March 2012

Ordinarily, my daily news writeups focus rifle-like on a single-subject theme, but I've collected a diversity of smaller tidbits in recent weeks. And so, for today I thought I'd choose a more shotgun-like approach to delivering information to you.

Shopping at the local Safeway is becoming an increasingly annoying experience. The number of human-staffed checkout lines steadily diminishes, replaced by self-checkout stations guaranteed to cause my blood pressure to skyrocket. Assuming the card reader correctly scans the magnetic strips on my frequent-shopper and credit cards (always a crapshoot), the optical scanner is invariably unable to discern the UPC codes on at least a few items.

In early August of last year, I pointed out that Microsoft had released the first public beta of its Kinect SDK for Windows in mid-June, followed by a Kinect-cognizant services suite for Robotics Developer Studio R3 in mid-July.

Thanks to the increasing prevalence of live blogs, video streams and the like, it's becoming increasingly feasible to cover a conference without even attending it, thanks to the remaining poor sods who still muster the enthusiasm to travel there. You'll note, for example, that I generated a lot of content in spite of not shuttling myself to "Sin City" for January's Consumer Electronics Show (although the "poor sods" in this case were my boss and co-worker!).