seanbonner: Fight Club At Staples

Grok Headline matches for seanbonner: Fight Club At Staples

"Fight Club"-branded office supplies,
sort of

"Fight Club"-branded office supplies,
sort of 06/29/2004 06:50 PM
Weblogger Sean Bonner phonecammed a funny discovery in the laser-printable-label aisle at Staples today -- the "sample address" on the packaging for Avery #8293 is addressed to Brad Pitt's character in the movie Fight Club. Link< /a>

Staples Guns It

Staples Guns It 05/18/2004 02:49 PM
The office supplier reports a sharp quarter.

$6 stapler doesn't use staples

$6 stapler doesn't use staples 12/31/2004 04:37 PM
Mark Frauenfelder: Treehugger reports on a cute-as-a-button stapler that doesn't use staples.

Instead using the tiny pieces of metal that add up to lots waste, this ingenious little device joins your papers by punching a small, neat hole in your documents and folding the remaining flaps together for a secure binding.

Lin k

Staples Goes to China?

Staples Goes to China? 08/18/2004 01:05 PM
The company impresses the Street with strong earnings, an optimistic outlook, and a toehold abroad.

"Teachers At California High School
Refuse To Act When Founder Of A
Conservative Club Is Threatened And
Harassed By Other Students -- One
Teacher Called Tim A Nazi, While Another
Described The Club As "A Bunch Of
Bigots.""

"Teachers At California High School
Refuse To Act When Founder Of A
Conservative Club Is Threatened And
Harassed By Other Students -- One
Teacher Called Tim A Nazi, While Another
Described The Club As "A Bunch Of
Bigots."" 01/01/2004 03:19 AM

Staples to open first store here

Staples to open first store here 09/15/2004 02:10 AM
Chicagotribune.com - Mon Sep 13, 07:22 pm GMT

Rash of Activism at Staples

Rash of Activism at Staples 05/07/2004 12:01 PM
After a decade of apparent pliancy, Staples shareholders spring to life.

EarthLink hooks onto Staples

EarthLink hooks onto Staples 12/10/2003 12:40 PM
The ISP is partnering with the office store chain to market its Internet services. Customers in certain stores can use kiosks to sign up for high-speed Web access.

AT&T Pens Staples Pact

AT&T Pens Staples Pact 09/07/2004 06:09 PM
Internet News Sep 7 2004 9:38PM GMT

Staples to sell AT&T's Net phone starter
kit

Staples to sell AT&T's Net phone starter
kit 01/06/2005 05:51 PM
ZDNet Jan 6 2005 9:13PM GMT

Staples to promote Comcast broadband

Staples to promote Comcast broadband 11/11/2003 12:51 PM
Marking a new partnership between ISPs and retailers, Staples will sell Comcast high-speed Internet service at its stores nationwide.

Staples.com adds Linspire's Linux
desktop to PC lineup

Staples.com adds Linspire's Linux
desktop to PC lineup 09/15/2004 01:49 AM
DesktopLinux.com Sep 15 2004 6:14AM GMT

The Club For Growth - The Club for
Growth Blog: DNC 'Lawyers Up' Against
the Club for Growth

The Club For Growth - The Club for
Growth Blog: DNC 'Lawyers Up' Against
the Club for Growth 08/06/2004 02:31 AM
DNC Lawyers Also Try To Stop Anti-Kerry Ads By The 'Club For Growth' From Being Played .. independent ads from this other group .. making a habit .. life

clubforgrowth.org/blog/archives/013644.php
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In a world gone mad it’s hard to think
rightSo much violence hate and
spiteMurder going on all day and
nightDue time we fight the non-violent
fight

In a world gone mad it’s hard to think
rightSo much violence hate and
spiteMurder going on all day and
nightDue time we fight the non-violent
fight 03/13/2003 10:21 AM
Beastie Boy’s lyrics .. lyrics .. Lyrics

track this site | 13 links

"You thought these people were saying
that the fight against Iraq was part of
the fight against the people that
attacked us on 9/11? Psych!"

