I’ve put together this video showing you how to hack a servo. It’s great for those that want to buy an in-expensive standard servo and convert it to a continuous rotation servo. For more video’s like this, go to www.roboticsed.com.

I was reading this article over at 37signals and I realized that my enemy is inefficiency and it takes form in two arch villains:

• FUD Man – This is the person on the team or the architect that creates enough Fear Uncertainty and Doubt to ensure a solution/application is over-engineered and over-budgeted. This usually takes the form of a J2EE solution requiring offshore to get it done on time and on budget.
• Frameworkinstein – This person is usually FUD Man disguised as a hero coming in to propose a framework to take away time but in actuality it adds time and complexity to an already over-engineered solution.

How do you defeat these two in corporate IT? Ruby? Dynamic Languages? No. Those are usually the wrong weapons and you can’t fight FUD with something people know little about. To win this war you need to take lessons from Sun Tsu. Here’s some tactics:

1. Attack The Foundations of FUD by finding the most important emotional driver for the decision maker. If it’s cost make it cheaper, if it’s quality, introduce a quality process, if it’s power, caste doubt on his/her ability to control the project.
2. Ask questions like: How would we do this if we had half the time and budget to management without FUD Man around to respond.
3. Find a better framework than proposed only to show that one is not really needed.
4. Show examples of how someone smarter than you or your villain would do something different and how they succeeded.
5. Create a prototype/example in a few hours that does a good majority of the work, and ask management: If this only took me a few hours, how can we spend all this time and effort on something that’s essentially the same thing?

Good Luck in your fight, may the force be with you!!!

This was part of our trip in 2007. We made a trip to the lion and Rhino park, in Gauteng (Johannesburg)and witnessed a few really cool things. I apologize in advance for the camera work.

Castle Opening Christmas Presents in 2007

Castle Opening Christmas Presents in 2008

After four weeks of being disconnected and two weeks back in the states I thought I would write about some observations.

1. I don’t miss the hurry, hurry rush, rush.
2. I don’t miss the 24/7 Doom & Gloom, I need to stop watching TV all together.
3. I don’t miss office politics, or small group dynamics coupled with egos.
4. I like the “life change” from applying the 80/20 Principle to the little things. I’ve found I have had more time and stress less.
5. I missed my friends and family, but I’ve not seen them much at all. But Castle (my dog) has been a lot of fun.
6. I’ve enjoyed working on some robots at the shop. I’ve really enjoyed working on the new robot for RoboCross and planning my Robot Building DVD.
7. I’ve noticed I am still reading useless Google reader articless out of shear boredom, because I’ve gotten so much else done.

I have actually started to think a lot more about my robot DVD so much so that I am starting work on it. Check-Out RoboticsEd.Com for more information.

Today we just packed and had another braai. That was it. Just conversation talking African politics and a little about American History.

I was online looking at the weather and Columbus looks like it’s going to get cold and snow the day I arrive, nice, thanks Columbus for the welcome home.

My next post will be from the states!

Today we were up early and went to visit Cape Town. Our trip began at a small shop for breakfast where I had eggs florentine. I noticed this little shop had a lot of private labeled food, which was really neat because it had the name of the coffee shop and were all gourmet kinds of food.

After this we went to the market, with lots of traditional South African crafts/art. Can you say TOURIST TRAP? Emily and Magda were chatting so they did not bother us too much because we were “local”. After more shopping I got this awesome mechanical robot, vintage 1950’s, very cool. I will update this on my scottsbots.com site.

We walked over the the gardens for a beer and a rest then to the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus. This gave us a short tour of Cape Town before we went to Table Mountain.

The weather was awesome today because there was near 100% visibility with very little wind.

Today I am certain that I am completely caught up on my reading and about ready to get home since I am running out of things to do. Today we had an afternoon Braai (BBQ/Cookout) and then I read some more. Right now we are looking at old photos and slides of years past in South Africa, very cool to see Emm as a kid on the farm here… I think tonight we are having pies (English style).

Today was our once a year spoil. A 5 course Chinese dinner spread out over 3-4 hours. It was very, very nice. It started with spring rolls. Then we had a chicken soup, not sure of the recipe, but it was alike a chicken egg drop or something like that. Then we had sweet & sour pork. To end the food part we concluded with beef chow mien. For desert we had fortune cookies and fruit.