I went to work today (it's Saturday) without anything specific to do.
It felt great, actually. The past couple weeks I've been pressuring myself to get more work done on the robot and although a lot of planning has to go on since this is the first thing I've built from scratch, there's a lot of downtime when I'm waiting for components to come in from LEGO or Digikey. I've paid more in shipping fees than I really like to admit since I've been discovering new things that I need from the same suppliers over and over again. Google Local searches for electronics in San Francisco come up with places like Sun Microsystems and Wired Digital which makes it completely useless for finding actual electronics suppliers that I can take the bus to (RadioShack is only helpful to a certain degree). I've started a little project as a diversion from my shipping woes that I will dub "MeetingBot" - his use will be seen soon since he will probably contain an order of magnatude less parts than my main project.

I got a ton of cleanup and feature extension work done on StatWatch which was unexpected but I'll take the inspiration whenever I can get it, I suppose. A couple new fusions with blog data and a lot of clarifications that have been in emails from users.

I spent some of this week thinking about computers pretending to be humans, humans pretending to be computers and how they interact in all those crazy combinations. These computers are clever things. They play Unreal very well.

I also thought about some of the stuff Michael at Binary Bonsai says about FeedBurner's ability to mix blog feeds with del.icio.us and flickr content. He suggests that the whole concept of mixing feeds is bullshit; if he wants to read my flickr feed, he'll subscribe to it himself. I've given myself a few days to think about it and I both agree and disagree. For my own blog, adding my flickr photos to the stream is a logical choice. This is my personal blog and my photos are an extension of my personal life. If you're interested enough in me to read the blog, I can only imagine you'd be interested in my photos as well (that sounded less egotistical before it was typed out). For a blog less personal, adding flickr photos just seems silly. As for my del.icio.us links, I am guilty of mixing content poorly. Just look at the stuff I've bookmarked recently: Term::Screen on search.cpan.org, custom laser cutting services, robots - all stuff I'm interested in but stuff that I don't usually post about here. It's on the sidebar if it catches the eye but I'm going to remove it from the feed starting now. A certain subset of my del.icio.us links belongs attached to my Creation blog feed and since I can pull a feed for certain tags in my del.icio.us bookmarks, I'll start tagging robotics mentions with creation_blog and that will get attached.

So, feedburner only allows me to select a del.icio.us *user* to splice with a feed so I've created creation_blog for that purpose. Having two users is going to be a pain. Making things better for users is hard.