How do I put this on my resume?

It would appear from my World of Warcraft playing style that I'm primed for a career as a clever banterer and writer-of-one-liners, if conflict-averse, timid executive/bloodletter. Who knew?

IBM Study: Online multiplayer games build business leaders | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Tagged on Haight and Ashbury

The old GAP store looks hot with the giant AMAZE tag on it. I saw this along with everyone else at the Haight Ashbury fair two weeks ago but it took me til now - having walked past this thing 8 dozen times - to finally do the homework. I found out that this tag was commissed by the new building owners...RVCA!

Exciting, and a good sign for the neighborhood, which has been on the downslide over the last two years with lots of retail closures. This, combined with the increasing buzz over The Alembic has been feeling optimistic about the nabe.

Fatlace™.. Collect Everything!

A great miracle happened on Market Street

I love it! Jewlia and An Marie rocked out as superheroes with the Dykes on Bikes yesterday at pride...IN MY UNDERWEAR! Front page of today's Chronicle.

SF Gate: Multimedia (image)

Two Bots Enter, One Bot Leaves

Armed with two very geeky wingmen, I cruised down to the RoboGames Builders party Friday evening at Fort Mason -- the preview shindig for the weekend-long circuitry fest/bloodbath.

We were welcomed by a giddy blur of activity: Nemo Gould's sexy kinetic sculptures, Scott Gasparian's glowing Buddha piece, and a hot and heavy clash between two featherweight combots.

COMBOTS? Okay, allow me to explain to all ye uninitiated. Combots are fighting robots. Think the WWE meets a science fair meets ESPN meets Gladiator...or maybe Mad Max.

Whatever. There are hundreds of them here for RoboGames, the world's largest open robot competition, including -- yes -- "the fighting robot stars of TV."

The two featherweight (under 12 pounds) combots in question were assaulting each other with a wedge type apparatus, trying to scoop up the opposition.

"You'll get a lot of scoops one year, and then someone will develop an anti-scoop technology," volunteer Mike Thombs explained. "We're having a lot of evolution where species live and species die and then they come back again." Mike flew in from Rhode Island to help out as a gatekeeper. He told me that the battle arena in which the bots fight -- made of quarter-inch hardened steel I-beams and shatterproof Lexan (yes, you saw it at Maker Faire) -- took three days to assemble and weighs 40,000 pounds. The thing is indestructible, supposedly, but he showed me where a bot called "The Judge" had punched holes in the floor, and where another machine had punctured the steel in several places.

(It simply does not hurt in this world to have a spinning titanium steel disc of fury with steel blades like Robotic Death Company's Megabyte – a 220 pound heavyweight class combot.)

I asked Rob Purdy, builder of Scratch, and Ross McBee, builder of Lambchopper, about their hobby. They immediately corrected me, "Nah, it's pretty much an obsession."

Some other highlights:

Rook's Pawn -- my favorite specimen at the show. Matt Bauer's gorgeous 2 foot tall piece is controlled by 24 separate motors and a laptop sending hexadecimal code via a custom puppeteer application. This jaw-dropper rocks a great strut, squat and some cool wrestling moves. The bot was completed in just two months. Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised me when Matt agreed with Rob and Ross, "Well, it's more of an obsession."

Where there are geeks there are Legos. Becky Sherman -- who is not only female (!!!!) but also a Lego robotics instructor at Chabot Community college (can you say amazing job?) -- was hard at work repairing Isentrope, her red Lego rolling-ball sculpture inspired by the music of Aerosmith.

Therapings provided a bouncy soundtrack to the proceedings - modified theramins in the shape of electric guitars. These instruments are synced to a common clock and and blues scale for ease of melodious jamming. Originally developed for First Night Austin by Vern and Kym Grainer, they're easy to produce on your own for about $70 in parts.

Vern also showed me his brand new project, the Peanut Butter Monster Detector, a robot-in-a-plastic-jar designed to ease his 5-year-old's mind in her dark bedroom. After scanning a child's room for monsters, it intones softly, "All clear, go back to sleep. All clear, go back to sleep."

(Based on the well-loved Parallax Basic Stamp and a small stash of unobtainium, the Peanut Butter Monster Detector has an astonishing perfect track record of finding little Sami Grainer's bedroom to be monster-free. Vern told me that "the very first question technophiles ask me is always, 'So, one out of every 30 times or whatever does it start yelling OH MY GOD, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! MONSTERS!'?")

A group of adorably menacing Oakland-artist-warehouse-types were preparing for the Saturday's "Rumble" -- building gigantic robot costumes out of scrap materials and marauding about the pavilion. Corey Fro described his mylar, cardboard and tinfoil gear to me, "This is Grade A, high tech, very robust. These arms can really take a beating."

On the Cocktail robotics front, Magnus showed me some "vintage" 1999 machinery designed to fetch you a tropical drink from down the bar. Mike Mass, David Asmussen and Francis Doumet gave us a tasty demo of their precision cocktail machine, which carefully titrates alcohol to create miniature layered B52s in tiny test tubes. Their Menlo Park employer Velocity 11 actually encourages their "interesting application."

After a few precision shots, I looked forward to topping it all off with a Survival Research Labs stunt, alleged to occur at nine. Sadly, I seem to be a curse on these things. They'd canceled. Sigh.

I cannot overstate the geekery on display at this event. Hundreds of builders -- and teams of builders -- were clustered around robots, toolboxes, multimeters and soldering irons. They had come from Seattle, Austin, Indiana, Australia, Brazil and Palo Alto. Some were here to do demos, others to wage battles, some to sumo wrestle and still others to compete in fully autonomous robot soccer.

All the attendees happily spoke in heavy jargon about their geekly pursuits -- intensely technical -- and unselfconsciously cool.

Perhaps only one project had a heavy dose of irony. Hot Shot, the "world's only living robot," cruised around harassing people, or in his own words, "pretty much just chilling." The smart-assed bot flirted with the rare females in attendance. I asked if I'd seen him around before, and he told me, "I'm only one year old...but I lost my virginity months ago!"

I asked Jesse Lackey, electrical engineer, if this wasn't just about the geekiest event he'd ever been to.

"Well, you know," he said, "I've been to the embedded systems conference."

Cross posted to SFGate

It goes on and on and on and on

I couldn't sleep last night, I was having anxiety dreams that I would wake up and accidentally see a Sopranos spoiler on my web browser. Again and again, I dreamt of opening my Google home page and accidentally seeing a headline, or spotting a too-wordy ad to the right of torrent results on isohunt.com.

Like millions of other HBOless addicts, I started downloading Sopranos.621.XviD.whatever last night. At 2:30 AM I finally had it...was ready to stay up late and sacrifice the sleep...except that the file was corrupt.

I couldn't get any work done until I'd seen the fucking thing so I downloaded it this morning. Here's a letter to the New York Post: the ending was perfect. I don't want to participate in spoiling it for anyone else so I'll leave it at that.

VICTORY-CBS DAY

We fuckin did it.

NUTS for Jericho - NutsOnline

The view from the street

As you can see, Google really paid attention to detail when doing the Street View map of San Francisco.

44th and Anza (Google Street View)