dubious.biz(ness)

I will be leaving in May for Indonesia. I hope to bring back some very interesting stuff, probably pictures, and hopefully some blogs and maybe audioblogging.

So I asked Sintha how she would recommend that I change my money. According to her, cash is preferred, Visa is a bit of a risk because of all the fraud. I asked whether I should change my money at the airport or at a bank. I’ve seen different recommendations depending on city. She recommended the airport which has reasonable rates.

Of course in Indonesia, everything is not so easy. You have to be careful of the employees and of the companies you choose to do business with. I’m not sure I can judge things like that easily so I’m really relying on Sintha for that, but I’m assuming this will be before I actually see her, so I’ll be on my own. So I’m going to take my chances and hope that I don’t get shafted.

When I woke up the morning after I talked to her, Sintha had SMSed me that her mom said I should bring fresh money. “Fresh” as in crispy, crunchy, clean paper, as new as possible. Apparently they give discounted rates for old and used money. Of course at first thought this seems ridiculous. We all assume that paper currency is simply a representation of an abstract value. Abstraction of money is one the key elements of modern civilization. Consider the numerous ways that money is abstracted: Cash, credit cards, checks, stocks, nearly all our representations of money are transient and intangible. Money is the same size, and the same thickness, but the values are all different.

No one here considers money ever used or depreciated, it’s worth the value printed on it until it disappears magically out of circulation. And I can only assume that Indonesia is not in the stone age and doesn’t actually consider old money to be discounted, so I have two theories.

The first is that it’s a stupid way to make money off tourists who have failed to bring “new” currency. The other is that while US dollars are in relatively good supply here, they are typically found in other countries, yet they are very valuable because they are more stable than countries like Indonesia. In other words, it is good to have US currency around, and one of the cheapest ways to get it is to buy it off tourists.

However, the currency does have a lifetime, and there is no magic quality control to remove it out of circulation when it’s worn out. There is also no unlimited supply of money, or in fact a good source of it. Most likely the majority of foreign currency in any country is carried by people into and out of it. This means that a solid currency like the dollar and euro has increased value and its value is linked to its condition. In this case, really if it weren’t for common market rates, the consumer would be empowered to negotiate based on the condition. Quite interesting.

Of course, as I said I could be totally crazy and it could be that they’re just trying to shaft people.

Finally got the new design done. It’s orange and black and gray. It’s cool. And you love it. And I love it.

Well, it’s time to start making some difficult decisions. If I build my X2 the way I’m thinking right now, I will end up with a very capable, albeit expensive robot. Of course this isn’t terribly expensive in terms of robotics, it’s just a bit steep for me. Additionally this approach gives me a lot of flexability in terms of functionality out of the box. I’m going to have to start digging for el-cheapo approaches but I’m liking what I’m looking at so much I’m not sure how I can reduce costs significantly.

What I’m looking at:

• OOPicII+
• Expansion Board from SuperDroid
• Modified Servos for drive
• Large 6″ Model Airplane Wheels with round profile
• Possibly an LCD

The total for all that runs about $178 dollars (that’s without the LCD), and that’s mostly electronics. It won’t have any ability to “see” so it won’t be able to tell when it’s hit a wall. I will probably have to implment a giant bar-type bumper switch because the robot will wobble and won’t always be at the same angle to the ground. Essentially that stuff, mounted in a body, would give me a robot that could run around and beep. As long as the batteries didn’t die, it would be able to maintain a clock. There is a possibility that I could build it to recharge in a cradle, although getting it running would be enough of an accomplishment in my mind.

So, I’m still sitting on the decision to purchase a load of crap, as I’ve learned from experience that buying a bunch of parts does not equate itself into a anything except another pile…

The Overseas Trust finally mailed about my bursary application. They are offering me 3000 pounds per year for school. This is almost $6000 per year in US dollars, and the Overseas Trust Bursary is like a scholarship, it’s not a loan. I am happy :-).

I am also looking at podcasting. I believe I will be starting a podcast with a friend of mine, and may very well put up a few test recordings I’ve made thus far as well. I’m very interested in podcasting as a clean, unperterbed medium.

Most likely I will be podcasting from Indonesia if not recording in Indonesia and then uploading when I get back to the states. As such I’m probably going to be sticking in some test podcasts to make sure that everything is technically working.

Well, this is certainly an overused title, but still appropriate. The lack of blogging has been due to the lack of interesting things going on as pertains to school. I have not yet received my loan application :-(, I have not yet received word on my Overseas Trust application :-(, and I am spending most of my time between school and work.

However, and this is quite exciting, I will be leaving the country to go to one of the State Department’s all-time faves: Indonesia. I will be visiting Sintha there for about two weeks, which will end up being 12 days there due to the two 35 hour flights to and from. I will definitely be blogging that voyage, and hopefully be doing some podcasting from there.

