Todays nice robots are...

 

Huey, Dewie & Louie DD

Word of the day. Crapsifruit.

1.
a. - Alt. of Crapsifruit. ~ (Crap-see-frute)

To be a bit crap and slightly fruity. (See John Inman.)

Time...

I've just done something very, very silly. I worked out how much time I spend commuting to my current job in Paddington. Wanna know? Well I'll tell you sweet reader. It's 4 and a half hours per day. Now that dearest, is a whopping 22 and a half hours per week. I basically travel for one day for every five. Now that's not right is it.

Off sick

Today I took a day off work because I felt like shite but I was determined not to waste it sitting about watching daytime teevee and drifting in and out of consciousness so I set about a few odds 'n sods that I've been meaning to do for a while. Here's a handy list.
Today I...

• Learnt how to crossfade images in Flash using XML
  
• Priced up a new bathroom online
• Dropped off some old clothes at the homeless shelter down the road
• Watched a whole episode of 'Diagnosis Murder' (Which frankly made me feel worse.)
• Discovered how to burn disk from my wonderful new DVD recorder & PVR
• Rediscovered joy in the humble, but mighty, custard cream

• Groaned as Hilary Clinton beat Barack Obama, winning New Hampshire's primary
• Cheered as Apple announced plans to drop the price of tracks on iTunes in the UK
• Had a poo
• Added a new entry to my blog. This one.

And it's only half three.

How to write with feeling

The other day I was talking to one of my new-temporary work colleagues about hospitals and the like and the subject of the Hickman Line I once had to have inserted into me came up. For those of you that don't know what a Hickman line is it's basically an intravenous cathater (usually used in the administration of chemotherapy) that gets inserted through the subcutaneous fat in your chest and fed into your superior vena cava (I think) so stuff can be pumped in to you. In my case the 'stuff' was a nutrient mix that looked rather like loose mash potato... in a bag. Anyhow, when I got the part of my tale when I asked if the mirror could be adjusted so I could watch the surgeon inserting the line whilst I lay prone on the operating table, one of the guys listening to my thunderously interesting story asked me, quite openly and earnestly, how it felt. All I could say on this matter was that 'it felt weird'. How crap is that!
Now when George Orwell was asked how it felt when he was shot in the throat whilst in Spain he replied:

"Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing. The sandbags in front of me receded into immense distance. I fancy you would feel much the same if you were struck by lightning. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me. All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense."

Man I wish I could be more lucid at times.

SAL 9000

Trawling YouTube I came across this clip of SAL 9000 & Dr. Chandra. 

Today's nice robot is...

SONNY from I, Robot

Sonny is an NS-5 robot designed by his creator Alfred Lanning, to be different from the other model NS-5's (he has blue eyes not gold) because Dr. Lanning wants him to carry out a very special request. Namely to shove him out of a high window. Now before you all start jumping up and down shouting, "But this is Nice robots Mr. TeaIsLife, not Evil robots!", Lanning orders Sonny to do it as his last request in order to get Will Smith involved for some strange and rather convoluted reason.
Now Sonny is a REALLY nice robot all things considered. As the plot rolls along it turns out that Sonny (previously suspected by Will S. of murder) is living with the deep, dark tormented secret that he killed his creator as an act of kindness. Aawww... Poor Sonny huh? He just wants to be liked and work out who he is and everything but everyone keeps pestering him and trying to inject little nano-killer-robot things into his head. What a bottomer.
Anyhow, Sonny (though not the most interesting of robots) does look mighty cool in the film and turns out to be quite a kick-ass bot later in the day so all's well in Nice-Robot-Land I feel.

NICE ROBOTS

So, as a follow up to my barely-successful, award losing series EVIL ROBOTS, I thought I'd delve once again into the robot barrel and see what examples of niceness I could dredge up and let me tell you, there are quite a few. You see robots are supposed to BE nice and nice they are a lot of the time. So, without further ado I present to you oh ever faithful reader, the first in my equally spurious NICE ROBOTS series.
Enjoy.


Today's nice robot is...



SAL 9000

The erstwhile counterpart of the murderous barn-pot that was HAL 9000 in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Oddysey, SAL 9000 was, like her 'brother', a supercomputer designed by Dr. Chandra for use as a reference system for HAL With her gleaming blue 'eye' and her sultry, Indian accented voice SAL was a far more comforting character than HAL for one reason above all others. She never asphyxiated anyone and bunged 'em out an airlock. That kind of thing will really put a crimp on your day after all and she frankly wasn't that kind of computer. She was nice. If she'd have done anything she would've let poor Dave Bowman back in whilst looking at HAL with a kind of 'I'm not angry HAL, just disappointed' look whilst HAL looked at his feet and shuffled about mumbling something about being 'sorry' and that he'd try to re-connect Frank Poole's oxygen pipe...
So there you have it. HAL 9000 - Evil. SAL 9000 - Nice.

The cosmic balance is restored.

FILM REVIEW - 28 WEEKS LATER

It's shit.