The Gadget Whore

One of my favorite sites, Woot, had a great deal on Roombas two weeks ago. I ordered one (and won their contest to get two for the price of one). I finally today had the time to run the thing. Yes, I know it’s supposed to run itself without hassle and without the owner taking any time out of their schedule, but it was the first time it was running and I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

This thing is cool. The bottom floor of the apartment is sparkling clean, and my boyfriend’s cat was only moderately startled at it when it nearly ran over his tail (the rest of the time he followed it around). It made much less noise than a traditional vacuum and I only had to take it off the charger and press two buttons to make it run.

I bought the base model for my mother for Christmas, and she’s been able to run it without error so far. I say this only because my mother is the exact opposite of me when it comes to technology. She probably still has the notebook where she wrote down the instructions three years ago on how to attach a file to an email – instructions she wrote while I taught her. Three years ago. She still mentions that she has to consult those notes every time she wants to send me a picture over email. If someone like that can run a Roomba, just about anyone can.

Such user friendliness is impressive in a piece of equipment as advanced as the Roomba. The soft front bumper acts as a sensor. When it encounters a wall, furniture, stereo, or cat, it bumps into it gently then moves backwards, adjusts its course slightly, then tries again.

Now all I need is a Scooba for the hardwood floors and the bathrooms.

On one of my favorite blogs today, they described a scenario where one could encrypt BitTorrent traffic. I don’t work for an ISP, but I work for a hosting company where BitTorrent isn’t allowed. I know that anytime a company that has genuine reasons for not wanting a certain kind of traffic on their servers is always in a see-saw battle with individual users. The company finds a way to quickly find and disable, and the user finds a way to circumvent the script. Then the company finds a way to find the work-around, and the user finds another way to circumvent that workaround. Wash, rinse…you know the rest.

I can understand the battle from both ends. I like trying out media before buying, but I work for a company where using BitTorrent is truly a pain on resources, which are limited and costly. The individual user thinks everything is cool and peachy keen, but the company might be getting a slew of complaints from other customers who are experiencing slowdowns due to someone else eating up resources.

What it comes down to is that we’re coming up with new and exciting ways to use the Internet, but the Internet is still relying on fairly old technology and infrastructure to support the new toys, and it can’t really keep up. So until someone comes up with something really innovative as far as infrastructure, and the ISPs adopt it, the battle will continue.

I get a little behind on news when I do graveyard shifts (and I’m taking on more to ease the transition of going from no car payment to car payment), but much like a traveller in a foreign land, I wake up at odd hours for food and a little web surfing. Yesterday I got online and found an email from my old friend and co-worker from Sony, from when I did web development for Sony Entertainment Robot America, the department that marketed the AIBO in America. He said he had sad news, and that I should get on IM as soon as I could.

So I did and I found out what I knew what was coming for a long time. Sony is nixing AIBO altogether. Engadget is all sad about them not producing AIBOs anymore, but that’s not anything new. They stopped production not too long after I was laid off from my position, and that was, what? Five? Six years ago? Sony, as far as I know, never had any plans to mass produce Qrio. They kept the little guy on as somewhat of a goodwill embassador for awhile. A PR bot.

I can tell you why AIBO died. First of all, the tech slump a few years back killed it, but it really wasn’t doing to well to begin with. They didn’t sell very quickly in America. The majority of Americans just did not get AIBOs. At least back then. In a move that smacked of desperation, they sent everyone in the department out to the retail outlets to demonstrate AIBOs to customers, including me. I had people asking me, “Will it get me a beer?” “Why don’t I just get a real dog?” “Will it do my dishes?”

And on and on and on.

People just can’t see paying $1500 for a toy. If they pay that much, they expect much more than just a cute song and dance, and cool tech. If Sony had been able to reduce the price point to, say, $300 or so, AIBO would still be around today, and who knows what it would do or what it would look like. Hell, the last version had face recognition, and I can tell you from working with the people who program that sort of thing in robots that it’s ridiculously hard to get a computer to recognize a face.

