The sound of whirring gears around the house

Check this out: Honda’s humanoid robot development (I can’t help but thinking of the Rockettes when I look at that page). Thank God they weren’t commercially successful with the E5. Imagine that beast lurking around you house cleaning up and asking if you want some tea. While I love my Roomba (he does a bang up job) I am waiting for the PaPeRo to finally come out. It would take a cold, cold heart to not want one of those little guys trundling around the house. Most people would trade in their kids for one. I hope someone comes out with a cool household robot soon.

Deep down it doesn’t really matter what it does. Hell, if the Roomba just bounced around the room and returned to his home base for a charge I’d be thrilled. The vacuuming is just a bonus. I wouldn’t expect too much out of this first generation. I’ll settle for: come when I call it, wake me up, take the chicken out of the freezer (something The Cat and I can’t seem to pull off), feed the cats and guinea pig and remind me of things. Maybe make some bacon occasionally (on command of course, not spontaneously).

For now I’ll just build a bot featured in the current issue of Make. Maybe the cats will enjoy it. The last bot I tried to make from Make still is unassembled and a bit of a mess. I remember breadboarding it, but after I just stopped. Ah, but all the things I don’t make out of Make is a topic for another time.

So last year.

I spend some of my Memorial Day making a duct tape wallet. It was surprisingly difficult. Getting duct tape to stick to duct tape (sticky sides together) smooth and straight is an acquired skill. I know it’s not “in” any more but my real wallet is starting to circle the drain. So now I have a shiny (literally) blue wallet. Not sure if I am actually going to use it. It is a pretty vivid blue and it could freak out small children and the clergy. It’s also a little wrinkly. I guess I can just slap some duct tape on my old one.

I do have this urge to draw a Bob-omb on it with a Sharpie. Maybe it is because . . .

I spent the rest of my days off reading the first 2 Scott Pilgrim books so I can enjoy volume 3. I would like to give a shout out to Cecil for finding me copies of the first 2 books. Volume 3 was pretty good. I had built it up in mind so much that it was bound to be a slight disappointment. I’m having trouble find Scott a sympathetic character; he’s a mooch, a two-timer and plays video games constantly. . .wait. . . uh, he also not very bright. He really didn’t even fight the last two of Ramona’s evil ex’s. Not technically anyway. Well, hopefully he will get it together for the 4th book.

I originally animated a moving platform graphic (it hovers around). But I can’t manage to place it in the template. While it is an animated GIF, Blogger uploads it as a PNG, which not only displays at the wrong size but also doesn’t budge an inch. This isn’t stationary platform after all. If anyone has any advice I would appreciate it. I would imagine it’s to prevent people from using those flame GIFs that were so popular on the early Internet.

Back on the horse

Horse like heroin not the quadruped. After several months I fired up World of Warcraft for a serious session. Just like old times I managed to fritter away around 5 hours playing Karmm, my Tauren shaman. I knocked out a lot of quests and managed to find my way into at least one new area. It was good to play again, hopefully I can find some time to play regularly.

The only thing that could drive me away is the damn 12 year olds (or those that act like them) and their horrible chat skills and behavior. Would it kill them to form one complete sentence? Or maybe punctuate? I’m not asking for flowery prose when some Bloodsail Buccaneers are breathing down our necks, but it should resemble human speech. And Lord, please make them stop ending every sentence with “lol.” Not everything is lol.

12 yo: “aight lets attack, lol”
me: “I’m ready for battle. I’ll cover you with my magic.”
12 yo: “:D lol!”
me: “Pardon?

Lol has its place, as does rofl and omg. Just not in every sentence.

The only thing worse is leet speak. True I find it amusing outside of the game (I will occasionally harass The Cat with some leet e-mail), but it really is a drag on a RP (that’s “role-playing” for you nubs) server. Nothing breaks the mood like “dude that 3l/= r0><><0rs.” It just breaks my heart.

