Eileen and I went up to the Okanagan valley on our annual pilgrimage to the wine country of B.C. Every spring we go to visit old favorites and try the newer ventures. We had a fantastic long weekend, leaving home on Thursday and getting back on Sunday. The weather was really outstanding and the guest house at Burrowing Owl is very luxurious, enough so that it is easy to get relaxed in a matter of hours rather than the typical days of decompression it might take on any other holiday.

Our return trip this morning started off with very unusual weather: rain! Good thing we had decided to head out early such that we could pick up the dogs from their “spa weekend” on the way home. Unfortunately things didn’t go as planned: on one of the sharp turns outside of Princeton a car crossed the center line and smashed into the driver’s side door of our blue Saturn. The picture pretty much says it all. Fortunately no one seems to have been injured, and the story ends better than it might have.

It is a bit weird having an accident outside any major population center; there was no cell service for anyone’s phone and there was limited traffic passing by (although all who did pass stopped to see if they could help). We packed ourselves up and headed back 20km to Princeton to find the local RCMP detachment and look into how we might want to get our car back to Vancouver. Princeton isn’t exactly a major destination spot in B.C. One tow truck service, no car rental options, and quite limited choices for pretty much everything else. We stopped at the Husky gas station as it was the first place we came to, though the staff was moderately unhelpful. We got cell service and started calling around to the RCMP to report the accident.

Someone else had already reported it however, which explained the police, ambulance and fire rescue service vehicles we passed on the way back to town. I guess they weren’t taking any chances on whether we were lying a pool of our own blood and body parts, potentially pinned under a blazing car. Better safe than sorry, which is fine by me. The only downside was that we had to wait while they got out to the site, concluded there wasn’t anyone to rescue, then drove back to town to interview everyone involved.

After some waiting, then some explaining, then more waiting, we were handed our police report and sent off on our way. During part of the waiting we occupied ourselves with talking about how lucky we’d been and also trying to recollect whether we thought our car was too badly damaged to drive or not. The impact was low speed and from the side such that our airbags did not deploy. I recalled kicking open the door to get out, while Eileen’s door was pinned against the concrete barrier that protected us from driving off the road to relative safety. We weren’t really sure whether there had been damage to the wheels or not.

We got a tow truck to take us back out to the scene and investigate whether our day was going to get much, much longer. Turns out with a sharp kick to force the door securely closed, careful removal of the debris from what was left of the door, and some duct tape to secure the remaining dangling plastic fragments we could drive the car safely enough to get back to Vancouver.

All in all, we were amazingly lucky. I’m very impressed with the way our Saturn weathered the damage, but I wouldn’t want to try it again. The white Honda Accord that hit us didn’t hold up nearly as well, tearing away the front quarter panel and front bumper.

Besides not sustaining any injury and only moderate damage, the other good thing is that our six cases of wine in the trunk were not damaged at all. Whew.

A news story at Slashdot recently grabbed more of my attention than usual:

Datacenter Robbed for the Fourth Time in Two Years

Thieves broke into the facility and stole computer equipment, and certainly not for the purposes of selling the hardware on the street like stolen car radios or DVD players. Likely the thieves were much more interested to gain access to the hard disks in the resident systems. All the network security products in the world can’t stop them once they have physical access. Identity theft and credit card fraud won’t be far behind this crime.

This story is straight out of a cyberpunk novel in the genre as defined by William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Those books and many more like them had a profound effect on my outlook on life. It seems the dark future predicted by that genre is coming true sooner than anyone expected.

Here is another example of the cyberpunk fiction:

Human Organs For Sale

This is somewhat gruesome but not surprising. Easily predicted by anyone familiar with the genre. Ebay might be squeamish but how long before this stuff appears on craigslist?

Here is something else in the same theme: The Science of Growing Body Parts

Another major theme in cyberpunk stories is virtual reality. Now there is a real-world example of that phenomenon for Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strips, various books, and other useless crap:

It’s Like Reality, Without the Screaming

The source of that is Second Life, a virtual reality social network. Sure its primitive technology by comparison to the rich stories written by the great authors of the genre, but everything has a “version 1.0”.

Another strong theme in the cyberpunk genre is the role that corporations play vs. government. We like to believe our utopian democratic society will protect us from evil corporations and oppressive governments.

Certainly untrue. Think about Haliburton, a corporation that has free reign to set its own price for services in Iraq. It acts without any real oversight. A corporation like Blackwater can sustain a private war at the financial expense of taxpayers without so much as a social hiccup.

Consider that the U.S. government believes secret, illegal spying on citizens is justified and the blatant withholding of human rights of un-convicted prisoners is an acceptable way of conducting international politics. And certainly that particular government isn’t the only one to act this way.

The trend is clear, and the outcome will be fascinating. I can’t wait to see it all unfold!

It’s been pouring rain today in Vancouver, seems winter has come a bit early. We decided to settle indoors for the day, built a fire for the first time this season, and watched Ken Burns’ The War on PBS. I was going to work on my latest robot project, but laziness and some obligations for the day job got in the way.

The War has been quite amazing. The episode we’re watching now included the story of the battle for Herken Forest, outside Aachen, Germany. It is quite a stunning story, I’d never heard about it before. In fact the entire series has been about incredible stories I haven’t really heard about before. I’ve learned a lot about World War II through this documentary, and I thought I already knew a lot.

Eileen made an amazing beef bourgogne for dinner too. Yum!

Eileen and I left the great country of Canada yesterday to venture south for the annual SRS Robothon event. I’ve been giddy all week to get here, but wasn’t quite prepared for the hour and a half wait at the border. This gave us a chance to debate why the border crossing was so slow. We reached two possible answers:

1. The border guards believe if they inflict enough suffering on travelers they will discourage future trips, making it will be easier to pick out the terrorists (who will come anyways) from the tourists (who will instead fly to their destination)
2. Like the people living near Tijuana, everyone in Vancouver has decided to venture to that third-world country to the south to buy cheap stuff, go to wild parties and be a nuisance on the local population

Either explanation works for me. Along the way, we say a couple of very funny bumper stickers.

We had a lot of fun making jokes about both of these, although we expected that you’d never see both of these on the same car. Otherwise it was an uneventful trip to Seattle, and we arrived by dinner time.

I’ll be posting my photos from Robothon as soon as I get back to Vancouver.

And a follow-up from the last post, apparently there is some potential legal issues with simply plunking your robot on the Moon without a permit. Really? Would they give you a parking ticket?

In the last post I wrote about some practical issues that occurred to me as I fantasized about being involved in building the first private lunar rover. I still think about it in that way, but today a new thought occurred to me: will there be historical preservation of Moon landing sites?

Back in 1969 Neil Armstrong placed his footprints (bootprints, really) on the lunar soil, marking one of the greatest technical achievements NASA has ever made. The location of these prints is well documented. Google’s contest provides extra incentive for visits to historical sites, and what site is more spectacular than right on top of the Eagle lander?

Once your robot arrives, you are supposed to drive around capturing video and broadcasting back to Earth. Since one of the most significant views of this most significant site would be those very first footprints, will your robot drive over and snap a picture or two? Of course! But what if your robot doesn’t do exactly what its commanded, but instead drives over and literally erases those famous prints?

Opps.

Or, in a fit of absolute mania, you decided you were entitled to own the rights to the very last video footage of those prints, and purposefully ordered your robot to do the fatal damage? What if you decided to sell the right to do this damage? Would anyone buy it? Would it even be illegal?