This is just fucking insane.

Suggesting piracy of books of any members of the Author’s Guild would be irresponsible of me, so instead I’ll just suggest you find authors who *aren’t* guild members and do your best to support them instead.

Support authors like Cory Doctorow, who openly invites you to copy his books, share them with friends, shift them into any format you like.

Don’t let books fall into the same copyright-abusing mess that the music and film industries have. Please.

So, there’s this bakery in the city, around the corner from a place I visit regularly for work. It’s on Erskine Street, and is called Central Baking Depot.

I only noticed it recently, but it has potentially been there for millenia.

Yesterday, I finally found the time and inclination to pop in and see what they do. I’m a bit of a fan of baked goods, so I like to investigate newly found bakers. Besides, I hadn’t eaten lunch, and bakers make pies. Who doesn’t love a pie?

They were very busy. People everywhere, munching down on delicious looking baked goods. It was pretty late for lunch by this point, which is probably a good thing - were it peak lunching time, I might not have been able to get in the door.

Whilst waiting to be served, I witnessed the following conversation between a fellow customer and one of the staff.

Customer: do you have any mince pies?

Staff: Mince pies? No.

C: No mince pies?

S: No, just what you see on the menu.

C: Oh. Well, I’ll just have a sausage roll then.

The staff member then proceeded to recite a list of 4 or 5 splendid-sounding sausage roll variants.

C [slightly aghast]: Don’t you do anything plain?

S [proudly]: No, we only do extraordinary!

At this point, the confused customer left - perhaps to the convenience store across the street to get a sloppy Mrs Macs - while I mentally noted that I had certainly come into the right bakery.

I was then served by a bright looking, friendly-but-not-annoying fellow who had the service skill to note I was wearing a work shirt with my name on it, and greet me by name like an old friend, without making it feel like an old friend I wish I hadn’t run into.

“I’ll have a chicken, pea & lime pickle pie, and a mexican beef & chili bean sausage roll, thanks!”

Yes, I actually said this sentence out loud, and was not greeted with a look of bemusement or a pitying “I’m sorry sir, but that isn’t even legal!” as the silent alarm was triggered.

No, these are actual, real items, right there on their menu board. I know, I know, they sound like some sort of fantabulous Willy-Wonka-esque dream-foods, but they were real, and I bought them.

They were absolutely fucking delicious, too.

Bought a kite. A dual-control stunt delta. Took it out to Sydney Park on Sunday - fun stuff.

What is wrong with you lot? Why are you so fucking stupid? Well, maybe not you specifically, but your fellow humans, oh my.

I am, as you may know, a picture framer. I frame pictures. It is, almost exclusively, all that I do. My business name features the words “picture frame” in it.

However, I just had a customer come in - and I assure you, this is not an isolated event - to pick something up. Like about 70% of these morons, she doesn’t have her job docket, so I ask her her name. Plug it into the computer, nothing comes up [because, again like 70% of these dumb asses, she can never decide whether to give her first or last name, and so seems to alternate between the two] so I ask her what she was having done - y’know, maybe I remember doing it, and I’ll be able to find it amongst the 200 or so jobs in our store room currently.

“A picture frame,” she tells me.

That narrows it down, oh not at all, really, so I look at her expectantly, causing her to clarify.

“A gold one,” she reveals.

oh, for fucks sake.

I actually had to ask her *what she was having framed* before she would reveal this piece of information.

It seems TISM are right - You really are only five yards from a fuckwit.

I replaced the touch-sensor with an ultrasonic sensor, so the bot can ’see’ rather than feel its way around, made a mounting bracket out of LEGO to hold my phone, and let the little guy go for a roam around the house, while recording video.

He gets stuck on the occasional wall, but always manages to work it out in the end.

I finally managed to convince myself that I should buy the most expensive piece of lego I’ve ever heard of. So now I can build an army of robots to do my bidding. Well, an army of robot. I’ll need to buy more sets if i want to have multiple robots. How do evil geniuses ever afford global domination plans?

The pic above is the first of my own design, after building the rather cute TriBot that the boxed set tutorial guides you through. Roma, as I call him, isn’t exactly going to lead a march on the capital just yet, but he can explore a room, backing up and changing direction if he encounters an obstacle, after issuing a robotic ‘ouch!’ in complaint.

The visual programming environment for the AI is very cool. A nice simple layout that allows you to do basic programming without a lot of clutter, but with the ability to do far more complicated things once you’re ready.

Ok, well, obviously when I wrote the previous entry, I had some sort of intention of, y’know.. writing more music. And well, maybe I will. And if I do, I suppose it’ll end up posted here too; if I don’t, well . . . you get the idea.

In the mean time, I think I’m going to start keeping a blog, or journal, or whatever the popular term on the intarwebz is these days. With any luck, I wont run out of things to say too soon.

Running WordPress in the back-room now. Michelle wanted something a bit different done with the layout and such for avarice, which Wordpress seemed more suitable for than the old Movable Type, and so here we are . . .