"You thought these people were saying
that the fight against Iraq was part of
the fight against the people that
attacked us on 9/11? Psych!" 06/19/2004 04:26 PM

""Why didn't you fight?" one Governing
Council member asked Hussein as their
meeting ended. Hussein gestured toward
the U.S. soldiers guarding him and asked
his own question: "Would you fight
them?""

""Why didn't you fight?" one Governing
Council member asked Hussein as their
meeting ended. Hussein gestured toward
the U.S. soldiers guarding him and asked
his own question: "Would you fight
them?"" 12/16/2003 08:48 PM

There's a club if you'd like to go

There's a club if you'd like to go 02/14/2004 02:28 AM
The photo inside The Smiths' The Queen is Dead album depicts the boys in front of the Salford Lads Club in Manchester, England. Ever since the record was released in 1986, the building has become a mecca for Smiths fans--a notoriously, er, dedicated bunch. At first, the Club was less than thrilled at being associated with the kinds of characters who would sing about "stealing lead from a church roof." Now though, the charity is dedicating an entire room to those charming men who made their gateway famous. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

CD Club ... first get-together

CD Club ... first get-together 04/09/2004 03:59 PM
Had a fantastic first meeting of our little music club last night at St. James Gate. Unfortunately, Greg was a no-show: too embarrassed to appear without CDs after losing a wrestling match with technology (I've promised to help get him back on his feet). Mark showed no such reluctance or guilt, appearing like one of his students talking of canines and homework. Both have been assured they're still welcome and both promise gifts of music to come shortly.Three great hours sipping beers and talking music. The group seems to be the perfect mix: strongly shared tastes, sensibilities and knowledge but...

Six Months to the UPS Club

Six Months to the UPS Club 06/05/2005 11:27 PM
"...how long have you been running Adsense? And you're not in the UPS club yet? Why not?"

Stupid Fun Club

Stupid Fun Club 06/04/2004 01:14 AM
Software Development Magazine: Inside the Stupid Fun Club.

Software Development Magazine wrote an article called "Inside the Stupid Fun Club" (registration required).

The author, Alexandra Weber Morales, unexpectedly encountered the Sad Robot, broken down and crying for help on the streets of Oakland.

We were shooting a couple of hidden camera reality TV "One Minute Movies" for NBC: one of a Sad Robot torn apart into pieces and pleading for help from passers by, and the other of a Robot Waiter taking orders,  serving food and bantering for a tip in a barbecue restaurant.

I (Don Hopkins) developed the custom "robot brain" software for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, mostly in Python. It involved writing lots of high level Python code and XML data, and integrating all kinds of different software components together with SWIG, C++, ActiveX, Java, IRC, HTTP and WiFi. The robot features 3D facial animation, speech synthesis and recognition, conversational scripting, artificial intelligence, personality simulation, telerobotic remote control via wireless networking, with an interactive web interface for controling its behavior in real time.

For another Stupid Fun Club project, I also used Python to develop expressive synthetic speech authoring tools (audio speech “phonoscoping”, like visual animation “rotoscoping”), and talking toy simulations.

Python is ideally suited for brainstorming and prototyping new product ideas, as well as developing custom real-time robotic software for supporting creative Stupid Fun Club projects like reality TV production.

Eventually, Alexandra Weber Morales tracked down the person responsible, Will Wright, at his private production company, the Stupid Fun Club. She asked Will about the Sad Robot:
[I've added my own comments like this.
-Don]

Uh, OK. So, what kinds of reactions did people have to Sad Robot?

Wright: A lot of people were talking directly to it. Most of the women who were walking alone just sped up like they were spooked by it. Most of the single men would stop and start stripping it for parts, ignoring that the robot was talking to them. And it was mostly the couples who would actually interact with it and try to help it. Some would have long conversations, pushing the buttons.

We had a whole sort of troubleshooting thing, and we wanted to see how far people would go to help it. It was sort of a Good Samaritan experiment.

She also asked about the software we developed to control the robot, simulate its personality, animate its face, and listen and talk with people.

Have you heard of an AI knowledge base called Cyc?