When I first started WoW I met two other players that really were fun to be around, Herrick and Shinobu. For about a month we quested together and traded materials. It was great fun. But all of a sudden they just drifted away from the game. I think at some point they came back, but I had a new guild and they were hanging out with other people.

One quality I enjoyed about those two was the fact that they rarely discussed the game itself. We never discussed game mechanics in detail. Sure, Shinobu used to cook me food but I never asked what her cooking skill was; the same thing with Herrick and his smithing. We always spent the time and thought to put a veneer on all this discussion. We placed it with in the context of the overall story and the characters we chose to play.

They weren’t too intense with their RP either. No lengthy emote chat fights (which I find very creepy) or involving the unwilling in their RP. It was a great balance.

I’ve never found anyone else like them. Most could give a damn about adding to the whole experience with a little bit of RP and a few others are paralyzed by their incessant RPing; they can’t actually play the game because they’ve layered a whole other system on top.

I’ll just have to keep playing with both styles of people and hopefully I can find some folks that want the same balance as I do.

La Vita Forte!

Last night The Cat and I went out to Dolce Vita, hoity pizza restaurant in the “fashionable to be seen there” district. Before we delve into the place’s major faults I want to say that the food was great. We had:

Drinks: The Cat-red wine, me- blood orange proseccio (*giggle*)
Appetizers: shaved brussel sprouts with pecorino, beets with walnuts, cauliflower Sicilian style
Pizza: artichoke, sopressa, some kind of cheese
Dessert: The Cat-espresso and a dense chocolate dessert, me- coffee and cannoli

Everything was just so good. All the appetizers were just full of flavor and the cannolis were the best I’ve had in recent memory. They were so crisp and light with nice bits of orange rind in the filling.

Besides the food the place was comically annoying. First the crowd made me uncomfortable. Every guy was wearing a button up shirt (untucked), kakis and flip-flops or sandals. I was in a t-shirt, jeans and mocs. The Cat assured that me that I looked fine, but I felt like I was crashing a grown-up party. The place was full of too many of the pretty people.

We were shown to a nice table in about 10 minutes. First thing that we noticed was the place was LOUD. Not just like really-loud-restaurant loud but like soccer riot loud, arena rock loud, World War III loud. It was constant wall of socialite noise that you could almost taste. I’m sure that when I finally go insane that it will sound like this. Our only topic of conversation, which we had to shout, was the overwhelming noise.

Since the place was so crowded the service was spread kind of thin. And we weren’t bitchy socialites with their retinue of gay men and miscellaneous hangers-on so we didn’t really attract that much attention from the wait staff. The service we did get was good just few and far between.

We got there around 7 and left near 10. The Cat and I usually eat really fast then leave so this was a record for us. Though to be fair most of it was waiting for the pizza or service. Since we were there so long the crowd thinned out a bit. It was much more tolerable around 9 or so.

I think the plan is to hit Dolce Vita again, but on a less cool night and time.

A very Asian Evening

Oh. . . Ugh. . .That hurt. I just finished Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. I was so confused I think I passed out a few times. Not sure what I expected though, I haven’t touched a FF game since Final Fantasy on NES. They’ve come along way since then.

The movie was pretty dull for an outsider. All the story bits between fights were a bit silly and very melodramatic. But the fights were completely bad ass. Fighting on speeding motorcycles= bad ass; fighting while jumping around on steel superstructures = bad ass; using a really big sword=bad ass. One of these days I’ll have to pick up some Final Fantasy games and see if they are bad ass too.

Until then I picked up Pump It Up (think DDR from Korea with a more comfortable dance pad) for the PS2. I’m not big on exercising, or going outside or any activity for that matter. This is my attempt at leveraging my video game “habit” into something healthy. Your heart really gets going after a few songs, so it could do me some good. Let’s hope I don’t have Marfan Syndrome like I’ve always suspected; this would be a crappy way to find out.

