Let this be a lesson to all lost souls that might cancel their credit cards without notifying their hosting companies!

Also, I probably should have updated my contact information, so my hosts didn’t send all their warning emails to my 6 year old Michigan State University email address.

I have to say, I felt like I was back in grade school when I saw that “account suspended” message. That’s about as bad as being called down to the principals office!

Mankind’s children of silicon and steel are making it into the news more and more these days, so I figured it’s about time we highlight the interesting news concerning robots on a regular basis. This week: reptile bots, maternity bots, and lunar pioneer bots!

Snake robots could aid in rescues!
In what seems like a bad plot for a sci-fi channel movie, a Pennsylvania professor at Carnegie Mellon is designing first responder “snake bots” that promise to be uniquely suited to searching for disaster victims in large debris fields. Maybe it’s just me, but robots with no arms can move silently. Robots that can move silently can kill silently. And don’t get me started on the possibility of these things getting loose on a plane!

Pregnant Robot Gives Birth!
Once human kind has been killed off by that stealthy army of snake bots, the earth will clearly be repopulated via the new pregnancy simulator droid. Even those this particular model is intended to let doctors and nurses practice their trade on a benign patient, everyone knows it’ll only be a matter time until some l337 basement haxor enhances one of these contraptions with the ability to truly replicate artificial life.

Japan launches effort to colonize moon with robots!
Finally, Japan is planning to launch a series of probes to the moon which will begin a remote process of colonization while we humans down here on earth glare up at them anxiously. Because let’s face it: we’re going to be lying awake at night wondering what the chances are that the future will have us dealing with a moonbase full of pregnancy droids furiously pumping out an unstoppable army of snake bots.

Have you ever thought, “I wonder what my office would look like with a wall of twelve 30″ LCD monitors?” Me neither. But this guy did, and he decided to build it. Using twelve of Dell’s newly released 30″ monitors, six Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX 512mb video cards, three 1000-watt power supplies and likely the sacrificed soul of a puppy, he constructed a ridiculosly large display with (correct me if I’m wrong) an effective resolution of 7680 x 6400.  Must be a nice view whenever he looks up from his five 32″ Apple Cinimea Displays that ring his desk. Ah, to be independently wealthy…

Google Calendar finally went live late last night. I was able to login using my gmail account and poke around for a few minutes. The interface looks really nice, and a lot of the simplicity of the other Google services seem to be in place. Two things that were immediately dissapointing: no Safari support (albeit this seems to be the norm lately rather than the exception) and no custom recurring settings for events. If you have a class, work or any type of event that doesn’t follow a M-F, MWF or TTR pattern, you are out of luck. This was a bit surprising as nearly every other calendar app allows you to customize how often your even recurs.

On the positive side, there are some really interesting features that are begging to be explored. Calendar Sharing, Invitations, Gmail Integration, Mobile Access and Event Publishing all sound especially promising. I also read that it will import iCal and MS Outlook calendar files so we may be nearing the day that your calendar will be available to you wherever you are. Provided that wherever has internet access I supose.

It’s free and it’s beta and it’s ready to be toyed with. Go have a look! If you don’t have a Gmail account, get in touch with me and I’ll send you an invite.

UPDATE: After some additional tinkering today, I found that you actually do have the ability to schedule events with custom recurrence. One fault down!