Into the Void

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June 8th, 2009

What a freaking nightmare. I lost my phone a couple of weeks ago. Of course, I haven’t been backing it up, it’s only a phone…

Then I realized how much of my life I keep in there. I get email from three different accounts, and store the passwords. I have “secret” email addresses or passwords for posting status and photos to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, TwitPic, MySpace and of course this WordPress blog. All my friends’ contact information is in there.

The first thing I did was call AT&T to ask them to physically locate the phone. Maybe it was in the car, wedged up between the seats where I couldn’t see it or hear it ring. The nice lady at AT&T support told me about the AT&T Family Map. It isn’t mentioned on the AT&T website at all, you must have the URL to get to it. Check this out, the account holder can track the rest of the family all day. The following result shows an aerial view of the back of my house looking in the window at me. If the picture were in taken in real time it would be seriously creepy.

I am -*here*-

I spent an inordinate amount of time deciding on a new phone. The iPhone was tempting, but I played with one a bit in the AT&T store and decided that a touchscreen phone needs haptic feedback. In the end I wimped out and bought the Samsung Jack.

So now all I have to do is recreate the information in the old phone.

TinyTube is YouTube for phones that don’t support rtsp streaming media. The Jack doesn’t, so this is a big deal for me!

I had to reinstall QuickMark. The lastest version will Twitter the text after decoding. Very kewl. It’s not optimized for the Jack, however. Remind me to send them a screen shot.

Samsung: Imagine Living in the World of Tomorrow Now

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TV presenter sets fire to Paris Hilton :-)

July 1st, 2007

TV presenter screws up and sets fire to Paris Hilton story live on air | the Daily Mail

It’s about bloody time someone stood up for responsible journalism. The video is hosted on YouTube.

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What NOT to Do With an Industrial Robot

March 23rd, 2007

YouTube – Robot Ride

Part of my engineering curriculum was a very fun hands-on robotics course. A robot like this one can move so fast that you don’t have time to get out of its way. Factories that use robotics will have black-and-yellow danger lines on the floor around around each workstation and flashing lights on top of the robots. The factory floor looks like a crazy Christmas show, especially when the lights are low.

A workstation ideally is defined as the maximum reach of the robot, not the extents of its motion in a given job, so that if there is a mechanical failure or a glitch in the program nobody gets surprised.

For the clueless, there are also multiple emergency stop switches. I can’t tell whether the fellow twirling around on the robot-ride end effector in this video has an emergency stop switch within reach. I kind of doubt it. Not that he’d have time to actually use it.

Breaking the rules is fun.

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