Around and around I go
Posted in Dante's Second Life, News, Robotics on May 31st, 2008 by mydnightWell, I didn’t get either of the jobs I was hoping for as of my last post — I started working at Startek, a call center which handles support for AT&T Wireless customers in the southern U.S. After I had been there for two weeks, I was offered a job at a contracting firm called Fact Computers, to be a systems administrator for the provincial government. Unfortunately, and for some as-of-yet unknown reason, they decided to call me up the day before I was supposed to start working (after I’d quit my job at Startek, unfortunately) and let me know that they weren’t going to hire me after all. Two weeks of unemployment and frantic job-searching followed. I am now working for Marketel, a company which manufactures and supports autodialers, as a sort of jack-of-all-trades… I work primarily in tech support, but I’m also doing sysadmin and programming as well. The job can be fairly monotonous at times, but my co-workers and supervisors are great — where else would you find a supervisor who, between calls, randomly starts singing things by “They Might Be Giants”?
I’m working on a new version of DanteSL to enable multithreading, since the login process freezing the program temporarily is the biggest problem I can find with it. Motion is going to have to wait, as I haven’t been able to find any functions in the libSecondLife code which would allow me to impliment movement. I’m also working on another version, to be called something entirely different, using AIML as the A.I. engine instead of Dante. The custom AIML interpreter will be closed source, and the overall product will be commercial in nature — essentially, I’ll be providing the bot and custom “scripts” for it as an advertising resource for customers.
I’m getting much closer to actually starting my major robotics project of the year — I was worried about having to pay for custom fabrication on the body, but as it turns out, my brother has just purchased a farm, complete with — oh rapture of raptures — a fully equipped machine shop. He’s going to be selling most of the equipment, to help pay of the mortgage on the farm, but he has decided to keep enough of it around for me to “play” when I go out to visit.
