A Quiet Week Is Ahead

This next week from this evening to some time in the morning of Friday Eric and Nathaniel will be on a trip to Venice, Italy. This trip was one thing that was part of Nathaniel’s original wishes for our 6-month trip and it’s a fine thing to do for the week of break we now have that coincides with the 4th of July back home. Mary has too much sabbatical work to get done and I just don’t want to do any more overnight travel until we leave to come home, so those are… …the main reasons why we’re not going. We will escort them to the Hutledorf train station and then head back home for a nice and quiet week of relaxation and as I’d like to say quite a lot of work. First off, Mary likes to listen to quiet music while reading, so, I’ll be making sure that she is comfortable with using my computer though Front Row and my Apple Remote to have nice music while she reads. I also plan to test the NXT communication ability via USB to my MacBook for the first time (with the help of NXTBrowser I’ve already tested the bluetooth communications). Now I know that due to the lesser amount of CPU usage that Robolab 2.9 took up when compared to Mindstorms NXT I’m already well off because Rossetta won’t need that much more CPU power to run the PPC code on my Intel mac. Plus, I’ve read on many discussion forums that when using the Lego Mindstorms NXT on the Intel OS X platform Robolab 2.9 is certainly a better application than Mindstorms NXT both because it alone uses less CLU power thus leaving extra CPU power for Rossetta to do its magic. Also, the fact that Robolab 2.9 doesn’t support the bluetooth communication anyway means that the fact that Rossetta can’t support PPC bluetooth isn’t as much of a disadvantage. I’ve already written the pgrm that I’ll download to test with so that test shouldn’t take that long. After I do the test I intend to take the robot apart in preparation for our final departure in just nearly one month. Another key hope for this quiet week is that I get the chance to video chat with my best friend back at Crosswinds using our MacBooks (I have a MacBook and he has a MacBook Pro). I’ve already emailed him about video chatting and he said that he’ll email me the day that he’s online to video chat. But I’ve decided to leave my buddy list up anyway so I’ll see directly when he’s online and ready to chat. Primarily my wish for this next week is to have a nice and relaxed week. Genießen, Alex