Wright: For the conversational side of it, we’re using something similar to Cyc—in fact, we were looking at Cyc. There’s so many different layers. First of all, there’s the voice recognition, which is getting much better but is still pretty limited. Then, once you have the voice, you go into the conversation engine, and then it’s doing something like Cyc or Alice or Eliza: trying to give an appropriate response to what your input was. One of the projects we’re working on here is this toy design where we have these toys that converse with each other via infrared text-to-speech.

There are all these different approaches to AI. Some of them are more brute force, like Cyc. There’s also artificial life, an attempt to evolve systems rather than build them from the ground up.

Where’s this work being done?

Wright: The Santa Fe Institute is one place. There’s genetic programming, or adaptive systems, to give computers a way to learn and get feedback. That looks like a more promising approach.

Back in the ’60s, when computers were first being used in business, everybody assumed we’d have artificial intelligence in 10 years. When 2001 came out, in 1967, and people came out of that movie saying, “I can’t believe that a computer will be able to play chess that well.” But they took the conversation with HAL for granted. In fact, it was the opposite: Chess turned out to be the easy part; natural conversation turned out to be the hard part. Within 20 years, we’re going to have machines like this that have full autonomy and pretty good conversational ability. We could build a stove that would have a long conversation with you. So the real interesting question for me now is, what’s going to happen when our world is surrounding us with intelligent machines? These are going to be the first aliens we meet.

Describe the software running this thing.

Wright: The conversational chatbot is Alice. It takes input and you give it a dictionary to define what it knows about.

[ALICE is written in Java, so Python talks to it through an IRC server running on the robot. We can connect to the same IRC channel over the wireless network, watch the messages going between ALICE and the brain, interject text to speak and think, switch moods, play facial animations, tweak the personality, execute commands, etc. Later I developed a more powerful web based " Homunculus" interface, for operating the robot in real time, with a web browser on a remote laptop or handheld.
-Don]

Winter: That’s connected to Microsoft speech recognition, which is fantastic.

[I wouldn't go that far. It doesn't suck, but "fantastic" is a stretch. 
-Don]

Winter: And some simple AI, since Alice may or may not understand what you’re talking about.

[In other words, Alice is like the mad old aunt with Tourette's Syndrome you keep locked away in the attic. Alice is only used as a backstop, when the Python/XML/AI layer of the robot brain can't think of anything to say. But it's turned off when we don't want the robot to seem insane.
-Don]

Winter: The most intelligent thing it ever did is we had an opera singer in here singing to the robot, but the robot didn’t like it. So she said, “maybe I should explain the story,” and after the singer finished, the robot paraphrased the whole thing back to her. It was about the most amazing thing we’d ever seen; we all just about started believing in robots at that moment.

[What's really interesting is abusing the speech recognizer, by putting the robot brain into a mode where it listens to itself (and anyone else) talk! It's like the mutating telephone gossip game, or the news media echo chamber: The robot repeats what it thinks it heard itself say, which it then mis-recognizes and distorts again and again, in a feedback loop of quasi-coherent rhyming speech! Any words you interject get mixed in and distorted in the speech recognition/synthesis feedback loop. It naturally finds and converges on extremely strange attractors in the recognizer's hidden markov models of the English language, chanting and mutating gramatically plausible but semantically ridiculous phrases, in response to whatever it thinks it hears. When properly configured, the robot can actually compose live performances of original surrealistic beat robopoetry, responding to the audience in real time! Stanislaw Lem calls that "Bitic Literature".
-Don]

Winter: When we take these in public, it seems like the people who are less technical savvy are the ones who interact with it, whereas the people with technical backgrounds are standing there reverse-engineering it.

Are you following what MIT has done with humanoid robots such as Kismet?

Wright: There are lots of research labs around the country building these types of robots, but they never take them out into the public. We drive them into a laundromat or a restaurant and see what the response is.

When we filmed Sad Robot, we also filmed a scene in a restaurant with a robot waiter. It was interesting how many people totally bought it. Usually within three or four minutes, they were completely normal about it. People kind of expect that there will be robots in the future; it’s just a matter of when.