I’ve played Pump It Up’s arcade version and the home version is just the same. It’s missing by two favorite songs (figures) but there is one by Earth, Wind and Fire and an Elvis remix on the home version I enjoy. One thing is the shifty dance pad. I’m sure that some one on the Internet has posted plans to make it durable and arcade-like. I’m sure The Cat will love that lurking in the living room.

Loot!

Today was loot-a-rific: I finally received my newest Threadless shirt, Pessimistic or Optimistic, picked up the newest Scott Pilgrim book and ran across a Buckaroo Banzai comic. BB was like my most favorite movie ever (probably for about two weeks cause I was 9 when it came out). That movie had everything: science, aliens, gadgets, a dimension crossing vehicle, rock n’ roll, some 80’s Japan fascination and Jeff Goldblum in furry chaps (for some reason I wanted to be Goldblum’s character rather than BB himself). I remember this movie confusing the absolute hell out of me as a kid. I loved it, but it left my head spinning. It seemed to start in medias res, a concept that took me until my college freshman year to “get.” I wanted more back story; I wanted to know how BB became such a smooth bad ass.

At the end of the film the next BB movie was hinted at Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League. It never came out. I finally forgot about it until I saw the end of the movie again on DVD. I remembered how much I wanted that movie to come out. Ah well.

It says on IMDB that the script for the next movie ended up as Big Trouble in Little China! I love that movie too! The guns! The ladies! The wicker hats! The martial arts! The Kurt! One of these days I’ll have to watch them together with Condor Man in between (to cleanse the palate).

Aeon Flux

I just finished the Aeon Flux movie. It was “eh”: not horrible, but I wasn’t on the edge of my seat either. The plot wasn’t what I had figured, so I was mildly surprised. I never saw the original MTV series so I didn’t have the emotional baggage that would cause me to whine how it wasn’t like the original.

That really irks me. Dorks, nerds and their ilk (or should I say “our ilk”) often bitch about something not following the book, comic or game. Maybe it is my high tolerance for bad movies (I recently ‘flixed Tank Girl), but it isn’t required that every movie match its predecessor. I’ve read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and seen the movie. Both are pretty good in their own right. There’s so much great detail and stuff going on in the background in the comic that it would have been overload to see it on the screen. And I understand adding in Tom Sawyer to the film version. I think it made the League a bit more active. They really aren’t very “take charge” in the comics.

So everyone should calm down and just try to enjoy movies on their own merits. But what would the Internet be with out all this kind of discussion? No where; it was created so we can all pick at continuity errors in our favorite summer fair.

Back to Aeon: it was good looking movie, particularly the sets/locations. They were so striking that I watched the extra about the location. Originally they were going to set it in Brasilia, which was sort of weird. I was surfing Wikipedia the other day and came across the article for Brazil’s capital. It seems just like EPCOT or something, minus Mickey and throwin a few cults that would make a great front for the villain in a James Bond flick.

Zoom Forever

Just in case you missed it on BoingBoing: Spend a few hours wasting time with this. If you do it fast enough you feel like your falling. . . or just get motion sick like I did. Poke around for a really black spot to see a great pic of a black cat.

Hip Loot

On Sunday we made a trip to Domy Books, sort of a Kidrobot style place. But I’m not sure that KidRobot is so damn pretentious. I’m sorry, the store itself isn’t really pretentious (it’s tastefully minimalist) just the insufferable hipsters that reside there. I won’t duplicate The Cat’s description of the hipsters here, but the clerk did try to drop a few names during our brief exchange. They were hosting a book signing of someone I guess I should care about. I just responded with my best selection of oh’s, uh-huh’s and cool’s.

I did manage to get a David Horvath 2 Faced Dunny (set 2), Gel 2.0 specifically. I love Horvath’s art and have one of his Ugly Dolls (Cinko). I might snag a few more of these Dunnys.

