white noise

While most people have nominated their favorite albums, songs, movies, games, and so on for 2007, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry have crowned their picks for robots of year. The top honor went to Fanuc’s two-armed industrial robot system equipped with a visual tracking system. Take a close look at video below. The arms are plucking randomly positioned and oriented objects off of the conveyor belt and neatly stacking them on the other belt. In other words, the robot isn’t just repeating actions, it has to change its motion with every item it picks up, but time it correctly to keep the second belt properly organized. The arms can repeat this action 120 times per minute and run unsupervised 24×7. The famous chocolate scene from “I Love Lucy” just wouldn’t be the same. More from the manufacturer here.

Just a reminder to forget the stress and have loads of fun this holiday season. And no one reminds me to take things less seriously quite like Jonathon Coulton.

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Jonathon Coulton: Chiron Beta Prime

Pre-lit Christmas trees = very good.
Our flocked pre-lit Christmas tree = beautiful.
Hunting through a flocked, pre-lit Christmas tree to find the dead bulbs keeping the top of the tree from lighting – TORTURE!

About a week ago the top quarter of our tree just went dark. Weird, I thought, what about that whole stay-lit technology of wiring the series of bulbs with shunts that keep the string lit even if a bulb goes out? So, I figure the problem must be a blown fuse in the top strand. To my surprise the fuse was fine. Crap. So the hunt begins. Which of the dark bulbs is the bad one keeping the string from lighting. Now I don’t remember how many bulbs are in our tree, but it’s a crap load. And to make things tricky, our flocked tree has most bulbs coated with clumps of ‘snow’ so you can’t even casually find them when they’re not lit.

I start by testing one random bulb from the top in the lower part of the tree. The bulb doesn’t light and the lower string stays lit. Hmmm. I try the good bulb in the top. Nothing. Okay, that was a bad bulb. I replace it by snagging a bulb from a spare string, pulling the bulb from that holder and inserting it into the holder that the tree uses. As common as all Christmas bulbs are, you’d think the bulb base/holder would be universal – but, nooooo, everyone makes them differently. Which means every time I need to replace a bulb I need to pull the old and new bulbs from their bases and insert the new one, carefully feeding in the two tiny wires, into the correct base. This only seems mildly annoying…at first.

I keep repeating the process of pulling a bulb from the top and testing it in a working part of the tree. Over and over, every bulb I pull down is bad. With every replacement I put in, I feel more and more like Clark Griswold anticipating the miraculous lighting of the whole lot with a glorious choir singing in the background. After 35 bulbs, I run out to the store to buy another strand to supply me with more bulbs (by the way you can either buy a pack of 5 replacement bulbs for 99 cents, or a 50 light strand for 2 bucks).

After a while, finding bulbs that I haven’t replaced becomes some freakish yuletide Where’s Waldo exercise. Following the wire strands seem logical enough until you see how tightly wound they are around the branches. Plus, there’s all that damn flock in the way.

After inserting the 58th new bulb, I’m covered in flock as if I’ve been making artificial snow angels all day, and the choir launches into song.

To be off the road. D and I spent the last four days making our tri-state holiday tour. 794 miles all told. Mostly in the rain. But it was good seeing everyone.

Out last leg of the trip involved taking D’s nephew back to IU in Bloomington. To help the hours pass I took our Guitar Hero addiction to the next level. I spent Saturday in South Bend pimping my ride. Not only is the width of the ‘tek handy for hauling 4×8 sheets of lumber, but it’s also handy for dueling axe battles in the back seat.

Lastly, a blast from turkey day past:
EDIT: Dang, youtube stinks…vid gone

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o5L9jiIfbY]

AVM Hell 4: http://amvhell.com/

Psolaris hit me with a tag, so I gotta play along. Six random facts about myself coming right up:

1. Ohio State was one of the last schools to cross my mind when filling out college applications.
2. I also applied to Michigan. (Ug, I feel dirty, but in my defense I went to a high school in Michigan so it was really standard operating procedure if you had decent grades).
3. I used to be addicted to collecting basketball cards (ya know, sports trading cards). This was not during childhood, but the years following college. We have boxes of them in the closet!
4. My senior project in high school English class consisted of a recording of an original song accompanied by a written analysis of the composition and the writing process. A little unusual, yes, but my hippie teacher didn’t mind.
5. I can’t handle heights. Donna must get on the roof whenever something must be done up there.
6. The Go-Go’s will always be one of my favorite bands.

Now then, not enough of my chaps are bloggers, so I’ll tag the couple I can. Come on, six facts, the more irrational, the better.