[The Sad Robot: A pitiful broken down female robot is crying for help, bent out of shape and fallen on its side with a mangled tractor tread, next to a stinky garbage dumpster, begging reluctant passers by to turn it upright, describe its condition, press its big red reset button, adjust its controls, step away before it explodes, and call a mysterious professor on their cell phone.
The Robot Waiter: An earnest robot waiter, just trying to do its job taking orders, delivering food to tables, telling jokes and bantering for tips, and collecting dirty dishes. Afterwards submits itself to a Robot Waiter Performance Evaluation Survey, and begs the human to give it good marks, otherwise it might lose its job.
-Don]

Robot: If you could have any kind of robot, what would it be? The goal is elimination of crime, combined with rehabilitation of criminals … Yes, it seems very long to me, too.

What do you use for automated testing?

Wright: Our own suites. Most of our stuff is in C++, but we have a proprietary visual scripting language I designed, called Edith, for the behavioral code for the Sims. It’s totally geared to AI and the Sims.

[The robot software is written in C++, Python and XML. Edith is used to program simulated personalities, but for simulated people instead of real robots. Edith is the tool for programming The Sims, for scripting the artificial intelligence of the characters and objects. The Sims visual programming language itself is called SimAntics. Edith is Maxis's official tool for programming SimAntics code, while iffpencil2 is another third party SimAntics programming tool, developed outside of Maxis.
-Don]

Winter: I think it’s time for the Christmas robot.

Wright: Are you running that … weapon? I don’t know if we want to sit here. [A dancing snowman on a wheeled platform with a circular saw mounted on its front bumper approaches a plastic toy-store robot.]

Winter: No, you would die. You’d better take cover.

[The interview ends.]

The snowman quickly demolishes the toy, shooting debris throughout the warehouse. With Winter’s encouragement, I spend 10 minutes in a nonsensical conversation with the robot. He also shows me the Minute Movie that have been made for NBC—and they’re hilarious.

I leave this unconventional interview impressed with the way the Stupid Fun Club has turned a fascination with robots and toys into a lucrative and wholly entertaining enterprise. Meanwhile, the larger concerns about the technical strengths, limitations and implications of these semiautonomous machines go mostly unanswered. Wright and Winter seem firmly on the side of presentation, and somewhat unwilling to delve deeply into how their toys work—as if to say, “Where’s the fun in asking all these questions? Just talk to the robot.”

I'm certainly interested in delving deeply into how the robot brain works myself, but not everyone else is. So I used Python to develop a high-level XML based AI and wireless web remote control system, which enables creative writers and designers like Will Wright to script and control the robot behavior, and reconfigure it for different scenarios, without needing to deal with Python, C++ or the other software components that went into building it.

[Don Hopkins' RadiOMatic BlogUTron]

Hi, Sarah - Welcome to the Club!

Hi, Sarah - Welcome to the Club! 01/17/2004 11:15 PM

Hello. My name is Sarah and I'm an RSS-addict.

"OK, so the # of feeds I'm getting just went over 100. I officially cannot live without RSS now...." [Librarian InBlack]

The Belmont Club

The Belmont Club 09/11/2004 04:28 PM
view

belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/09/escaping-kill-zone-dan-rathers -defense.html
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The Album Club

The Album Club 07/31/2004 12:10 AM
No time to pick out your own music? Still like the CD format? Live in the UK? Well has The Rough Trade Shop got a club for you. Is this outmoded on arrival or an interesting variant on old style "X-Of-the-Month" clubs? I know I sometimes find it overwhelming to keep up with what's new'n'exciting.

