Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Lish sent me an ominous warning — “it’s happening!*”

The incident took place in June 2007 at a factory in Bålsta, north of Stockholm, when the industrial worker was trying to carry out maintenance on a defective machine generally used to lift heavy rocks. Thinking he had cut off the power supply, the man approached the robot with no sense of trepidation.

But the robot suddenly came to life and grabbed a tight hold of the victim’s head. The man succeeded in defending himself but not before suffering serious injuries.

“I’ve never heard of a robot attacking somebody like this,” [prosecutor Leif Johansson] told news agency TT.

* The human-robot apocalypse that is.

Speaking of robots (TikTok), Nefarious and I have been reading Ozma of Oz (you can click here to download a great PDF of the book, complete with gorgeous illustrations). We’re about half way through it right now and it’s a big hit. Whenever I read these older novels, I worry about their accessibility — I find Alice in Wonderland pretty unreadable for example — because much of the writing is quite archaic and, well, boring to a modern reader, let alone a young reader.

I had a doctor’s appointment today — long story about unpleasantness that went on while they were taking my blood to make sure my liver is still working — that made a slight change to my current prescription. What’s quite interesting to me is how very slight differences in the formulation of Oxycodone-based painkillers — for example, two Percocet is quite different from an Oxy-IR, which is quite different from Oxycontin, even though they all have the same basic ingredients. I had some trouble finding a pharmacy that had the new prescription in stock, so I thought to myself, which pharmacy has the most Tang behind the counter? I remembered that the pharmacy in the world’s grimiest mall is also a methadone clinic, so they are well stocked in all pain killers.

Oh, and I think everyone is bored of my JavaScript ramblings by now, but I did some experimenting with integrating sound into the Bing-Bong! game. I used a series of <embed>’s which contained the sound effects, four for each sound. The reason I did four for each sound is for polyphony — it cycles through playing them sequentially, so if for example, you hit a bunch of bricks in quick succession, you hear more than one hit. That said, it was a failed experiment for two reasons — first, it really slows down load time (except, ironically, on IE, which is quite fast), and second, there’s some degree of latency (1/10 of a second, maybe more), which makes it essentially impossible to sync the sound effects to the game. That said, it’s given me some ideas for other amusements, and if you want to see it or check out the code, here’s the link. I might play with it more in the future and see if I can solve things…