{"id":87613873,"date":"2005-04-14T15:50:35","date_gmt":"2005-04-15T07:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/?p=87613873"},"modified":"2005-04-16T10:06:04","modified_gmt":"2005-04-16T18:06:04","slug":"teapots-for-the-elderly-and-a-blender-you-can-sing-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/?p=87613873","title":{"rendered":"TeaPots for the Elderly, and a Blender You Can Sing To"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’m on Engadget<\/a>, and they have this thing about the iPot (Information Pot)<\/a> and how it’s used by Japanese folks to keeps tabs (without being invasive) on their elderly folks at home. Okay fine. Sort of a neat idea, a little creepy, but I get it.<\/p>\n

Then I’m digging around and notice this piece<\/a> on the iPot, and they had this little paragraph that struck me as poingnant somehow: <\/p>\n

The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine. The action may also bring about personal revelations in the participant, because in sounding with the blender one is likely to perform gesture and sound expressions not previously accessed which may open up hidden emotions or thoughts or feelings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, this strikes a chord for me, ’cause I’m one of those people who, as a child, spent about four and a half-minutes trying to figure something out, and then I’d get frustrated, freak out a little, think I was obviously retarded, and then put it down, never to do it again.<\/p>\n

Which makes me think about why the hell I got into computers in the first place. Immensely frustrating things. I intentionally and happily got myself into a professional field where I often wake up not knowing what I’ll need to know before the end of the day. My lack of organization actually helps<\/i> me in my job, since it means that I sometimes have to be a little faster on my feet (faster on my fingers?) when it comes to figuring out why a particular piece of hardware\/software\/user won’t work. It’s gotta be fast, and it’s gotta be darn-near free, otherwise it won’t look like magic, as all good technology should.<\/font>
\n
\nMy job’s often hard, and you get your butt handed to you by a machine once in a while, but those days when you pull a fast one, and manage to do something that the manual claims can’t be done? Dude. All killer, no filler. It’s the one thing that I often feel like I’m really good at, and it’s been long enough now that I can apply my “super zen mind state” to other things in my life. My buddy at work get freaked out and flies off the handle sometimes, and often to good effect, but I just don’t seem so flappable. Don’t know if I ever really was like that, which is probably why I don’t give myself credit for how far I’ve come since working for MacMillan Bloedel as their overnight “little elf” data entry kid, ‘lo these many moons ago.<\/p>\n

So yeah, anyhoo<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Then I start reading a little more into the article, and realize that they’re not talking about the “kettle with wifi and email” anymore, but about a blender you yell at, called Blendie. <\/p>\n

Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own. Materials are a 1950’s Osterizer blender altered with custom made hardware and software for sound analysis and motor control.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No really.<\/p>\n

You go “grrrrrRRRRRRRRrrrrrr” and it’ll chop that salsa for ya.<\/p>\n

You go “rrrrRRRRAAAAAEEEEEEYYYAAAAAAAAAAA<\/b>” and it’ll spray blueberry schrapnel all over your kitchen ceiling.<\/p>\n

Awesome.<\/p>\n

I wanna put my Robosapien<\/a> in a room with one of these, and let ’em fight it out. Sort of a BattleBots meets IronChef or something.<\/p>\n

There’s a video<\/a> and everything. There’s also some stuff at UPENN about “machine therapy<\/a>” too.<\/p>\n

Of course, the first thing I thought was “they’re joking, right?” quickly overwritten by the following mental image:
\nRipley having a full-blown “I don’t wanna and I’m gonna kick\/punch\/GRRR” (no more Tae Bo<\/a> for that kid), and he sets off the blender, which makes him scream at a higher pitch, which makes the blender go into full-on DEFCON5.2a, and either rearrange the kitchen ginsu-style, or melt into a ball of blubbering goo…<\/p>\n

Oh yeah, and Blendie looks kinda like Tom Servo<\/a> from MST3K<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n
\"\"
Blendie<\/td>\n		\"\"
Tom Servo<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I’m on Engadget, and they have this thing about the iPot (Information Pot) and how it’s used by Japanese folks to keeps tabs (without being invasive) on their elderly folks at home. Okay fine. Sort of a neat idea, a little creepy, but I get it. Then I’m digging around and notice this piece […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87613873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends","category-people","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87613873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87613873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87613873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87613873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87613873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87613873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}