I have a new rule. Never run dist-upgrade outside of a screen session, over wireless using DHCP, because one or more of these will fail and you will have to reboot the machine to get it back.

Tonight at volleyball I had three beers while waiting for Steve, Al, Ben and Sophie to play their mixed game at 7:15. Then during our game, at 8:00PM, I fell out the court and did a wicked stack.

Then I bought another beer.

It looks like I’m an official source of wisdom.

I forgot that I submitted this, and it appears to have been accepted by the admins at Urban Dictionary.

How cool is this little dude? He is the Wow Robot KHR-1 and has a price tag of $1450. I’m guessing that’s US dollars also, but can’t tell because the Wow Robot site is Korean (although Babelfish did a semi-decent job in translating).

I was pointed in his direction by some guys on IRC, and downloaded a video that shows some of the robot’s capabilities. He can do headstands, lie on both his back and his stomach (and get up from these prone positions), kick, walk sideways, dance, and most impressively… he can perform katas! (They’re controlled patterns practiced my martial artists.)

What really impressed me was his speed. He didn’t just ‘do the moves’ at a slow pace. He looked pretty menacing (well as menacing as a 30cm robot can I guess). He belted out some wicked looking ‘fu.

He has a bunch of software that is used to program and control him; I’m guessing this is how he was taught the katas. I wonder if he can program himself?

I seem to remember hearing about him on Slashdot about 6 months ago (it’s his mad-ninja-skills that ring a bell), so it’s great to see this kind of technology become available to consumers, albeit at a relatively high price.

He sure beats the model cars I used to make as a kid. Now, how do I convince Maggie he’ll be good around the house?

It appears that IE is equally vulnerable to the shell:// attack vector that Firefox, Mozilla and Thunderbird perviously displayed (and subsequently patched against).