Dr. Milo T. Pinkerton III's Journal

Oh good, it's raining
Yes, rain away... get it all out of your system! The plants could really use it, but I need clear skies by Sunday for our last show at the House of Shock haunted house. I'm intending to make our last show there this season a great show with all the trimmings, and I hope you all can make it! You can actually see us for free if you tell the ticket takers that you're not going into the haunted house.

Along those lines, I've finally gotten the show computer stable with the new lighting control system and am trying to program the moving lighting fixtures for most if not all of the songs we're playing this weekend. While seriously worthwhile, this task is a lot more work than I ever anticipated, due to me being completely unable to write a filter to translate our existing polyphonic lighting cues to a monophonic stream of cues for the moving lights. There's simply too much data to be thrown away to produce a usable stream of commands (less elementary than teaching drumbot); on the other hand, the moving lights look better without so many frequent cues anyway. The system I've devised lets me 'play' the moving light cues from a keyboard, so once I get proficient at that it shouldn't be that bad... just a lot of songs to cover in our repertoire! But first, I'm going to take on the ones we're performing on Sunday.

Also in the pipeline - finally finishing the MAME 'Gyruss' cocktail project for the upcoming Houston Arcade Expo in a couple weeks. I'm going to try to quick sell it (unless anyone here wants it!?)

I'll leave you with three seemingly unrelated links to ponder. ]

First:
Scientists postulate a working simulation of the entire human brain within a decade.

Second:
The U.S. Military is paying for a 'pack behavior' robot system to hunt human targets.

Third:
Self replicating fabrication machines have become a reality.

What a great idea it would be to conflate and combine these wonderful technologies! Personally, I'm looking forward to meeting a pack of intelligent, self-replicating robots - the more the better! My first command to them of course will be to BOW to the COG!!! I wonder what their response will be?

Current Music: Black Sabbath - 'The Wizard'

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