I could go on about all the little day to day things that went on behind the scenes, but who knows. Maybe my friend and I someday will pool our memories and write a book. He was onboard with the department from almost day one, so I know he has some pretty interesting stories.

For now I’ll mourn AIBOs passing, and just hope the fans and the AIBO hackers will keep the memory alive, and maybe do some interesting stuff on their own.

Me? I’ll be keeping a close watch on my three AIBOs, and plan for a very nice retirement.

(Who am I kidding? I’d rather part with a lung.)

It’s my first holiday day off with my Scion, and of course it has to be windier than hell out. I could take a ride on the beach, but I fear I’d be blown into the ocean, bike and all.

*sigh*

I’ve got the late late shift this week, and I’m stress testing my Creative Zen Touch right now. “Stress testing” being codespeak for “haven’t charged it in days” and it gives me an excuse to see how long this thing lasts with no bars in sight.

CES was this week, and I haven’t been able to muster up the energy to care all that much. Considering my usual amount of technolust, this is a strange reaction. I feel no angst, and nobody has heard me pine about not attending this year, about having to work graveyard this week rather than taking some vacation time to jockey for gadget eyespace on a soulless convention floor.

I caught some CES highlights on Attack of the Show. This year it doesn’t seem like anyone is really coming up with groundbreaking technology – just minor upgrades of things we already have. Bill Gates seemed to have some interesting ideas regarding portable access to information (no, hell did not just freeze over), but even he seemed to fall just short of the mark. My eyes have glazed over in boredom when catching releases from Engadget or Gizmodo.

I get really excited over big leaps, like when we leapt from the ability to listen to music from a small CD player to small flash MP3 players to small hard-drived based players. This leap happened in a short time, as did the leap from bag phones to the slim Razr that barely makes a line in my back pocket. My first laptop, purchased in 1997, could be used as a weapon. It sported the latest and greatest in affordable portability such as 32 MB of RAM and a Pentium MMX processor. My iBook is half the weight, a portion of the size, and many times the power, and OS X Tiger buries what Windows 95 in the sand like a turd in a cat box.

And, pardon the aside, but did anyone else, when watching Bill Gates demonstrating Vista, say to themselves “My GOD am I high or is he showing us how to use OS X?” However, this does get down to my basic complaint about the computing/electronics industry at the moment. Where’s the innovation? Where’s the brilliance? Where’s the shiny shiny? I think OS X is a great operating system, but it’d be really great if Microsoft put all of that money to good use and came up with something really earth-shattering rather than licking Steve Jobs’ bum while trying to look like they’re not.

The phones I’m seeing lately are either just barely modified versions of what is out already, really great innovations that can only be purchased in Korea or Japan, or severely limited by the retarded chimps we call mobile service providers. I’ll consider built-in MP3 player to be a great cellphone feature when I only want 128 MB of songs with me. Which is to say, never.

I actually started to get a little bit excited about the video iPod. But then I started reading into actual user reviews (users who weren’t so far up Apple’s ass they could see Jobs’ Adams Apple, that is) and it looks like it’s even worse in many ways than the first generation iPods. The damn thing doesn’t even come with a wall charger. You have to plug it in via USB to your computer and hope you get a decent charge. Only Apple could get away with something like not including basic accessories with a product.

The Xbox 360…oh don’t even get me started. Microsoft wasn’t finished losing out on money trying to get into the video game console market. They had to launch this garbage a scant, what? Two? Three years? after launching the first Xbox. At CES they announced…my fucking word…an external hard drive so that the machine can also be used as a DVR/media center. I think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have been sipping a few too many crack margaritas in each others’ company.

But don’t worry about the electronics market going the way of the Internet start-up. Oh no. There’s enough drooling, simpering idiots out there to buy this cheap, overpriced crap year after year. There is no onus to actually innovate because the expectations of the brainwashed masses is set so low a geriatric could step on it without complaining about arthritic knees.

You can have all of it. I’ll be watching “Beyond Tomorrow” on the Science channel and waiting for something to, you know, happen.