Category: life

Topics concerning that thing known as ‘real life’ and not virtual worlds.

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Two-for-one weekend bookshelf special!

I thought I’d round out Saturday by posting my last two bookshelves as a kind of two-for-one deal. Here they are, Bookshelves Numbers 4 and 5.

As you can tell, I’ve been saving the best for last. This is where I keep the classics including two of William Shatner’s best works ever written by someone he met.

Shelf Number 4:

Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet

Larry Niven, Rainbow Mars

Frederik Pohl, The Far Shore of Time

Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

Michael Friedman, My Brother’s Keeper

John Vornholt, Gemworld

Steve and Dal Perry, Titan A.E.

William Shatner, Dark Victory

William Shatner, Spectre

Larry Niven, Destiny’s Road

Terry Brooks, Star Wars Episode I: the Phantom Menace

Jeri Taylor, Pathways

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce, Sons and Lovers

Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

William Deverell, Trial of Passion

Diane Carey, Ship of the Line

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The Norton Anthology of English Literature

Combat Flight Simulator 2

Shelf Number 5:

Bill Richardson, oddball@large

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 videos

Star Trek I, II, III, and IV

Monty Python, The Complete Unexpugated Scripts of the Original TV Series (Vol. 1)

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Mast and Kawin, A Short History of the Movies

Irwin Gray, The Engineer in Transition to Management

Gary Greenberg, The Pop-up Book of Phobias

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The robot invasion

Today I was going to write about how the robot designs are coming, but instead I’ll just post a picture of my desk, which is now completely taken over by little plastic gears and beams and axles and motors and wires and… you get the idea.

Home office becomes home robot lab.

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When Lego becomes hard work

Lego RCX: the microcomputer in a brick.Ever wonder how they make those really detailed 3-D illustrated Lego instruction booklets? I discovered for myself last night. There’s a freeware program called MLCAD, in which you choose individual 3-D modelled parts from an enormous catalogue and carefully place them in the correct position and orientation in the workspace. Slowly, painstakingly, you can build a fully 3-D Lego model.

Last night I spent at least four hours “drawing” a small portion of a sub-assembly of a Lego robot that I designed. Oddly, designing and building the robot itself only took an a fraction of that time.

Why am I doing this? I was asked to contribute to a book about building Lego Mindstorms robots, which has a bit of a cult following amongst the geek set. As it turns out, Lego is a lot less fun when you have to design and build robots on a deadline.

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Stupid Guy Moment: a confession

I always considered myself a laundry-savvy kind of guy. That is, I know the difference between the settings on the washing machine. I only ever use one, but I know which one it is. Admittedly, as a cubicle dweller, I’m better suited to cleaning a hard drive than cleaning clothes, but I get by.

Due to technical difficulties, my jeans weren’t entirely dry this morning and they were the only clean pair. No problem, I thought to myself, I’ll just put them on and they’ll — I’m embarrassed to admit this — get dry as I wear them. Most people will recognize this as a Stupid Guy Moment.

If you’ve ever tried this, you know it doesn’t work. Not only do you end up wearing sticky, damp jeans for hours, but on a crisp October morning such as today they also cause another more subtle form of embarrassment.

In the chilly air, the damp cotton was warmed by my legs and began to steam gently. Little wisps of fog, touched by the golden glow of the rising sun, curled around my legs and evaporated in the gentle air currents. I was the only employee leaving a vapour trail behind me as I strode up to my building.

And I remembered another fine day back when I was about thirteen, when I did exactly the same thing before going to school.

I will never learn, will I?

Hmm. I forgot to iron my shirt this morning. Oh well. The wrinkles will disappear after a while.

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Showing some spine(s)

Continuing from where I left off, here is Bookshelf Number Three.

Because the photo is blurry, here’s the list:

Tolkien, The Two Towers

Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

The Best of Owen Marshall’s Short Stories

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse

The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories

Tennesee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Michael Coren, Aesthete

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes, The Legacy of Heorot

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

Edward M. Cohen, Working on a New Play

Canadian Short Fiction

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

Kevin Chong, Baroque-a-nova (signed)

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

Frances Russel, Mistehay Sakahegan: the Great Lake

Lunsford and Connors, The St. Martins Handbook

The Heath Introduction to Poetry

Joan MacLeod, Amigo’s Blue Guitar

Larry Niven, Three Books of Known Space

Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost