Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Hanover
Bedroom and living room view du jour.
I lucked out. I sublet a flat online, sight unseen. The above is my front yard. There's a stream right there too but I have to take a couple steps out my door to see it. Fireflies dance around the trees at night. Right now they're going BLINK BLINK BLINK [pause] BLINK BLINK BLINK [pause] .... It looks like someone strung flashing Christmas lights all through the forest. Deer walk by regularly (shedding ticks like mad, unfortunately). The flat itself is nice too. More space than I need. Except for the kitchen, which is truly diminutive.
It's a couple miles bike ride to my new office at Dartmouth, and also the town of Hanover--which really just feels like a commercial annex of the campus. There's a good food coop in town, so I have almost everything I need within biking distance. Except a bike shop.
Grunt has made a new friend. Literally.
It may not look like much, but soon it will have a brain the size of a planet (note the ears). And we'll probably lose the legs and replace them with treads. The servos are pretty cool--they operate on a chained digital bus so it's trivial to reconfigure the bot, and you can query and set various attributes per servo as well. But the bot itself isn't the focus--it's just a real-world interface to the brain.
In the meantime, biology continues to slip the other direction. If you haven't seen Idiocracy, the intro is a gem. So true, so true.
In other news, Lulu has sold over 200 copies of After Life now, which is surprising considering I have a link right on their page to the free online version. I also put up a donations link last year some time since a few people suggested it. So far the tally is: $50 in donations for me, and $1548 in gross revenues for Lulu. Interesting, isn't it. Clearly I'm on the wrong end of this business. Fortunately I have a day job.
Ur, well, sort of.
Bah, someone's trying to hack my machine via ssh! Gotta go. (Forgot to shut down my guest account before enabling ssh through the firewall, and sure enough within twelve hours someone's on my machine!! Fucking humans, don't you have anything productive to do??)
