Could the green robot drawings be winding down? Hell to tha no! Suckaz! This guy, FTW!

Consider this my official heads-up to the drivers in Southwestern Montana: I am practically blind behind the wheel. Especially right around dusk…something about the indirect light makes my eyes tired to the point where everything is a blurry mess. Not good. Welcome to my thirties, I guess. Turns out I am badly in need of some eyeglasses…and none too pleased. My first thought was to get some contacts. Hide the fact, so to speak, that I am ageing. But then I start thinking about it…I really don’t need correction at work. I also don’t need help when I read…so why not just bite the bullet and get some eyeglasses, that I could toss in the car? Here is why. I absolutely destroy sunglasses. If I have glasses that I wear ‘on occasion,’ I will get only a few occasions to wear them before they are either lost or scratched to bejesus. Same goes for my cell phones, but I digress. So, looking at the mall and at Costco, it turns out that eyeglasses are break-the-bank pricey. Enter stage left…Zenni Optical. Check the price on this guy… As my caption so nicely states, that is cheaper than lunch at the danged deli. For good looking frames, to boot. Eight bucks is for the pure prescription lens, but they also offer bifocals, progressives, you name it. For dirt cheap. Problem solved, the problem being my need for several pairs of specs. I could grab an armful of these for less than the price of one pair at the mall, and therein have a pair in the SS, Yukon, Kate’s Camry, the living room, work, etc. Plus, for eight bucks, I could have a next year’s Halloween costume knocked out… Buddy Holly baby. Or the guy from Major League played by Charlie Sheen. Decisions decisions.

I started thinking about my first Ubuntu experience…8.04, Hardy Heron. Good stuff. I got curious and looked up the previous version names…and found them fairly interesting. Warty Warthog 4.10 Hoary Hedgehog 5.04 Breezy Badger 5.10 Dapper Drake 6.06 Edgy Eft 6.10 Feisty Fawn 7.04 Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 Hardy Heron 8.04 Intrepid Ibex 8.10 Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 Karmic Koala 9.10 Lucid Lynx 10.04 Maverick Meerkat 10.10 The trend is self-apparent. Now, the names are alphabetically similar, and in a descending order. Shitty sentence, yes, but too is this sentence shitty. The numbers correspond to the year of release, and month of release…meaning that the Meerkat drop that I have will remain beta for another 5 months. Nerd points.

Snow? In May? Give me a f*cking break, Mother Nature.

LED. Check Breadboard. Check Bunch of wires. Check. C++. Check. What is that under my finger? A BAD ASSED BUTTON! I’m going to have this robot up and rolling in no time. Everyone knows that every robot needs at least one button…the fricking kill switch. For, in case, said robot gains sentience and tries to kill the creator. And I’m not going down by robot death. Skin cancer, maybe, but no death by robot.

You know what? I’m pretty pumped I graduated when I did. Compared to my little sister, who is currently in the university system in Idaho, I paid practically nothing for my undergraduate degree. My mathematical science degree, for the win. Five grand does not go very far these days…and I’m fairly certain that five grand a year was enough to secure my degree. Beer and Doritos pushed that cost well over ten thousand a year, but I digress. Well, fear not. Technology to the rescue! Online courses were just coming to prevalence when I was wrapping up at Montana State. Granted, the foothold that was in place was primarily for continuing education, and for remote learning for secondary school teachers. Go figure. But, times change, and now there are crazy options in the field of online, higher education. Remember the University of Phoenix? Now they are simply one of many “Online Universities”, along with a grip of “Traditional Universities” offering online degrees. Per the title of this post, I found it interesting that the popularity contest in this field ranks as follows: 1) Business Degrees 2) Criminal Justice Degrees 3) Art & Design Degrees 4) Computer Science Degrees and letter number 5) Engineering Degrees Invert the list (5 –> 1, for those unfamiliar with the term) to see the degrees I would pursue, in perfect order. Stick a “Chemical” in between the “5)” and “Engineering” to be completely specific. Anyhow, with the spread of online degrees and acceptance, per se, comes other benefits that were once enjoyed only by students of traditional schools. Like financial aid. This is the perfect opportunity to boost the resume, in a time of economic (and job) uncertainty such as this. Take a look…it is pretty slick.

Remember this from…say…25 years ago? I first played Mario on a black and white TV in my neighbor’s basement…I shit you not. Black. And. White. Here it is in color… Well, apparently it took a while, but somebody has finally notices this gem from Toad. Whatever. That may be cool, but by Super Mario 2, he was demoted back down to his worthless status. Remember his “ability?” Being able to lift things quickly? Joke is on you, dick.

Hot on the heels of Lucid LTS, Shuttleworth has just announced the next Ubuntu drop will be 10.10, Maverick Meerkat. Check Mark Shuttleworth’s Blog for the press release-ish details. Long story short, more emphasis on the netbook and the cloud…quicker boots, etc. Should be good times.

New Ubuntu is the best Ubuntu. You know what that means…Lucid Lynx is stable, and currently running on my primary machine. So far so good. Visually, Lynx is a bit more polished than Koala. Boot time was quicker…drivers working, etc. Even my Arduino front end fired up from the terminal…we are good in the hood. LTS…pretty damned stable for a beta, per se. Stay tuned…I still have Karmic on my old Dell, so perhaps I will fire them up side-by-side and write a review. Perhaps.

I’m not there yet, but let’s chalk this one up as a step towards the end goal…which would be the title of this post. A Damned Arduino Robot! Granted, this is basically just my hello world (hola mundo) program with the addition of a solderlss breadboard into the fray. But, it is awesome and, I am going to be the coolest dude on the block when I come rolling out with a bad-ass robot. I had better get back to work.