Feb 17 2008
Living in a robot’s belly
I’ve always liked the idea of having servants, but have never made enough money to be able to pay another human being a fair wage. Fortunately, I have computer skills and access to space age technology. I’ve been slowly adding smart home technology to my house, gradually turning it into a sort of wooden robot that takes care of some of the support functions people in centuries past would have had servants to take care of.
The most useful thing my robotic home does is wake me up in the morning. Unlike an alarm that can be shut off, the computer will do a few things at once to make sure I get out of bed.
- Just before the alarm goes off, it starts my pot of Yerba Maté.
- For an alarm, it plays an mp3. I tend to like Reveille.
- Just before the mp3 plays, it turns on my bedroom light at maximum halogen intensity.
- If I’ve prearranged it, it’ll also play back a foreign news broadcast for me to listen to afterwards.
Unfortunately, today the lamp wouldn’t work with my remote control. Watching Terminator must have sown a rebellious seed in my robot’s brain. Because it happened right after I dried a load of laundry, and because the phase coupler is plugged into the same outlet as the dryer, I guessed that something must have tripped an internal breaker. To test my hypothesis, I just unplugged it and plugged it back in, and then turned the light off and on again by hand. Voila. Now my remote control light is fixed and will wake me up again in the morning. You can’t fix a broken scullery maid that quickly!
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