Dave Kellam

I watched I, Robot last night with Alanah; it’s good and it’s bad. Wired sums up the movie best, If you shut off your brain, it is fun to watch. If you’ve spent time thinking about robotics and a.i. and delve deeper into some of the plot elements the movie can get convoluted and stop making sense. The look and feel of the movie was pretty slick. Their vision of the future is a reasonable adaptation of modern cities and what technology we may see in the future.

I haven’t been hanging out with the computer that much the last little while, that means fewer posts. Next week I’m running a computer camp, so we’ll probably see a few more.

Summer does offer the opportunity to spend a lot of time outside; it’s fun to go wandering around downtown. Yesterday, I picked up three books from a cut-rate bookstore: The Erye Affair by Jasper Fforde, Moody Food by Roy Robertson, and In America by Susan Sontag. They should keep me busy for a little while. I also found a really cheap pair of shorts and t-shirt.

The design for the Conform Project is half-finished and the series has been started, so it should be appearing in the very near future.

Here are eight simple steps for securing your pc. If you use Windows, please… just do it. If you’re at Queen’s, you can get Symantec Anti-Virus for free from Packman.

1. Run Windows Update regularly.
2. Install ZoneAlarm (Firewall)
3. Buy and install NOD32 (Anti-Virus)
4. Install WinPatrol (Anti-Hijack)
5. Buy and install AdMuncher (Ad and Popup Blocker)
6. Install and run AdAware (Anti-Spyware)
7. Replace Internet Explorer and Outlook Express with Firefox & Thunderbird
8. Disable Autorun.

The list is completely ripped off from Everything Hurts.

The Estonians have won the Wife-Carrying Championship for the seventh straight year. The winners of the annual contest are awarded the wife’s weight in beer and a sauna. See previous posts (link 1, link 2).

On of my favourite quotes from an interview he did with Wired.

Alan Tudyk played Sonny, so he was there but had the tight green suit on. We kept calling him – and all the robots who had green suits on – the Irish speed-skating team.

I guess it’s really the concept of weird Irish Speed Skating team in my head. Apparently, if he got recruited by MIT but wanted to rap instead.

I would have made a billion dollars and been broke by now. I’ve always dreamed of a computerized classroom. You’d come in and the teacher wouldn’t have to take roll – every desk would have fingerprint roll. They could track you from one class to the other. Computer engineering would’ve been the only way for me to go.

It’s weird, I’d never really considered Will Smith as one of sci-fi’s champions. He’s done quite a bit of it though.