Today, while mowing the lawn at Dre’s house I had an interesting experience. As I stopped to take a break, I noticed Lila, one of Dre’s cats, sitting in the kitchen window. When I walked to the window to say hi, Lila appeared to get very skittish¹. She shifted position and began to furiously smell the window. At first this behavior puzzled me. As far as I could tell, I wasn’t making any motion that could be interpreted as threatening. So what was causing this reaction?

Then it occurred to me: Lila was sniffing so furiously because she couldn’t smell me through the window. So, for her, a key sensory identifier was missing. Perhaps she was experiencing cognitive dissonance or some feline version of Freud’s Uncanny. Either way, I suspect that she didn’t know how to resolve the fact that the entity in front of her looked like me but had no smell. I had essentially become a “bot” to her: something that appear to simulate myself without manifesting all of the necessary components to be me.

¹ – Admittedly Lila is often very skittish, so I could be completely misinterpreting her behavior.

Today I made the mistake of updating Yahoo!Messenger. While v7 seems to work quite nicely, it removes the “follow this chatter” feature that has been so useful to me. And with that my research capabilities ground to a halt. The reason is that without that feature, I can’t track a bots movement through different rooms.

Thankfully, after a bit of googling, I came up with:

http://www.oldversion.com/

Old Version collects and archives previous versions of popular public software products. And within minutes I was able to download the version of Messenger that I’ve been using.

So should you, in the course of your research, come up with need to track down a previous software version, I’d start your search at Old Version.

Sept 26 – I must file for graduation
Oct 14 – My draft thesis is due
Nov 4 – Final thesis due
Nov 18 – All remaining grades are due
Dec 2 – Bound thesis due
Dec 9 – Pass go and collect diploma

I think I can do this!

Dre and I got back from Vermont last night. We took a brief vacation there to visit law school friends of hers and the Vermont Raptor Center.

I’ve got a month to get my rough thesis draft in.

And I’ve yet to receive my back vaction pay from Kodak.

I’m back in Chicago for a few days on a quest for books. As I mentioned I struck out in Rochester and so I decided to take a road trip. Tomorrow I return to the Reg and to $1 Latte’s. Woo Hoo. And hopefully find the references that I’ve been looking for!