But enough about you

I ascended again last night... woohoo! The writeup is over in the nethack community.

I meant to write this up sooner: Elliott, Jon, and I discovered the best weekend activity ever for nerds of all ages. Weekend before last, we went to Robothon at the Seattle Center and it was great fun. Robothon is an annual event put on by the Seattle Robotics Society. They have vendors and demos and competitions and it runs all weekend.

Elliott's been obsessing about robots for at least a few months now, so it was an easy sell when I told him we were going to get in the car to go and see some REAL LIVE ROBOTS. I think he thought they would be 16 feet tall and have laser guns for arms, but he seemed to be satisfied with the small, peace-loving gadgets we found when we got there.

On the way in, we walked past the International Fountain, a rather odd-looking Seattle landmark especially popular on hot summer days:



This was a gray drizzly day, so I told Elliott that it was the spaceship the robots had used to come to earth. He was very enthusiastic about that story.

At the event itself, there was plenty to look at, but my favorite part was the MicroMouse competition. Here's an example of a MicroMouse maze (not the one I saw, just a random one from the web):



Each robot had ten minutes to explore the maze and make runs from the start corner to the center of the maze. The fastest run within that ten minutes would be the final time.

There was a big variety in the robots that ran the race. One was built from stock, off-the-shelf Lego Mindstorms components; another was almost completely hand-crafted from specialized components and circuit boards. Strategies varied a lot too. The Lego robot just followed walls, but the fancy circuit board robot mapped the entire maze with four downward-pointing "eyes," charted an optimal route, and then made speed runs to the center.

It was a great event for all of us and I hope we manage to attend again next year. Maybe one of these years I'll build a robot and bring it along, too -- or if all else fails, I'll check at the International Fountain and see if any robots newly arrived from space want to join forces with me.

I've been craving a good RTS lately. I used to buy every new version of Age of Empires and all the expansions.

Travian doesn't quite scratch the itch to click-click-click my way to frenzied victory, but it's an interesting take on the genre. I'm still in the "beginner protection" phase of the game until early tomorrow morning. After that, I will probably get rushed by more advanced players and be clobbered, but I've had fun so far.

Anyone else want to start up a village and make an alliance with me?

I ascended this weekend, for the fourth time ever, and for the first time as a barbarian. I was hoping this would mean the end of the recent obsession, but no. I'm continuing to start new random games, even though the RNG is frowning on me lately... for example, I just started a caveman who stepped on a magic trap first turn. I was blinded and surrounded by grid bugs, and I didn't want to hit Slasher by mistake, so I just had to sit there and get zapped until he dispatched them for me. I survived that with a few HP to spare. What will happen next? Why do I still care?

Ascended: two Valkyries, a Wizard, and now a Barbarian. Someday I'll complete the set. I hope I don't do it all in 2007 since that would imply that I'll have lost my job, my family, all my friends, and everything else while I stared bleary-eyed at the 80x24 window of nethack-y goodness.

Shaping the Future, a recent talk by Charlie Stross, science fiction author.

Stross talks about lots of different pieces of the future that'll be here in our lifetimes, but my favorite bits are about lifelogging: the technology that's going to make it possible, the consequences for privacy and privacy law, and the future of history.

This is a sketch I did for my Dad about ten years ago, when I was already a huge Babylon 5 devotee and my Dad was just starting to watch. My parents have been decluttering their house lately and they sent the sketch back to me, and now I get to share it with you. Lucky, lucky you. :)

I just fixed our broken satellite system by re-splicing some coax cable. I realize this is not, you know, brain surgery. I am still proud.