Phone Returns

Woo-hoo! My new SIM has arrived and I can be phoned again!

Dead Phone

To all boB-Blog readers who may have tried to contact me via mobile phone. Don't - my phone is toast.

Apparently it's because my SIM card's onboard memory has corrupted. I think that I had the foresight to move all my contacts onto my phone memory, but my phone doesn't allow you to look at the phone memory without the SIM card being present :( This also means that any text messages that I might of been saving in case they had important information on them, are probably lost. This will undoubtedly result in my being far scattier than usual!

You can still call my uni-room's landline number. But I only got it working just before my mobile died, so most people don't have it - and I'm certainly not publishing it on the web! Most of you will have some way of contacting Alice, or my parents, who do have it though, so you'll have to do that.

I will mention that I am kind of happy that Orange is replacing the SIM card for free on the grounds that I've had it for less than 2 months! Though I am slightly concerned that the damn thing broke in the first place!

Test

This is a test of my rss feed

Happy Valentines Day!

Ironically - my girlfriend is actually the only person I know who doesn't have internet access, and therefore won't get this.

I decided to look around for possible papers on robot cooperation today. There's a lot. Sadly until I get a handle on who's big and who's lame, they'll have to be indiscriminantly scanned. I don't plan on getting much else done tomorrow.

Confession

As part of my ongoing commitment to entertainment, and to remind those of you who don't see me very often, that I am capable of laughing at myself, I want to share the following story.

Last night I was sitting in my big desk chair, listening to music and juggling. I missed a catch, but not to be out done, instinctively moved my right hand down to catch it. The ball hit the chair between my legs, my hand, en-route to intercept what the ball would of done, were it not for the chair, crashed with incredible force into my testicles. Despite the pain I laughed almost immediately, (there were tears, but I'm not sure enough to attribute those to the laughter.)

Nobody witnessed the event, yet I chose to share it anyway... in some ways that is the most disturbing point about the whole thing!

Holy Contributing to the Delinquency of Minors!

Just an update on the robot situation! I have bolted the wheel back on and all is right with the world. Now everything, (with the exception of the camera) works, and I've begun writing a report for my own benefit about how to use the ARIA library. I may even pop it on my website in case any hapless traveller needs some pointers.

I've recently been commenting on Si's blog about Linux, and trying to be balanced. I know that my previous blog on the subject was a little biased, as I had spent an unhappy day banging my head against Linux trying to get it to do something that would of been trivial in Windows. But I do see a lot of advantages. It's of note that I don't confuse the word "Linux" to mean "open source software". I use a lot of OSS - and a lot of it kicks ass. Speaking of which, my problems have been resolved in part thanks to Eclipse. Which is a fantastic IDE, (that could do with a little more polishing in my opinion), but on the whole is good to use. I will be sticking with it for a while and seeing how I fair. I'm quite enjoying the integrated Doxygen support.

By the way, I couldn't think of a good title for this blog, so I took one of the 352 variations of the phrase "Holy X!" genuinely used by Robin in the 1960's Batman TV series. Thanks to Jenny for buying me "The Rough Guide to Superheroes" for my birthday, which contains 24 of the more bizzare.

God Damn Demoitis

So for the past couple of weeks I've split my time between reading papers and getting my robots to actually do what I want them to. The majority of the problems were solved today
[NEEDLESS GEEKY DETAIL]
by simply recompiling the library.
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So, I have my 40 grand robot wandering round, waving its little robotic arm, and perceiving the world with an array of sensors, (though still yet to play with the camera.) A group of potential students walk in, and I'm asked by a colleague to place the robot in demo mode. It works, until suddenly it gets stuck and after the group has moved on, I notice that it appears to have a wheel that isn't responding properly.

I restart it and tell it to simply move forwards... the wheel falls off.

Let me just state again - state of the art robot, with its vast array of sensors, actuators, and masses of processing power AND THE BLOODY WHEEL FALLS OFF!

The only person with a spanner set wouldn't let me borrow it, so I'm at home with chocolate and a cup of tea whilst I calm down.

Robson, (my robot's name - not my choice) I am thy nemesis!