Folks:
Something just happened that I HAD to share, but first a little background
noise: For Christmas, my wife, who is a great sports fan, bought me a
Roomba - you know, the motorized disc that chases your cats around the
house and sometimes actually also gets part of the floor clean by random
accident. She named it "Trot"; for most people this would have no
significance, but for us Boston Red Sox fans, Trot Nixon was the last of
the "dirt-dogs", making it a remotely suitable name for a robotic vacuum
cleaner.
Anyway, when Trot runs his little NiCd batteries down to some
factory-determined warning level, he heads for the charging station, a
crescent plugged into a 110 v socket. You are usually away from this scene,
doing something more productive than watching a robot bump his sensors into
your chair legs, but this morning we actually witnessed this self-charging
homing behavior for the first time since we got him. He steers in by way of
his IR sensors, dramatically shimmying into home port. When he arrives, he
shuts down his motor, and in the sudden quiet whispers a familiar six tone
music bar:
"do ray me so, me so!" And with perfect timing this morning, my wife, a
devoted football fan, shouts "Charge!"
I would never have made that connection. Who says engineers don't have any
sense of humor!
-- best regards, Marty Michener
MIST Software Assoc. Inc., P. O. Box 269, Hollis, NH 03049
http://www.enjoybirds.com/
"This flower (Brook Lobelia) was named for Peter Kalm, a naturalist sent in
1749 by the Swedish Royal Academy to study North American biota. Kalm was
amazed at the diversity of nature and disgusted at how the English colonists
were trampling it all, conducting life in a manner of looting which has
ironically
more recently become known as conservative". - Botany Everywhere, p. 965
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