Robo Follow Up...

This is what Google Earth caught when viewing mom's house(A)...looks like a giant bot (B) from the last post is helping her move.....the moving truck. Uh oh!...yeah I'm dumb...:)

One Of The Coolest Things

This is more toy than tech...but that might depend on how you look at it. I read a post this morning on Engadget that I thought was pretty awesome/hilarious. It is about a generation of robots made by a company called Kondo. At one school in Japan, they are trying to gain a foundation interest level among teens. They do this by having the teens develop "fighting bots". Hilarity found here. (Watch the videos embedded into the post.) How they move is the funniest part...

Reservoir Dog

Recently, my wife and I went for a drive with our dog, Piper, up to a nearby reservoir. We we were admiring the scenery (click the photos to enlarge)...

when Piper saw a german shepherd. I had my phone out still, so I took a quick snap shot and got a vid.

Mainly I just wanted to share her cute little growl. She's an adorable dog that loves people...she likes to eat the faces off of other dogs though. At least she pretends to want to. She will usually end up just playing with them.

Silence...

I had a few minutes at work so I made this image that had been stuck in my head as a follow up to the last post. I hope it doesn't offend any lambchop fans out there... :)

Of Peace And Placidity

Since my wife, Tasha, and I have started dating, wool socks have been one of those things that just...I dunno...makes things better. I'm not just talking about "oh yay, my feet are warm" better. I'm talking about "I am now one with the universe" better. It really is an amazing thing. Our "Woolies", as we lovingly call them, have the uncanny ability to pacify and enlighten beyond the expected ability of any physical device. A tiff will turn into a philosophical snuggle fest. Silence of the Lambs becomes Lambchop and the Rainbow Kids. Wild bears seem to have the need to be "coochie coo'd" and absolutely require baby talk. It was when reflecting back on that situation that we realized the danger brought about by wearing the socks. We started to think they were part of a government conspiracy or the commies trying to wage some level of biological warfare...but then put the socks back on and all was forgotten. Ultimately, the socks are here to stay...and we're okay with that. ahhhhhhh Yup...we're really......really okay with that.

A Quick, More Detailed Example

Check out a more detailed form for our family reunion here.

(I made this in a few minutes and it will allow me to track all data submitted.)

One last go at technobabble...

...and only because we could all find a use for this. For anything from family get togethers to
weddings. If you want to have a convenient RSVP distribution and tracking setup or simply poll a group of people/readers.

We can accomplish this by leveraging the tools made available by our beloved pals at Google. Their Doc options allow you to not only create editable doc (Word) and xls (Excel) files, but create forms that you can email to friends or embed into a blog such as this.

Here is a demonstration of what I mean:
______________________________________________________


______________________________________________________

Above is a live field that anyone can submit their answer to. When someone makes a selection, they get the following confirmation:

At this point the information selected gets submitted to your Google Docs database. You can then review the information simply selecting the "Summary" or "Spreadsheet" options under the "See Responses" button. For this particular form, I get the following information for the "Spreadsheet":

Or the following for the "Summary":
This is just a brief (simplified) overview of what you can do with this GoogleDoc application. It has practically an infinite number of uses and be extremely complex/intuitive as you would like. You could make registration pages for a little league baseball team, see who's bringing what meal to a church potluck (and who hasn't responded yet), or simply take a more techy approach to seeing if these pants make me look fat.

There are so many options and possibilities for this application that you would think that it would be difficult to utilize, unless you were a computer genius. But Google, as always, excels at simplifying processes and putting a friendly, usable face on a complex situation.

Since this quasi tutorial barely scratched the surface of this tool, let me know if you have questions and I will help you out. Trust me, this is something you will want to know.