Bouncing Red Ball

If you liked Asimo, you’ll love Plen, the skating robot. You can have this diminutive robot for ¥250,000 excluding tax. From the website (translated from Japanese):

CREATE: After you finish putting together the kit, you can freely create motions for your Plen with the supplied software. No special tools are necessary; you can assemble the kit with only a “plus” screwdriver. There is also no programming skills to create the motions. They can be created intuitively with the mouse.

CONTROL: When you finish making the motions, you can control your Plen remotely with a Bluetooth-enabled device (like AU mobile phones). You can also use your AU phones to download motions from a server. You can then send these motions to your Plen and play them instantly.

MOTION: Plen comes with over 20 motions to create a variety of expressions. Even programming beginners can immediately enjoy Plen’s varied motions after initialization. Please enjoy Plen’s motion performance by attaching the supplied roller skates kit.

Plen is powered by a 33MHz ARM7 processor, Bluetooth-enabled, connects to a USB port, stands 23cm, weighs 700 grams and can run (or skate) for 25 minutes without recharging.

This is one cool robot (see the video on the website). Unfortunately though, the Motion Editor works only for Windows XP, my AU phone is not Bluetooth capable, nor do I have ¥262,500 to spare. But Plen is cool nonetheless (even on video).

(Regarding that “plus” screwdriver above: not too long ago, I had this conversation with a friend at work: Me: “Can you get me that ‘plus’ screwdriver?” Him: “What do you mean ‘plus’ screwdriver?” Me: “‘Plus’, you know, there’s a ‘minus’ and a ‘plus’ screwdriver…” (I showed him the “plus” screwdriver.) Him: “You know, there’s no such thing as a ‘plus’ or ‘minus’ screwdriver; only the regular screwdriver and the Phillips type.” (Obviously, he was a newcomer in Japan because the Japanese call screwdrivers either ‘plus’ or ‘minus’.))

(Thanks to Nestle Poell for the link.)

The other day I was watching a Japanese bangumi where they feature famous athletes attempting to perform tasks given them according to their specialties. One of the guests was Shunsuke Nakamura (中村俊輔), the Celtic midfielder. He was tasked to shoot 10 soccer balls over a wall into two rings (one on each upper corner of the goal) barely the size of a basketball ring. (The other guest was a famous sprinter who ran the 50-meter dash against an Enzo Ferrari driven by a professional race car driver. Guess who won? Hint: it’s red and worth $1,000,000.) But Shunsuke Nakamura was impressive, bending no less than 4 soccer balls over the wall and into the rings.

Perhaps Nakamura’s most famous goal on the field was the spectacular 30-yard free kick against Manchester United (video above) in the 2006 Champions’ League which eventually eliminated Manchester United. With that wonderful goal, he became the only Japanese to score in the Champions’ League. He is also sometimes called the “Beckham of Asia” and although he doesn’t have Beckham’s looks, he can probably bend it better than the former galactico. The J-League coach Steve Perryman once said Nakamura was so good he “could open a tin of beans with his left foot”. Click here for a collection of Nakamura’s free kicks at YouTube.

I have moved — or backed-up — most of my files (the bulk of these are video clips, mp3s, photos and the gzipped copies of the Timog Forum database). This wouldn’t have taken too much time but I waited until the last minute to get an external hard disk for the iMac.

These 1- and 2-terabyte hard disks at the computer store were tempting, but one look at their price made me slink back to another corner where the more reasonably-priced megabyte-sized hard disks were located. I chose the cheapest one: a 250MB Buffalo drive for about 12,000 yen. The drive taken home and files finally moved from the Dimension to the iMac; a mop-up operation over the weekend will clean up the old computer for selling (I already have an enthusiastic buyer actually). Almost 10 years of using a Windows machine at home will come to an end, although I will still use PCs at work (a Japanese Mac Ad, watch out for the sound).

(Rough translation of the Japanese Mac Ad:
PC: Hello, I’m a PC.
Mac: Hello, I’m a Mac.
PC: Hey, aren’t you a PC, too?
Mac: Yeah, but people usually call me “Mac”.
PC: So, you’re kinda special right? Like a friend.
Mac: People usually use me in the privacy of their homes, so maybe I’m easy to get along with.
PC: Right. Well, people usually use me at work… I want a special name, too, like you.
Mac: Well… If you’re mainly used on the job… How about “Waaku” (The Japanese word for “Work”.)
PC: (Pointing to Mac) “Makku” and (pointing to himself) “Waaku”! Cool!

I know this doesn’t sound funny (translations rarely are) but the whole thing is a play on the words “Makku” (meaning “Mac”) and “Waaku” (meaning “work”) and how the PC guy thinks it’s a cool name. At the risk of getting too far off-topic, I like the PC guy better (like I like the PC guy in the English ads better than the Mac guy) and these two comedians (their younger versions) were also in another subtly funny video clip — this one about eating sushi.)

If I sound like it’s my first time using a Mac, well, the fact is my first 4 computers were Macs. I have had in succession the Color Classic II, the Performa 630, the LC 588, and the Power Macintosh 6100 Dos Compatible (similar to the one on the left). The this Power Mac was a dual-personality PC, powered by 66MHz PowerPC and 486DX2 chips through which I ran both Kanji Talk 7.5 (the Japanese MacOS 7.5) and Windows 95 in a dual-booting system. It was the only computer I know at that time (or any time since except the current Intel Macs) that could run both MacOS and Windows.

After I sold the Power Mac in the late nineties and while lusting after the PowerWave 150 (a Mac clone), a friend of mine gave me a Pentium 133 chip, I decided to assemble a PC around it and got stuck with Windows for almost 10 years. So in a way, this iMac is a way back to my old computing roots. I hope it will be a good trip.