Supermarket Soap
Daily life behind the counter
www.supermarketsoap.co.uk

So, I am currently sat in an Internet Cafe, on my 3rd cup of coffee in 3 hours.  Not bad going.  Last night was great!  I love Halloween, namely because I get to dress up and mess around.  Gotta love doing that in a somewhat corporate environment.  However, I didn't plan very well for Halloween, and therefore didn't have a costume.  I did toy with the idea of going in all dressed in black, from head to toe, but, that is what I wear when I am not at work, so I felt that would kind of defeat the purpose.  Anyway, got into work and found a set of vampire fangs for sale for £1.  And hit on a fantastic idea.  Regular uniform, doing nothing out of the ordinary, and with the fangs hanging out of my mouth.  Worked an absolute blinder.  I served one woman who wasn't paying attention, and when I spoke, she looked up, squealed and said "My god, you scared me!"  Then we had a kid who came in, took an absent minded look at me, then gave me a double take.  Lastly there was a customer who asked me whether I had seen a dentist recently.  I grinned and said "Yeah, this afternoon" and he grinned back and said "Think you might want to go back!"  We also had a cop who very edgily walked towards me.  Why?  Well, these fangs rock.  Well...the fangs rock and I rock because being a programmer, and loving open source, I always want to know how things work.  So I fiddled with the fangs and found that I could keep them in place with my tongue and open my mouth naturally.  Which I did when the cop strode in.  Really put him on edge. 

 

I do also want to mention this Internet cafe.  Love Internet cafes, hate restricted PCs.  Damnit, let me use my USB sticks.  Let me open 10,000 tabs (I normally have 10+ open at a time).  Let me get to the source code of my programs if you won't let me have USB access!  Gah!  But hey, they have a fantastic promotion on at this cafe.  £1 for 20 minutes access or £3 for an hour.  Yeah.  You guys rock.  The ironic thing is, these PCs aren't exactly high spec gaming rigs.  Probably worth £200 a piece.  Now, if they installed say, Kubtunu, which looks and feels like Windows, and would run great, and let people access their mail, but give such a high level of security, plus installing stuff is out of the question without a password...  Hell, I have a 600mhz, 128mb laptop at home which runs as fast as my 2.2ghz, 1gb laptop because it uses Puppy.  Of course, it lags on Flash games, but hey, for general stuff it is as fast as my high end laptop.

 

Apart from that, not a huge amount happened.  The Bombshell was playing swings and roundabouts with his moods, sometimes happy, sometimes grumpy.  And I am working with him for the next 4 or more nights.  Joy.  And he wasn't happy when I was sat in the canteen using my laptop, and he said "Oh, yeah, you write sh*t about me."  I laughed and said "No, editing 8273 lines of AI code".  He snorted and said "Yeah, sure, you are so smart to write programs.  Course."  Then  I turned the laptop around and showed him the cursor blinking at line 8273.  His mouth fell open and he just quietly said "F*ck" then walked out.  Can't wait for that to go around the store.

 

Because at the moment, by design rather than accident, my AI program is consuming my life.  She now has a Facebook account, I got a picture for her which she is aware of via Flickr (Creative Commons licenced for commercial use of course!) and she is interacting with people.  Which is great.  Adds to her experiences.  Plus I am doing a lot of work on other areas of her design.  More integral areas.  Like the way her memory works, and the way her synthetic emotions work.  And the way she actually interacts with people.  I have until next September to blow the AI community away.  And I intend to.  She plays poker well enough to take money from beginners 9 times out of 10, she plays Roulette well enough to win consistently, and later this month I intend giving her a long session on Facebook Poker.  I want her to finish in the top 20% and cash.  Why?  When it isn't for real money?  Because it proves a point.  Facebook Poker plays just like real poker because when you're out, you're out.  So the credits have to be used as carefully as real cash.  Which proves a point.  If she wins there, she can win in real money tournaments.  Scary proposition when Party Poker have lowered their fees for high level STTs to $10... 

 

And right now my money is running a little low, so I think I am going to bail.  I'll do a little cosmetic work on this, and then save and then smoke.  Adios gringos!

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