Dream at the top of your lungs

Apparently I have been mocked for my current dearth of witty informative blog entries. Not that this will be either of those things but here’s a blog entry:

Why have I forsaken my dear little blog? I’ll tell you why, because I’m cheating on it. That’s right. I have another place to write. And this one is better*

What and where is this amazing repository of wordsmithery you may ask? It’s over at Robots of Joy.

“Oh no, he’s making interactive sex-bots… again” I hear you say, but no! Not only will I never tinker in the gray triangle region between a roomba, prostitute, and God EVER again** but this project benefits sick kids (although depending on how you take the word “sick”… never mind I’m straying from my point.)

Here’s how it works (shamelessly copied from something I already wrote)

The Robots of Joy project was conceived in early 2008 as an all-around-everybody-wins mixture consisting of a scoop of the love of technology, a handful of engineering, and substantially more than a pinch of helping out others who could use a boost.

The plan falls into five parts:

Stage One: Design of the actual robot project. This stage is currently IN PROGRESS down to the Solidworks drawings, component choice, etc. For more on this check out this article.

Stage Two: We acquire the needed parts through donations (physical parts or money to buy parts) ad-based revenue from the website, and good old-fashioned out-of-pocket expenses. To add a bit of incentive each of the donors’ names will be laser etched into the side of the final project and recorded here on the site. (Have a blog or a website? That’ll also get face time here)

Stage Three: The build is on! Machining time has already been donated to the project and some of the operations code is already in the works. Admittedly this is the fun part :) Pictures of the build and how it progresses will go out on the website and in the newsletter. Hopefully we’ll really build some excitement for this stage and get a good rolling start into…

Stage Four! The whole project is sold to a lucky bidder on eBay. That’s right the whole thing will get packed up and shipped off. For this first project expect to see somebody’s computer room get a blast of very awesome. As soon as we find a home for our little creation it’s on to…

The BEST Stage: After out-of-pocket expenses are settled we’ll be giving %90 of the proceeds to the great guys over at the non-profit organization Child’s Play (childsplaycharity.org) who supply over 40 children’s hospitals with gifts, toys, and all manner of great things for children in long-term care. Read some of the letters these guys get and you’ll instantly understand the great service they provide to a lot of kids who really need a pick-me-up.

So where does that extra 10% go? It becomes the seed money for the next project allowing us to continue this cycle. We may change charities from project to project or year to year but the end goal will always be the same: to help fund amazing charities and do it all while developing some great open source projects.

So there you have it. That’s where the time has been going.

On the life side of things: Work is good but classified. Apartment is good but lacking dishwasher. Health is good but… EVERYTHING. Megan and I have bronchitis or some such nonsense and I’ve been missing the aforementioned work and dragging myself around the aforementioned apartment. Lotta WoW and sleeping. About the only things these here cough meds let me do. Well that and write this post…

And with that I’ll let this here robitusssin and delsyn fueled rant come to an end. Kelly consider yourself re-mocked…ed… mockeded… THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

* It may not be better and it’s not exclusively mine but it’s where my “writing time” has been going. Along with my “free time.”
** Not saying that I have, but damn if it doesn’t make for a good mental image in a blog post.

Filed under: Engineering, Rants, Suck, Time Wasting on February 26th, 2008