Allegedly we had a small flurry on Monday. One of my friends claims to have seen it. Unlike me, he has a window in the office where he works. Actually, in his lab everybody has like an 8-foot desk and a huge 30-inch flat-panel monitor if not two. And you know I never exaggerate. I had like this 8-inch monitor before I scavenged and fought to get a slightly bigger one (haven't measured but I think it's an 8.25 incher), and I have maybe 2 feet of desk space although that can change as I sometimes get relocated with about 3 minutes' notice. But I wouldn't even consider trading places, because in my lab I get to be surrounded by a Jawa's paradise of half-disassembled robot skeletons, a veritable graveyard of robots that once were. The giant, defunct cylindrical body of a robot long since rendered obsolete greets me every day by my door with the slogan "Everyday robot" emblazoned on its now-headless chest. Inside my room, a black humanoid hulk sits across from my desk, slumped against the wall, its innards spilling out of its torso, a cascade of connectors and controller boards dangling unused from a rainbow tangle of ribbon cables. But not unlike in the rainforest, the death all around is only one part of the eternal cycle of life. Even as old disused wheeled bases, piles of burned-out motors, and old servers that were state-of-the-art when "Wayne's World" came out, sit in the hallway awaiting their eventual fate in the dumpster, so too do stacks of crates against the wall hold the promise of new life - shiny new infrared distance sensors still in their boxes, brand-new wireless network hubs, hot new video capture boards, virgin CPU's that have yet to be socketed, and stacks of servos and anodized aluminum body frame parts still in their bubble-wrap. The unending cycle of sa-ta-na-ma continues. Assembly, Maintenance, Disassembly, Reuse of parts. All a part of the enormous conversion engine: in comes a steady flow of coffee, research funding, and Canadian interns (well, the coffee is pretty steady at least) and out goes a flow of academic papers, source code, and Canadian interns (they kinda just pass through the system like corn). And in my little corner of my little server room I reside, doing my own little bit to keep my little part of the engine greased and running, surrounded in my little world by piles of circuit boards, snarls of colored wires ending in obscure plastic connectors of all types, boxes overflowing with servos, cables, RFID tag readers, heatsinks, and power supplies; shelves heaped with hard drives, DV tapes, webcams, transceivers of all sorts, and giant robot batteries; around me sit enormous database servers, a 3D printer, small-scale machine tools, walls of little plastic bins full of electronics parts, screws, bearings, pink staplers, and the like, workbenches cluttered with tools for cutting, soldering, and measuring, and some sort of - what is that, anyway? It's like a heavy 3-degree-of-freedom industrial robot arm but has a mannequin's head mounted on it with pink shredded PVC hair - your guess is as good as mine.
Code, compile, run, debug, code again. Breathe in, breathe out. Sa, ta, na ma. Birth, life, death, rebirth. Gyana, Shuni, Surya, Bhudi. As it is with the robots, as it is with our code, so it is with our lives, wheeling our way through the circle of seasons. I wonder when it will snow again.
So it's Christmas Eve. In Japan, that means a number of things:
I spent a quiet evening home alone (most of my friends are gone for break) and threw together what I could for a Christmas Eve dinner. Roast pork was the main entree, along with some mashed potatoes I made from scratch and a melange of sauteed root vegetables and peppers. I need to get some decent dishes one of these days so I can do a better job with the presentation, being that I don't actually own, for example, a plate.
