Halfbrown

Am I the only one who thinks that the Mars rover PanCam (or NavCam, or whatever the hell it’s called) looks a little bit like “Johnny Five”, the robot from the 1986 movie Short Circuit?

Admittedly I haven’t been too on the ball with the Mars mission, but when I finally saw the pictures of the Mars Exploration Rover “Spirit” itself I couldn’t help but seeing a similarity between the Short Circuit robot and the Mars rover. The long “neck”, the two “eyes”… good googaly moogaly I hope Spirit doesn’t have a laser attached to it!

Oh, and just so I can sleep better at night, someone please ensure the neither Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, nor Fisher Stevens are anywhere near the control center!

Maybe Kimberly and I are crazy, but I think we just had a little earthquake happening in our neck of the woods… Kimberly’s (nearly) asleep and I’m finishing some PHP in the home office and it felt as if the whole house was shaking a bit; almost like someone was running or walking heavily outside of our respective rooms.

<update id=”moments_later”>

Yep! We sure did have a 3.2 earthquake according to the University of Washington and the USGS confirms it on their website! Very exciting stuff… the last earthquake I personally experienced was about 8 months before Evan was born and I was driving at the time. My car starts shaking and I didn’t even realize it was an earthquake until I noticed the streetlights and traffic signals swaying in the air.

Anyhow, here’s what UW said (in brief):

A minor earthquake occurred at 0:18:18 AM (PST) on Friday, January 16, 2004.
The magnitude 3.2 event occurred 4 km (2 miles) E of Bremerton, WA.
The hypocentral depth is 54 km (34 miles).

You can check out a topographic map of the quake area as well if you like.

</update>

The Airborne Express courier came by the house this afternoon and picked up my laptop. I can’t say that I’m all together impressed with the level of service I’ve received so far; from Dell or from Airborne.

Maybe I’m being nit-picky, but my laptop was pretty expensive, and here’s what I noted in the ~1.3 minutes the guy was here:

• The truck was horribly dirty and the Airborne sign was almost indistinguishable,
• The driver was unkempt (terribly so… shoes, pants, shirt: all a mess),
• The driver didn’t seem to know exactly what he was doing,
• The driver didn’t have tape for the box, nor did he have a pre-printed label for the shipment,
• I was asked to throw away his garbage from the box,
• No paperwork other than the hand-written tracking number he gave me, and finally
• No explanation of what happens next or who to contact if something goes wrong.

Maybe it’s a little too much to ask for someone who is performing a service to look and act in a professional manner; that could just be my cranky/curmudgeonly ways. I think, however, that large companies like Airborne Express and Dell would want to have the highest level of professionalism displayed at all times since their employees are in constant contact with the public.

According to a BBC article a friend sent me there are apparently health risks involved when a boss sends a threatening email to his or her workers. According to the article, “[ Experts from Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College] found that blood pressure shot up if emails were from their superiors - or written in an aggressive tone.”.

For anyone working for than, oh, about 6 months… this shouldn’t come as any great surprise. But what about snail mail, phone calls, pager messages, or even inter-office memos; not to mention the countless other methods of communication at our disposal? I think that any time a superior communicates with a worker in a threatening tone our blood-pressure rises, our anxiety increases, etc. Hell, I’m sure my BP rises if/when I even think that something has gone awry and a superior may catch wind of it and give me hell because of said incident.

That’s part of life in the workforce as a human being; you’re going to screw up every now and again and you’re going to get yelled at for doing so. How the reprimand itself is carried out should be the focal point of reducing stress and/or anxiety in the workplace. Employers, managers, and any “boss” should be aware that what they say and how they say it to an employee carries not only a lot of weight in the workers professional life, but in their personal life as well.

Wired, in a recent article regarding how cell phones with cameras may soon be able to also be barcode scanners, turns on a former advertiser by saying “The CueCat — that pesky bar-code scanner from Digital Convergence — may be dead…”. “Pesky”? Um, I still have a CueCat that Wired sent me with the Wired brand name imprinted on the side of it. Apparently they weren’t pesky when they shipped thousands of them out.

As you may or may not know, the CueCat, by Digital Convergence, was basically a flop of an “advertising scheme”, especially once folks figured out how to use it to convert the CueCat into a generic barcode reader; and most people thought it was silly (at best). Check out Joel Spolsky’s review of the CueCat.