• Slick
• Mr. Patterson

Just some random news ‘n junk:

• Halloween Pics – stay tuned, someone was lazy last weekend so it’ll be a little longer yet
• Guitar Hero 3 – got it. playing it. much fun!
• Speaking of which, South Park will be airing an episode all about GH this week!
• Just two more wins and the Buckeyes return to the National Championship bowl game. Woot!

How many hours a day do you sit? 8? 10? All of them? I thought about this question a few weeks ago and I decided I was very close to the latter. It certainly wasn’t always the case. Back in college I walked, walked, walked. Sometimes rode a bike. And fairly often went for a run a few miles around campus. In the ten or so years to follow, I slowed down some, but as a teacher I still spent most of my work days on my feet, all day, pacing around the classroom, or rushing through airports. Over the past couple years I’ve moved into full-time web monkey, and I’m literally paid to sit on my rear…all day. I don’t even walk to conference rooms anymore, because all our meetings are handled online. I tend to work about 9 or 10 hours a day. That’s a lot of ass time. What’s worse is that now that the construction in the basement is finished, I can look forward to sitting even more at home. Watching TV, movies, playing games, working on web projects, etc. It just happens that most of my pastimes involve sitting, too.

I bring this up because usually this time of year I trim back on my diet, and drop some pounds before going into the holiday gorge-fest. This year I trimmed back as usual, and nothing was happening. Na da. And I realized that inactivity is killing me. My already limping metabolism, has now reached a point where it can only be measured on a geologic time scale, and no amount of caloric control is going to have a big effect.

I’ve never been a big fan of having an exercise schedule. I do actually enjoy some activities that don’t involve sitting, but once you schedule these things it has always seemed like a second (or third?) job instead of recreation. The other factor has always been just a matter of time. I may not make the best use of every minute, but there are never enough hours in the day for want I want to do. A constant reminder of this is the dusty music equipment I haven’t fired up in ages.

None the less, I decided it was time for action, literally. Starting, oh, I guess 5 or 6 weeks ago now, I began spending about an hour working out five nights a week. None of this ramping up from 10 minutes twice a week stuff. I had to quit being lazy cold turkey. Generally my hour consists of 45 minutes on the elliptical finished up with 15 minutes of free weights.

Forget the before and after pictures. I’ll be just watching the scale and the resultant change in BMI. I started this little forey with a BMI of 32.7, which is squarely in the “obese” classification. I’m not really trying to get into the “normal” range; the last time I got down that low was before college and D says I had a distinct bobblehead look to me. Shouldn’t dudes with big heads get a modified BMI chart?

Anyway, besides getting out of the dreaded “o”-zone I don’t have a specific BMI goal; it’s just a measure of improvement I can watch over time, and maybe post occasionally. Generally, I don’t like blog entries about weight loss and diet – they tend to come off all uninteresting and self-absorbed (as if a blog is anything but). But there also a certain kick in the pants you get once your actions are public.

I just got back from Chicago where I attended the technical sausage-fest that is Adobe’s users conference, MAX. Some 4000 code monkies and graphic design zealots descended there to see the latest technologies and mingle over a lot of free beer. Yeah, that’s right, if Adobe spares no expense on one thing, it’s the open bar. For several hours, every night, free beer and wine. The cost must be staggering.

But back to the technology. You can certainly tell this is the Macromedia MAX conference from days past, only adapted to their new corporate parent. The products covered are all traditional Macromedia products (Flash, Flex, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, etc.) with only an occasion mention of Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. Even the Adobe CEO made only a brief appearnence and left the bulk of the emceeing to the former Macromedia figurehead, and current Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch.

There was a good mix of sessions, ranging from the all-attendee general sessions of keynote speeches and product coming attractions, to smaller focused presentations and hands-on workshops, to very small discussion groups. The best sessions I saw included ColdFusion security (e.g. how hackers will attack your stuff 101) and an introduction to AIR, Adobe’s new desktop runtime. Some of the less technical talks were great, too, like presentations about building an experience for a user, not just an app. – thoughts that may make their way into future blog entries.

There was also a wide range in users, from gurus to newbies, which makes for a good mix of ego-inflating and humbling conversations depending on whom you ran into. It was also cool catching some of the Adobe product managers (like for Flash, After Effects, and ColdFusion) for one-on-one talks. But one of the most intriguing conversations I had was with a couple guys from from the design house Big Spaceship. They were at the conference winning an award for their amazing HBO Voyeur project. It was really interesting to hear about how HBO approached them for the project, how they worked with the HBO film crews, and other technical details of the Flash build. Most impressive was how it involved (at most!) 3 people on their end and lasted 3 months, from bid to delivery. It’s hearing and seeing things like this that make me want to throw in my boring corporate towel, and move to New York.

Oh nevermind, I think there’s a SQL Server database calling my name…