I've started using Skype for my long distance telephony. Skype's a VoIP service, similar to Vonage except that they're more PC centric, charge per minute instead of monthly, and don't advertise nearly so much. So far, I like it -- good voice quality, and cheap -- which are just about the only things I care about for outgoing long distance calls.

But here's an interesting thought about Skype -- I think it's going to lead to an explosion of Nigerian 419 style scams, except voice-based and coming out of India instead of Nigeria. Like Nigeria, India has an exhange rate that will make any sucessful scammer into a millionaire. Unlike Nigeria, it has a large population with fluency in English and training in how to "close a sale" provided by all the corperate call centers there. Skype's network in particular will be appealing for scammers because of the low cost, excellent sound quality (sounds professional) and virtually untappable network.

Hope I'm wrong.

There's a great website that I peruse often called Engadget. There's not much to it, they collect and summarize news stories about tech stuff, including about robots. Their schtick for the robot section is that they're trying to warn off the upcoming doom caused by the rise of the machines -- didn'cha see the Terminator movies? Ain't it plain to see that it's comin'? Better treat 'em nice while they're still weak and incapable of dominating us all.

Today I got a firm reminder of just how much power the 'bots on display here have, and just how quickly the reins can be yanked from our hands -- maybe the Engadget schtick isn't such a comedy bit after all. One of the bots, "Tommy" was meekly making its way through the tunnel when it went went stark raving mad. It floored the throttle and kept it there, accelerating out of the tunnel, swerving to miss a stack of tires and finally crashing into the barrier wall at a angle, going somewhere in the range of 45-60 miles per hour. Two people standing one the far side of the wall barely got clear before the 'bot hit it and pushed it inwards by about a meter.

On a more technical level, the people next to me had a good guess as to what had happened -- the inertial navigation system was giving bad or no data, and when the bot lost GPS signal it thought it wasn't moving. It increased the throttle to try to start moving... and increased it some more, and more... confident that it wasn't moving at all as it barrelled towards the wall.

The hardware of a robot senses the world around it -- vision, velocity, position, pressure, whatever. The software tries to mold that data into a coherent and true model of the world around it. When that vision is warped, or when its model is drastically askew, the result isn't what we should call a "bug".

It's lunacy.

My blurry little friend is back and is running laps around the perimeter of the car's cabin. I'm pretty sure he wants my head

Yike! As I was tapping away at my previous entry, I saw a white blur come running along the windowsill of the partially opened window beside me. It's now a closed window, and I just saw the blur again go past and heard the patter of it's little feet on the leather of the roof behind me. It is, lest you think I'm about to be abducted by aliens, a rather mouse-sized and distinctly mouse shaped blur which I talking about here. I'm certainly glad I had the back window zipped up. As much as I have no ingrained fear of our rodent kin, I wouldn't care to wake up in the middle of the night with one doing an Irish jig on my head.

...

Not as though there's anything wrong with Irish jigs, mind you.

I've been trying to sleep in my car for this night. The logic went something along the lines of, "Why pay for a campsite when all I'm using it as is a place to be asleep for 8 hours and then leave?" A bigger cheapskate you'd be hard to find.

So after poking around the Silverlake campground for a few minutes, I drove back out and went looking for a quite place to park and snooze. In this quest I turned off onto a dirt road that's a, what was it again? Forest Adventure Area, I believe it was. There's nothing quite like heading down a bumpy, rocky dirt road in a car with the ground clearance of approximately the width of my pinky. Seeing full sized 4x4 pickups strolling around confidently, I'm never quite sure whether I should puff up with pride at my macho go-anywhere anyhow chutzpah, or whether I should cringe down in my seat with shame at my obviously impotent off-roading smarts. The answer should probably depend on if I'm in the process of asking for help getting unstuck or not.

Parallel development of different algorithmic strategies. Or, to wring a bit of the geek out and say it straight -- the two bots think different. Rocky, their red colored entry, tries to detect obstacles and then choose the best path to navigate around the obstacles to eventually get from point A to point B. Cliff, which is Virginia Tech's brown colored entry, instead plots a path from point A to B and swerves around the obstacles as they come up. So far Rocky, with it's obstacle based pathing, has seemed to have a better go at it. So much so that I would personally be surprised to see their Cliff entry make it to the main event. (update: Rocky made it to the finals, Cliff didn't.) (update to the update: Okay, so I was wrong. Both made it.)

Handed a press pass and free reign of the garage bays, I naturally fell to doing what I would've done without the pass, taking pictures and talking to people about their projects. And then writing about it. Except, with the press pass, I'm not near so tempted to write about how awful it is that the spectators don't get to see any of the bots close up. It is awful, it's just that I don't care so much.

Flipping through a pamphlet, looking at the teams and their bots, I just noticed that Virginia Tech has two bots, both built on similar "golf carts". I wonder what's the story behind the two seperate entries? Competing efforts, or fundamentally one team with two mules? Exact same list of sponsors, so it's unlikely that they're really competing. Wonder if it's all the same code for both. Think I'll go ask.

October 1st, 8:45 pm
I slept on the picnic table. I wasn't drunk, it's that I had only three choices. The other two were the "driveway" of my campsite, or the cleared dirt area. Nothing wrong with dirt except for it being dirty. Nothing wrong with a driveway save for it being asphault -- which is to say, everything.

Clear off the kitchen table, darling, for on the kitchen table I must lie. - TMBG

I've been saying for years that one of the most amazing, jaw droppingly revolutionary things about the bloom of the Internet is that for the first time in history anyone can publish. The printing press changed the world by allowing anyone to read. The internet is changing the world by allowing anyone to write.

One result of the all the economic barriers to publishing disappearing in a puff of electronic smoke has been to create a whole new strata of media -- or perhaps just the drastic expansion of a very old strata, that of the newsletter writer. This "new" media can, and often does, spurn the mainstream as their target audience, instead covering one niche, one hobby, one passion -- and covering it well. For perhaps the first time since "TV News" became the predominant form of news, 30 years or more, you can trust that someone in the media will get the story right, really understand the details, and properly convey what's important about an event, rather than just covering what's easy or sexy. Unfortunately, you can't count on anyone actually reading it when they're done. Though anyone can publish, not everyone has an audience.

Indeed, the predominance of personal web-logs or "blogs" without any readers, save perhaps for the author's aunt Mary, is the basis of more than a few jokes. The blog you're staring at could certainly be the butt of some of those jokes. I've even been known to be the one telling them.

And oh, Hi Mom.

So on one hand this new, web based media offers up tremendous ability to transmit both ideas and details to the people in the world who are certain to be really interested in them. On the other, there are countless writers out there -- for grins lets just refer to them as "reporters" -- who may be thunking away at their keyboards but to whom not even the crickets respect with a bit of attention. I suspect that this dichotomy has thrown event organizers everywhere for a bit of a loop. I mean, how do you tell them apart? How do you determine who's really part of this exciting "new media" that you want to have pay attention to you, and who's just part of the Aunt Mary crowd?

For DARPA, at least, the answer appears to be that you don't. And thus so it is that I am now the proud holder of a press pass to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much. Check back again in six months when, if history is any indicator, there's a 50% chance that this "reporter" might have updated. Cheers!