wasn't home tonight, so we feasted on forbidden fruit: pork and tomatoes. Google came up with Pork Chops with Fresh Tomato, Onion, Garlic, and Feta, which worried us somewhat but turned out to be really very good.

My roommate Sheraz and I suffer from a certain indecision about what to eat; nothing seems good to us anymore, and this results in discussions of the “What do you want to eat? I dunno, what do YOU want to eat?” kind and in disastrous expeditions like today's, in which we drove around aimlessly for an hour looking for something that would hit the elusive "spot". I have no illusions; this is a mark of decadence, one more of the minor pyschological problems that comes of limitless opportunities and a complete lack of survival pressure. But to hell with that—we decided to solve our problem by turning it into an amusing adventure, applying our favorite tool for doing so: eccentric wagering.

Mr. Mark Miller, true friend, pipe-crawling engineer, vagabond musician, gentleman-scholar, got married this weekend to his girlfriend Nicole in a lovely ceremony followed by a crazy party and supported by three days of various other entertainments. Per request, I am providing here a copy of my toast: