I bought a Motorola RAZR phone the other day to replace my aged Ericsson T28. I’m not a “phone person” nor a “gadget person” but I do like to have a mobile phone. I long ago figured out that its worth paying more for the convenience of small, thin, light electronics.

What has really surprised me is the subculture of people who “hack” these sophisticated phones. Sometimes its about removing the software locks set by the carrier, other times its just about changing the skins or uploading new games. Some sites offer alternate firmware to download to your phone. Try googling for “hack mobile phone {brand name}” and you’ll see what I mean.

I think this is sort of like hot rodding cars. When I was a teenager it was very cool to enhance a car in interesting ways. Replacing engines, transmissions, suspension, etc. was not at all unusual. Custom paint with multiple layers of clear coat was standard. I’ve heard that car mods are still popular but nothing like it was. Now its all about firmware tweaks or bolt-on wings or such. I miss days of the big fat tires with expensive chrome wheels and super-thin pin stripping painted by hand.

I guess I’m getting old. Sigh.

A few weeks ago I wrote about getting some printed circuit boards made for my robot projects. They arrived in the mail today and they look pretty good.

I also received my Digikey order of parts last Friday. That company is excellent to to work with – a pretty good website with a good search engine, links to data sheets, good prices and easy shipping options (basically a flat fee using Purolator, Canadian duty already included). My only complaint is their search engine doesn’t use permanent links – the link expires after a few minutes so its hard to send a link for a part to someone else.

I’ll probably start assembly tomorrow or Wednesday. Probably will have one of the boards done by the time I leave for the WCRG Robot Games on Friday night.

Last week my company took all the developers to a team-building event at TBC Indoor Kart Racing. About fifty of us descended onto the TBC location for lunch, racing and beer. The beer came after the racing of course.

The organizers got everyone into four-person teams for a two-hour race that had complicated rules about safety, pit-stops for driver changes, and track etiquette. The idea was to get everyone to drive at least a couple of times so there were a minimum number of pit-stops required. Of course there were also rules about bumping and running people into walls and such but pretty much it was a race against time.

These karts go fast – like 30km or more – and you are basically sitting low with your rear end scraping the ground, a gas engine right behind your seat and a full tank of gas between your legs. You get to wear a helmut and a seatbelt for safety.

I’ve done this same thing exactly once before. When I moved to Brussels (for Creo) a number of years ago we also (coincidentally) went to a kart racing track. So I had some experience to bring to the team. It was clear from the introduction that some of my co-workers were far more experienced, but I noticed none of those guys were on my team. Instead we had Tom who has never driven a car before (he has always lived in cities, never had a need to learn, and is from the UK where getting a driving license is not simple nor nearly automatic like it is in Canada and the United States). Everyone was a good sport though and we all wanted to have fun and do well in the race.

After two hours it was clear that our team was the best team on the track. We led the next closest team by four laps and some teams by up to seven or eight laps. We didn’t have the fastest driver (track record for the day went to Luke on a different team with 32.9 seconds for one lap, I had the second spot at 33.5 seconds). But we were very consistent (our average lap time was below 39 seconds over the 180+ laps including pit-stops), we didn’t take penalties for rough driving behavior (which cost time) and we were very efficient in changing drivers.

Driving these karts is very intense and also very strenuous. The track has lots of tight turns and zig-zags that make you turn the wheel very hard. I must have sweated away several pounds! Even the next day I was feeling the pain in my shoulders and upper arms. But it was a lot of fun and the next day at work was filled with everyone reliving every moment of their moments of glory (or defeat) at the track.

I’d highly recommend this sort of event, its not really expensive and the folks at TBC were fantastic. What a great day!

The Hubble Space Telescope is sixteen years old and this picture was released to commemerate the event. It’s a picture of the galaxy Messier 82.

Quoting the website: This mosaic image is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82. The galaxy is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions. Throughout the galaxy’s center, young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside our entire Milky Way Galaxy. The resulting huge concentration of young stars carved into the gas and dust at the galaxy’s center. The fierce galactic superwind generated from these stars compresses enough gas to make millions of more stars.

The light for this photo took 12 million years to reach Earth so you and I could see it (with a little help from science and engineering). Beautiful!

It’s happened. Marc Crawford is now the former head coach of the Canucks. Not really surprising. I don’t know if he is really to blame for the mess of this last season (especially since Christmas) but at the end of the day, the coach is the guy who is supposed to get the players to play. He couldn’t get the job done so he is gone.

Now the speculation begins about the next coach. I hope its not Pat Quinn.