Dave Snowdon

Today I went to HORIZONS: A celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum which was part of Sci-Fi London 2012.

Change is a strange thing. We need some of it or we get bored but mostly what we really want is homoeostasis - to find a situation we like and keep everything the same indefinitely - this is unlikely to happen and if it did we'd probably get bored eventually.

I just upgraded the head of my NAO robot to a NAO next gen head. The old head needs to go back to Aldebaran, but before that I could not resist having a little fun. Ghene Snowdon took my initial shots and edited them in photoshop to create the images below.

I'd put off reading The Windup Girl for a while as I'd seen mixed reviews, but finally a review on slashdot convinced me to give it a go.

Since I got my NAO I have not had time to do as much coding as I would have liked. I decided to give myself a simple project in order to get myself started and try out some programming in Choreographe and learn a bit about the NAOqi runtime. I don't know why I decided to try and get NAO to pretend to hypnotise people.

I bought this postcard about ten years ago in Karlsruhe, Germany and it just resurfaced while i was sorting out my stuff after moving house. The back suggests that it's titled "Dompteur" by Michael Sowa but I don't know any more about it than that. However, I think in many ways it sums up perfectly the experience of writing computer software.

After some discussion on Aldebaran Robotics Developer program's forum a few of the UK developers decided to meetup in London. We were lucky enough to be joined by Jerome Monceaux, the architect of the NAO platform and Akim, the developer program community manager who came over from Paris to spend the day with us.

After introducing ourselves, the first order of business was a little surgery on Tim's NAO to replace some stripped screws on the battery compartment.

My wife (a portrait and wedding photographer) thought the NAO was so cute she insisted on a portrait session:

http://www.gsnowdon.com/blog/work/portrait/daily-picture-meet-our-new-baby/