"The Belmont Club "

"The Belmont Club " 09/18/2004 08:51 AM

Strip Club

Strip Club 04/09/2004 04:03 PM
0.6.2 released

The iPod Club

The iPod Club 08/27/2004 02:03 PM
By Damien Barrett (via MyAppleMenu)

The Belmont Club :

The Belmont Club : 03/23/2005 08:12 AM
Wretchard's The Belmont Club

wretchard.com/blogs/the_belmont_club/default.aspx
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Tarot Club

Tarot Club 12/03/2003 11:05 AM
Création

Fat Club redux

Fat Club redux 08/27/2004 01:34 PM
Yesterday, Mutsumi in our office told me half a dozen times that I looked "bigger". I'd been thinking about how to lose some weight and I remembered Fa t Club because Jan e linked to a Fat Club entry on her blog. For some reason, I seem to be able to motivate myself to lose weight when I'm competing. I asked everyone in our office if they wanted to join Fat Club 2004. Kuri, Jim and Nob agreed to participate. The race is to see who can lose 10% of their body weight first and sustain it for one week. The last one in has to be a slave to the winner for a day. Slave rights can be sold or rented. We decided to set up a private wiki to organize this event.

Mizuka bought a fancy scale awhile ago hinting that I should probably lose some weight. I jumped on it this morning and it told me that I had the body of a 49 year old. (I'm 38.) The fancy scale uses Bioelectric Impedance to measure your body fat and calculates basal metabolism, body fat percentage, muscle percentage, internal body fat level, your body mass index and your body age equivalent. Let me just say it was very motivating. This new scale has 6 contacts, two for your hands and 4 for your feet and seems more accurate than some of the older models.

Comment - TrackBack

Belmont Club

Belmont Club 02/15/2004 10:18 PM
Wretchard at the Belmont club wrote: .. Wretchard .. observes:

belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_belmontclub_archive.ht ml#107681898064838240
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"Belmont Club"

"Belmont Club" 05/03/2004 02:23 AM

"The Belmont club"

"The Belmont club" 06/12/2004 09:26 AM

Working At The Club

Working At The Club 06/14/2004 05:11 AM
With more and more people telecommuting or "freelancing," the home office has been getting a lot more attention. Still, not everyone likes to work from home (and for some people, it's really difficult). There are tons of "temporary office space" companies that buy up buildings and let people rent out single offices. However, one company is trying to go (just slightly) beyond that by setting up a "work club", where you pay your membership dues and get to hang out in the common areas and meet your co-workers. You also can use meeting rooms, phone booths, and some limited amount of personal office space. Honestly, though, this doesn't seem all that different from most temporary or executive office space operations - other than they seem to be trying to make it sound cooler with trendy phrases to describe everything. For example, meeting rooms are "team spaces" while the cubicle farm is a "touchdown space." Right.

Hospitality Club

Hospitality Club 04/18/2004 08:23 PM
The Hospitality Club is a similar idea to CouchSurfing in that both sites provide a database of people offering free lodging to each other when visiting foreign countries. The Hospitality Club has been going for nearly three years and has over 12,500 members in 142 coun tries. The site has wiki-like features allowing members to edit travel guides for each country, region and city.

"club Mandrake"

"club Mandrake" 01/03/2004 10:00 PM

Fan Club Kit For 2005

Fan Club Kit For 2005 03/17/2005 03:10 AM
Starwars.com have posted all the goodies you get in the new and improved Hyperspace Fan Club kit. There's a sticker, poster, trading card and so much more! Check it out!

Club A Penguin

Club A Penguin 01/05/2005 02:01 PM
Club a Penguin [Flash] is a combination of a batting cage and a driving range. One click sets the bat; a second click swings.

Sam's Club Falcon Set

Sam's Club Falcon Set 09/15/2004 03:31 PM
Rebelscum reader "Jedi Turok" reports on finding the Origi nal Trilogy Collection Falcon with bonus figures:

If you got a Sam's Club near by you might want to check them.... I got one for $60.72 and they had a neat display of the Falcon out of the box alone with the figures. They had about 20 total on the pallet.

Need an excuse? Well, join the club

Need an excuse? Well, join the club 09/19/2004 08:14 AM
Chicago Tribune Sep 19 2004 12:22PM GMT
Grok Description matches for seanbonner: Fight Club At Staples
GrokA matches for seanbonner: Fight Club At Staples

seanbonner: Fight Club At Staples

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