This past week has been pretty typical which has given me time to do other non-typical things like look for housing in San Francisco. I've found that if I say I'm 20 I get no response but if I say I'm in my 20s people are interested. That's silly. Anyway, I'm looking in inner Richmond, the Haight area and Potrero Hill. Anyone that knows someone that knows someone with a room to rent in these areas should definitely shoot me an email. I've got a couple other emails that I've got to send out tonight so I can hopefully visit some places later this week. Here's a copy of the my room wanted post on craigslist. I've actually had a couple good responses from that ad. Just being myself seems to pay off every once in a while.

I've been pretty relaxed this week since I decided that I was going to not work on any ambitious projects for a week after fdrlib came out. I've had little to no response on fdrlib which was what I was expecting so my next task is to build it in to a web app that actually has some functionality so I can really show how fdrlib can be used. That'll get underway tonight or tomorrow as I emerge from my project hiatus. I did some playing with ruby a while back and I got in to it again this past week. I was attempting to play with rails and I ended up borking my ruby installation all to hell when upgrading from 1.8.1 to 1.8.2. That took me a couple hours to fix, only to run in to issues with rubygems and rails which were eventually solved.

I've been really itching to get back in to robotics recently and I'm having trouble figuring our where to start. Optimally, I'd like to find a controller with a decent number of digital i/o spots that runs perl and is USB-connected. Unfortunately, all I can find is game or parallel port controllers that you need to script in C or BASIC. It seems that home robotics is living way in the past and that sucks. If the controller is running scripts, why don't we make them to understand a scripting language? Many props for someone that can find me one of those.

Also, if you're running MT and find that Blacklist does a good job but requires too much user interaction you should check out the new SpamLookup from Brad Choate and Tobias Hoellrich. Trackbacks are back on now because of SpamLookup. Horray!