August 25, 2006

• misogynist, misanthropist

  well... I'll take back the misogynist part since the person I'm describing can be a number of men I know.

  So I'm sitting here at the coffee shop and a group of four decide to play Scrabble™.  Three girls and a guy.  One of the girls starts to pronounce that she will beat everyone at the table and then continues to talk about the rules while they play.  Some of her rules are wrong, which would be forgivable if she didn't put herself forward as some kind of great Scrabble™ player.  The other three decide to gang up against her and then I hear this stream chatter complaining how unfair it is that the three of them decided to gang up on her.  Well if you have the hubris to tell the other three at a Scrabble™ table that you're going to beat them, you deserve to be ganged up on.  I mean, my best friend while destroying you at the tabletop strategy games he so dealy loves would never tell you outright that he will beat you.  Instead he will give you advice subtly skewed to not only be of some use to you but really of more use to him.  It took much longer for people who play against him to gang up on him.

  Ugh, I'm glad they're gone, I couldn't stand the constant stream of chatter from that one girl, sometimes I believe that some people shouldn't have the power of speech.

  The third "dog"

  Mochi and Nori have a new playmate.  Well, they follow him around and look at him while he works.  We just aquired a brand new (to us) refurbished Roomba.  This is the one with the updated firmware and scheduler.  It works really well, getting to most areas of the living room/kitchen without too much difficulty, even under the couch.  As a daily collector of Mochi (and now Nori) hair, it works well and I will not be vacuuming as much, maybe once a week.  It plays this nice cheerful tune, and disengages from the docking station and starts on its random walk around the room.  I like the algorithim that it uses, it "recognizes" objects to go around like islands and follows walls.  I like that it can go over rugs and finally it puts itself back into the docking station when it is running out of juice.

  A really cool thing of this latest generation of Roombas is that programmability built into the device.  Basically it's like programming a simple microprocessor robot.  With a serial cable, I can get inside the SCI (serial control interface) and program to my hearts content.  There is also a bluetooth module that you can control the Roomba directly with.  The modding community seems to be really rich and the fact that the robot's programming interface specifications are open makes for interesting homebrewed apps, I saw a midi program that makes use of the Piezo speaker on the roomba to play tunes, cool.

  • 4:23 pm
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