This is crazy-cool…it’s a two-wheel balancing robot built with Lego Mindstorms. He calls it “Steve’s LegWay.”
I’ve got a set of Mindstorms, but have never managed to build anything nearly this cool with them. I always kind’ve sucked at actually building the robots, even with copies of the Lego Mindstorms O’Reilly and NQC books. That’s the price I pay for getting a Political Science degree.
The best thing I ever built was a simulated warehouse dispatching system which allowed me to tell a forklift robot pick-up and drop-off points and it would follow lines to find them. It was cool, but the robot part was not that interesting. Then I got bored with it.

This is a good trick for increasing the speeds at which Firefox loads pages. Basically, you’re enabling parallel request prcessing by the browser which, if you have the bandwidth (broadband or better) will make a big difference, especially on pages with lots of graphics or other embedded content. The downside is that it apparently can cause issues with page rendering, according to The Mozilla Dev Team. I’m using these settings now and will let you know if I run into issues.

Following the directions from Make Firefox Faster at Forever Geek:
Here’s something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

The fine folks at The Electronic Privacy Information Center have put together their Top Ten Privacy Resolutions for the new year. While some of them are a bit extreme for me, like #6, “Don’t shop at supermarkets with loyalty programs,” they also have some excellent suggestions, like the phone # and Web site to opt out of pre-approved credit offers.

Personally, I’d like to see pre-approved credit offers disappear, seeing they contribute to identity theft, kill lots of trees for no good reason, and (I personally believe) are part of the skyrocketing consumer debt rates in the United States today. Of course, due to the First Amendment (a thing I’m very much in favor of), there’s no way it’ll ever happen unless the situation gets so bad that those pre-approved credit offers quit making money. Oh, well. I guess there’s no protecting people from their own stupidity.

I had a conference call this morning at 7am. Luckily, I don’t have to get to the office for these things, just fire up the coffee maker and laptop, then dial into the conference bridge.

Still, that’s just way too early to be trying to conduct business since I was up too late last night and am fighting a wicked cold. I spent the entire call explaining that the reason they couldn’t hear me is because I’ve pretty much lost my voice, then having the same 10 minute conversation five times until they finally realize that I’m not going to tell them what they want to hear, no matter how much they would like me to.

It was like phone sex on viagra…it only takes 10 minutes to get through it but everyone’s ready to do it again 30 seconds later.

I hate Wal-Mart, so when I see something like The Wal-Mart Prank, I just have to share it with the world.

In the past, I’ve had jobs where real sales people tried to sell me things, and that was a lot of fun since it usually involved getting out of the office for a half day or more while someone else paid for us to partake of everything from free food and booze to luxury golf outings.

Here at my current Place Of Employment, however, I’m only an “Internal Customer.” Basically, what that means is that I have to listen to sales pitches from other groups who want to “sell” me goods and services (paid for with cost-center Monopoly Money). Letting Internal Sales people get their hooks on you is a mistake similar to letting the Jehovah’s Witnesses through your front door for a reason other than turning them into your very own Buffalo Bill Skinsuit.

So having had this mistake made on my behalf, I find myself sitting in a four-hour meeting in the World’s Coldest Conference Room trying to rub my hands together fast enough to make me catch fire while the Internal Salespeople tell me how great these products (”Business Process Management” and “Business Activity Monitoring” tools, in this case) are. And they do sound wonderful. In fact, to hear these people describe it, these tools would be better than World Peace if we’d just deploy them across our Processes.

Unfortunately, the longer I sit there dreaming of warm, sunny places and conference rooms with working thermostats, the more these people remind me of the stoners I used to know who would sit around the bong for hours talking about how awesome their band was gonna’ be. Never mind that none of them had a clue how to play an instrument.

And for all that, they didn’t even take me to lunch.

I was thinking about the relative evilness of modern corporations (including the one I work for) in general and Wal-Mart in particular. I mean, you could almost believe that they would do something like this.

This puts Wal-Mart, in The Grand Scheme Of Things, somewhere between 19th-Century Robber Barons and Alien Invaders coming to drain our oceans, strip-mine our mountains, and enslave our people.