the Past

When I was younger I was really into building robots. Right before I pretty much got out of doing it I had gotten to the point where I was having custom surface mount PCB's manufactured for me out of seatle to create modular neural networks as rudimentary brains for walking robots. This little beast was tiny and walked on paperclip legs. Later he was outfitted with a high effenciency solar panel and sensors so that he could spend the day in my dorm on his own.

Some days I think about what might have happened if I had stuck down that path. I would be probably somewhere building artificial limbs, something I always thought of as probably quite rewarding. It's amazing how much the little things can change your whole life.

Of course, I know why I didn't continue down that road. The people bored me. There were some great ideas going around, but by and large I never got enough of the people-stimulation from the electronics-robotics crowd. I spent a summer semester at Carnegie Mellon where I whipped all the other geek roboticists in robot building with my eyes closed. Of course, while the 'cool kids' were at the back of the class talking to each other in spoken HTML and TCP commands, I was out courting the *hot* smart girls over at the art and humanities building where I landed and kissed my first *real* girlfriend. (Real as in, she didn't come in kit form over the internet).

Truth be told, my mind was cut out for the enginering sciences, but my heart wasn't. I simply needed more than flourescent overheads and late night take out. Not to mention I've always had a thing for really beautiful women. My archeology director durring my time on the Greek coast used to say that the "romance was in what you made of it". But after Carnegie Mellon, I lost the heart I had in robots. The romance of living your life as your primary employment simply got the best of me.

Now of course, I'm at the other extreme. Where romance is what I do on a daily basis. And instead of talk HTMl I speak ISO, glamour and high fashion. I was never one for moderation.