I also picked up a Nano Spore. It was the “Girl” one, which is exactly the one that I didn’t want. In the store it was one of their display model and I can remember thinking “Man, I hope I don’t get that one.” That always happens with me and vinyl. Or maybe they just weight the assortment towards the crappy ones. According to the clerk the Nano Spores are selling out around the world. I guess that makes me feel better; at least I got a lame-tastic one, many unfortunates won’t even have that pleasure.

I also purchased the Colorcalm: by Design DVD. A while back there was a DVD of colors that would cycle. You were supposed to put it on your flats screen for mood or light. This is some sort of art installation shtick set to music. I’ll let you know more when we watch it.

Overall I dropped quite a bit at the store, which makes me sad. The owner is a jerk (he owns a coffee shop that chases people off when they aren’t ordering constantly) and the clientele is grating. But I can’t think of anywhere else in town to find this stuff. Not that I need any of it, though when the mood strikes Domy will be there.

Who's Who

Here's The Cat's naming conventions. Just in case you need to be refreshed.

Welcome back.

The first thing you should know is that I will not be using anyone's real name from now on. Here are your new names:

Mom=Mom
Dad=Dad
Boyfriend=Gameboy
Sister=Barnelia
Brother-in-law=Cecil (pronounced not "See-sill," but "Seh-sill")
Lady getting married this August=Mayo
Guy she's marrying=Mustard
Cat1=Fannie
Cat2=Juju

And, in the spirit of renaming, you will now be called Antonio Banderas, because you've always really liked him.

If you don't know the story behind all of this and you feel like you've missed a conversation and you'd like to know what you missed, email me.

Let's say this, though: if you have a blog and you're being fairly open about who you are, make damn sure that if anyone reads your blog, they won't find anything you wouldn't want them to read, all right? All right.

Anonymity, I embrace thee!

You'll have to adjust everything slightly. The Cat is my girlfriend and all the relations are her's. And they are her cats, as are the parents. And all that marriage has been finalized. But you get the drift. I reckon that I'll append this as necessary.

Welcome to Moving Platform.

Let's establish some ground rules:

1. There will be the occasional misspelled word. This kind of thing happens. As a corollary, I might even make up a few as we go along.
2. There will be some moderate profanity. This also happens.
3. Profound personal insights, thoughtful revelations and general gushing will not be addressed. Things will be kept as vacuous as possible.
4. There will be some light bitching about all aspects of my life, and because of this. . .
5. Everyone will remain anonymous and I will follow the naming conventions established but The Cat from Spinning Tales. I'll dig up that post some time; I need a refreshed lest I refer to Barnellia as Mayo.
6. I will grow bored with this soon and it will all wither on the vine.

Now that we are all on the same page: Why blog?

Those that know me know that I have long been opposed to starting a blog. But recent events have convinced me otherwise. One is that all the kids are doing it. I am in constant fear of becoming one of those old people who fears every new technology that comes along. Almost everyday I see Web 2.0 technology slip by with out getting involved. Rather than shaking my cane, muttering how websites should never change, I am starting Moving Platform. And with all the Burb Paranoia over MySpace, now seems like a good time to jump in. One of these days I'll start a MySpace account to attempt to drum up some buddies to play Worlds of Warcraft or City of Heroes with. But that is another project for another time.

The second reason is that I've started working on my Master of Library Science degree. Libraries of all shapes and sizes are all hepped up on blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies. I'd rather find out by doing than have to take a graduate level class on blogs. It will just be filled with older students asking questions like "Is this e-mail?" and "Do you have to type in http?" That kind of stuff kills me.

The final reason is I think The Cat has had just about enough of my mopey, sighing that I don't have a blog. I haven't started a blog yet, because I have nothing of substance to say. But hell, no one else does either. Some might find it difficult to imagine not saying anything if you don't have something meaningful to say. Maybe something will develop; we shall see.

Well that's about it. Nothing complex or insightful here, just some crap. Enjoy.