Airport Blues

Any Mac users thinking the title has something to do with a wireless LAN, stop it. I’m talking about the real airports, the kind airplanes live in. And, no, they don’t have wireless connections here. Fuckers. Anyway, I’m sitting here between gates 24 and 25, and am bored. I left the house with a poorly charged Game Boy – Mistake number one. I also packed only one book: Asimov’s Robot Visions, a good read, and one I have finished now, after the three hour flight out of Houston. Also not helping was the five hour delay. While PJ and Dan had enough warning that they didn’t have to leave Philly today, I was not so lucky, I don’t know why Dad couldn’t manage to get all three of us on the same flight. Oh well, I get to spend an extra night in my own bed, finally. I was getting a cramp because none of the beds up there were really meant for me. One of the odder things was the tiny mattress, smaller than the bigger mattress is sat on, that I called a bed. It was comfortable enough, though my feet were somewhat odd being a level below the rest of me. *Shrugs.* On second thought, I should have pushed it down farther, and had the pillow sit on the lower ledge, therefore keeping me balanced. Oh well, too little, too late.

This is going to be a bitch to edit. Assuming is still gives me the odd characters that I can’t show without trying (possibly this “– a quotation, or the hyphen, who knows) I’m gonna have to go through and edit every line of the entry where a non-alphanumeric character appears. Oh well. Also, speaking of editing, it turns out you cannot spell Houston with an ‘I’. Thanks spell checker! *Thumbs up* ^-^

Random Wireless networks are odd things. I have somehow acquired a barnacle of a network signal. “AJRWireless” or something. It sorta annoys me, cuz it doesn’t do anything except occasionally boot me off networks that actually DO work. Or something.

The guy next to me says there’s a free network connection over there. *Points.* Anyway, I’m gonna finish this and then go and see if I can get on. ^-^ *Closes WMP.*

I’ve become obsessed with robots lately. More so than usual. I said I was reading the Asimov book, and I’m looking forward to seeing I, Robot, and then heckling it for not being anything like the original story. Actually, if it ends up looking really bad, I’ll just wait and rent it in a few months. Merry Christmas to me! Here’s my major beef with the movie. The robots in it are supposed to have Asimov’s three laws of robotics built in. I repeat them here because not everyone knows them:

1: A robot may not harm a human being, nor through inaction cause one to come to harm
2: A robot must obey any orders given to it by a human, except when doing so would go against the first law.
3: A robot must preserve its safety, unless doing so would go against either the first or second laws.

Asimov uses these laws in his stories to counteract what he dubs “The Frankenstein Complex”, a fear humans have that, like Frankenstein’s monster, robots will rise up and attack their creators. Being free of that outdated plot device, Asimov uses his robots as tools, not as metaphors or anything morally silly like that.

However, the new movie, (which by the way has Will Smith playing a character who has never appeared in an Asimov Story) has robots attacking people, or so it seems. I actually want to see the movie, if only because I have this strange belief that all the action in the movie is either a case of human driven panic, or paranoia on Smith’s part, OR, Smith himself is a robot, and therefore open to attack by other robots. It could be interesting. It could also be an average “Bang Bang Shoot-em-up,” as my Grandmother used to call them.

I’ve also been watching the Chobits series Matt was kind enough to get for me. (I promise, Hill, one of these days I’ll learn how bit torrent works). I have decided that I need to make a robot computer case. It seems to me that all the necessary components such as a hard drive, Ram, and other hardware cards, could fit into a head sized space, seeing as how they fit in a laptop and smaller devices. All other accessories, such as disc drives and monitors, would be plugged into the head, much the way monitors and external disc drives work today. There could be microphones built into the “ears”, a speaker in the “mouth” and at least one camera in her “eyes.” Yes, her. I plan on building myself a Chi, or at least a female persocom.

With all this attention on the head, why bother with a body, aside from the fact that it looks nice? (I would find it unsettling to plug an optical mouse into the back of a dismembered head.) The obvious answer is mobility. I want a computer that will walk around and follow me, and possibly be able to have conversations. Prosthetic devices work well enough for a human brain; it seems to me that an electronic one would be able to control the motors much better, or at least just as well.

Anyway, that’s my dream. Or rather, part of my dream, who’s finale is to put my brain in a robot body. (AND THEN TO FIGHT CRIME WITH IT!!!... Nah, jk).

Later, gonna see if I got on the flight, or if I got on the internet, or both. (Neither would suck.)