As I was biking in to work today, I got hit by a car (but I’m fine – no injuries sustained). The weird thing is, I can’t tell if it was my fault or not. I was pedalling along the right side of the road, going through an intersection, and a car making a right turn hit me. I cannot, for the life of me, remember if I came up from behind him, making it my fault, or if he’d already passed me. This is certainly a vote for drinking coffee before I bike to work rather than when I get there.
What's been on my mind lately? Read on...
As I was walking home from the Diesel tonight, a group of four or five people were walking ahead of me. Two of them ducked into a store’s entryway to read a bulletin board ad or the like, and when the others turned around to look for them, there wasn’t anyone there (but me). It took these people a good thirty seconds, though, to figure out what’d happened. They really just stood around for a while, dumbfounded, as I stifled a laugh and walked by – what was going through their heads? Upon further reflection, it appears the answer is “no intelligent thoughts.”
Well, I picked up my new (old) robotic arm this morning without too much incident. Traffic was light, Laura was a good sport, and the security alarm at Northeastern stopped going off after a few seconds, so it was a quick trip. The whole thing is quite a bit bigger than I anticipated, though. While the arm is reasonably sized (about that of a breadbox), the controller computer/electronics is gargantuan. About the size (and a good part of the weight) of a window-installed air-conditioning unit, the box houses the programmable logic as well as the power supply & servo controllers. As I dig up more information, I’ll put up a page of resources & projects (done: check it).
Tomorrow morning promises to be quite an adventure. One of the co-op students at work goes to Northeastern, and a lab there is throwing out some kind of robotic arm. Somehow, I managed to convince my roommate to drive me down there to fetch this beast. Some important things to note:
- Northeastern is in Boston.
- Traffic and parking in Boston’s quite bad.
- We’re scheduled to pick up the arm at 8 AM.
- 8 AM is during rush hour, which means traffic and parking will be worse than usual.
- The co-op isn’t always the most reliable, so I’ve already advised my roommate that this may all be for naught (except she’ll get a nice meal out of it, no matter what).
I’ll keep you posted.