I am doing extremely well in my classes, and I suppose this is worthy of a serious mention on its own: this is perhaps the first time I have had such a high GPA in my life so if that doesn’t tell you how badly I want to go, I don’t know what will. I will most likely end up with a 4.00 GPA (AAA) in my courses. This is good because it will make the folks at Wolfson feel better about their decision. It has also been honest to god beneficial to get back into Mathematics.

I know I have blogged about math before and the state of math education in the US but even a semester has really refreshed my memory of stuff. I don’t think I would have any trouble at all with most of the topics covered on the mathematics review now, whereas before, some of them were iffy. I feel that I know all the material covered in our course very well, though I suspect that the pace of our course was meerly comfortable and that a Cambridge pace would be much faster and more topics would be covered.

Unfortunately I cannot say much of the same for my Computer Science class. It is in a word ridiculous. It isn’t the bizzare assignments from the prof and spend hours implimenting tedious user interfaces that don’t contribute to learning, as I realize that most of CS isn’t interesting and is mostly tedious. It’s the fact that the prof has no damn clue what he’s talking about. He has made a number of mistakes over the course of the semster and I have held my tongue or at most politely suggested that there is a different way. Further he blames the compiler for any mistakes he makes (”Well different compilers handle this differently.”) which is sort of like an apprentice blaming the tool. The problem with him blaming the tool is that the students then think that the tool is suspect and that when they make mistakes, perhaps it wasn’t their fault, it was the tool’s fault. This leads at best to second guessing your own knowledge, and at worst buggy, convoluted code.

I should also mention my physics prof to round things out. I believe I made a mistake the test today, but other than that I am indebted to him for giving me some of his time to discuss physics. The discussions were very productive in that they taught me the basics of “real physics,” the kind with vectors and calculus, rather than the kind we’re learning in class, which is the boring ghetto kind. He also did me a huge favor writing me a letter and I hope to reward him at least by raising the class average. He’s a wild and crazy guy.

So other than a terrible professor who probably shouldn’t have a job at all in the field of computing, the experience has been good, and I very good about going back to school. I know that the pace should be a lot faster and I am sure the supervisions will make things more difficult (it’s pretty much impossible to fake understanding one-on-one with someone). Honestly, I am also a bit excited to not have to work any longer and focus on school. I have said it before and I will say it again: work and school do not mix. Especially the type of work I am doing and the environment that I am in. I will be quite happy to be solely responsible for my knowledge of a subject rather than trying to balance a business’s needs and my own.

Anyway that’s it for now, I just wanted to pop in an update and keep the blog from going stale on me.

I am embarking on a project that seems to be a perfect fit considering my long, storied past. As a few will remember, I have always had an interest in robots. When I was about 11 or 12, I wanted to build one desparately, but I never got past the accursed power supply. Had I been smart, I would have built one, but no, I was stupid and tried to make one, but not just any power supply, the biggest, meanest supply you can imagine. And I failed. Now all I have to show for all my robot research is a lot of power handling IC, a soldering scar on my right index finger, and a little aluminum frame that says “X1 Robot Platform” in magic marker, which was to be my robot.

But I can tell at sight a microcontroller from a javelin.

So, sitting on the Internet, I discovered Clocky. I could go into a disertation about proper uses of robotics and robotics for the hell of it, but suffice to say, this is an excellent robot. In fact the makers are so wise, they don’t even call it a robot, but instead call it a clock. And it is essentially a clock, one that rolls off your bed and hides. I have in my past thought of really weird ways to not oversleep, and clocky is definitely a creative and fun solution to the problem.

So, I’m going to build a clocky. Details will be forthcoming, but at current, it will probably either look like an old-style alarm clock (the mechanical kind with clanging bells) or nearly identical to clocky. It will sit on the nightstand all day, probably in a cradle that keeps it from using it’s batteries up, and it will go off, and if you hit the snooze button it will drive off the cradle on to the floor, and hide, and then go off again. It will keep doing this until you do something else. I haven’t figured out what something else is, but it will probably involve turning it off at first.

My ultimate ideal, which is a bit tailored to my own sleeping problem, is that it will go off, then hide, then it will check to see if you have woken up, if not then it will go off again until you have really woken up. I have a tendancy to turn off alarm clocks and go back to sleep, so I need the sort of intelligence in clocky that will tell when I have actually awoken. I think that for now it can just do the simple stuff, but ultimately it will probably have to do something like infrared imaging to see if I am still in bed or something. That’s a lot more advanced than run around and hide, but definite a 2.0 feature.

Anyway, it will have two driven wheels, be less than 1 foot in all dimensions, use probably an ooPic for extendability, and I haven’t quite figured out the motors yet. It will need some very strong construction to handle driving on to the floor every day, but I think that I can come up with metal axles in metal collars that should be strong enough. The ooPic can easily handle the clock function and the hide function, with some buttons for input to change the time and the alarm. Because of the cost of the ooPic, it will be a bit more than $100. However, if I had to make several I think that the cost could easily be below $30 because I could use more specialized chips than the ooPic which is capable of nearly anything.

Mine will not be covered in shag carpet. It will be in faux cheetah fur.