here i am, sitting with nothing open on my laptop but textedit, brightness of my lcd set to low, airport off, and looking at (according to apple’s power monitor) just under 5 hours of battery life. in case anyone didn’t hear, and really it’s so localized that there’s no reason to know unless you happen to visit the very small area centred on bay and bloor streets, but the power is off. it’s been off since around 11:30am.

normally i wouldn’t mind so much, but i just bought uncharted2 and was hoping to get quality play time in today. alas, i guess i’ll catch up on my blogging instead. to be published once power returns of course.

so, what to talk about? well, i took advantage of the combination power outage to combine two very awesome things.

1) i took my new bike out for a ride

2) i rode my bike to Tacos el Asador and bought some absolutely delicious food, since i can’t cook without any power (about the only thing i really miss from my old apartment is the gas stove).

man, that’s a fun bicycle! really responsive, light without feeling flimsy, which is important for me, since i’m over 200 pounds and like jump off curbs when the opportunity presents itself. i felt a little bit bad taking this wonderful and brand spanking new (i bought it last week from the nice people at curbside) bicycle out onto the cold and salty downtown toronto roads, but i figure bicycles are meant to be ridden so i’ll just do it and hope for the best. i can’t wait for the weather to improve more generally, i plan on riding this thing everywhere!

update: 5:34 and still no power! sheesh, it’s been down since 11:30 am. sitting in a local Jack Astor’s (one of the few businesses in the area still with power) enjoying a beer and the free wifi. really hope they fix it soon =\

hello and welcome, may his noodly appendage touch you with his mercy and sauciness… or something like that. when you’re handed a blog titled spaghetti robot, it is important to give a nod toward the FSM for good measure.

anywho, on to the blogging. since 2010 is apparently the year of the blog, i’m going to try and get back on (back – sorta) on the blogging bandwagon.

to business!

over the holidays i decided to remedy the storage issue in our house by getting 2TB of storage in an attractive NAS box. specifically i bought myself a d-link DNS-323 (for a good price i’ll add) with two WD 7200rpm 1TB drives thrown in for good measure.

a little about the DNS-323. you can go read the specs yourself, but it’s basically a box big enough to hold two 3.5inch hard drives and a very small amount of supporting circuitry. it sports a 500Mhz ARM processor, 8MB of flash memory, 64MB of RAM, and a gigabit ethernet port. it runs linux and serves files out using Samba. it’s uber-hackable, if i wanted i could install debian on it.

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It is a little-known secret that many robots enjoy pasta. Scott, shown here, prefers farfalle. He says the bow ties remind him of more civilized times, when man and robot lived in harmony, before the Great Wars.

Scott can often be found rolling around in the colander, whilst the pasta is still hot and steamy from the boiling pot. He says the vapor is an excellent lubricant for his truss joints and that the mere smell of parmesan is enough to make him want to compete in robo-sports, even though he is only 5″ tall.

There once was a little robot named Chuck. He loved pasta. You could even say he loved pasta too much.

One day Chuck discovered a big bowl of spaghetti. His logic circuits overloaded. He was in love.

Without thinking, Chuck jumped into the steaming bowl of noodley goodness, smearing his stainless-steel chassis with tomato sauce and getting meatballs stuck in his servo motor.

“Oh noes!” Chuck cried. “I got pasta in my metadata!”

From then on, Chuck was no longer a T-800 on an endless quest for the death and destruction of mankind, but a peaceful lover of pasta.

The end…. or is it?