Robotic Pancake Picking Machine

I just saw this and I am hypnotized. It is a machine that can pick and stack 400 pancakes per minute. Do yourself a favour and watch this short video.

Things that came to mind while watching this.
1) 400 Pancakes per minute. In a 5 day, 8hour per day work week equals about 960,000 Pancakes. Do we really eat that many pancakes?
2) This Robot REALLY looks like the monster from "The Matrix"
3) The comment from the company Director about how the "Robots allowed us to absorb an number of overheads.... save on labour costs" It is amazing how sanitized the language is when they mean to say "we fired a bunch of people and bought robots"
4) This Robot is really awesome.
5) Would Claudia let me buy one if I promise to eat 960,000 pancakes per week?
6) If I had one of these, I would paint a face on it and name it Flexo.
7) Does ABB build a similar robot that will pour a bowl of fruit loops at 6am on the weekends for Liam? I have some weekend overheads that I would like to reduce.

Pumpkin Festival

As anyone who has been reading for a long time will recall, last year I went to the world's largest pumpkin festival. Well, it was so awesome.... I had to return this year.

As Luck would have it, this year marked the 10th anniversary of the fest. Something that had to clearly be written out with about 50 feet worth of pumpkins.

This year it happened to occur when my mother was visiting. So Mum, Liam and I all packed up and drove to the fest. Here is the smallest pumpkin fan sitting with a cow-pumpkin sculpture, enjoying some roasted cinnamon-vanilla pumpkin seeds (they were awesome.)

More photos will follow, the theme this year was Fairy Tales. Last year was of course Space, you can browse back to the old pumpkin posts last fall for a taste of what will be following.

Last photos of Italy

OK, it has taken a long time, but here are the last photos from the Italy trip that I am going to post. They are just a few rather random images really.

First up, a rather nice one of Claudia and Liam sitting on some steps in Sienna. It is pretty hard to get a photo of these two where both are smiling, looking in the right direction and have their eyes open. This one is nice though. Bonus points for Liam still in full tourist regalia. Funny hats make me laugh.

Of course I brought board games along to enjoy in the evening. We were actually too tired most nights to get aroudn to them, but we did manage to get in one night with the famous train game (Ticket to Ride.) As you can see from the faces, Ryan snatched victory from Claudia in the final moments of this match.

And finally I thought this one was funny. We were walking through a nice old town, I think it was Montepulciano, when I saw this nice single pair of underpants hanging out on the laundry line. Now these underpants can be shown to the entire internet. Enjoy.

Sienna

The next place we went to visit was Sienna. Another hell of parking ensued. After a looooong walk to the middle of the city, we arrived at the centre. I right away remembered this square from the James Bond Film "Casino Royale" it was pretty nice square, there is a famous horse race that takes place here every year. It was happening the week after our visit and there were already quite a few posters and promotions around the town.




We then headed over to the Cathedral, which is also pretty well known. I could write down some facts about it, but I would just be copying from the wikipedia page. So if you want to know about the place, feel free to look it up there.

My perspective.... It was big. lots of marble. Lots of paintings. Lots of tourists.

Quite nice.

Liam particularly enjoyed the patterns on the marble floor and amused himself by walking the patterns while we queued to enter the cathedral.

Nore that he is in full tourist regalia.

brief pause

Hi all.

No posts until Sept 23. My Mother is visiting and I am not really on the web so much.

San Gimignano - Part 2

OK, back to the Italian holiday.

Still in San Gimignano, our group split up. The women and children went shopping and the men decided to walk up the famous tower. I think it really had nothing to do with being men/women, it just worked out that way.

We strolled inside and bought tickets to walk up many stairs.It did not take so long to get to the top, and we had a nice view of the town. Here is the square below, and you can see another of the towers, one that is not open to be climbed though.
I also had a nice view back along the street we had used to walk into town. It really made me think of a maze or some sort of corridor.
From the top, you could see quite far off into the countryside. That is the benefit of all these hilltop towns in tuscany. Nice views.
Inside the tower, was nothing. It was just a hollow stone shell, apparently it had been used for everything from storage to a home for lepers over the centuries. This was not one of those palace or fortress type structures.

In the adjoining building at the bottom, there was some nice art though. This was not part of the tower proper, but the now-museum that you needed to pass through to get in and out of the tower.
After our tower excursion was over, we all met up on the steps out front. Here is a nice group image of Claudia and Liam with Oma and Opa.That is it for the San Gimignano stuff. On to the next exciting town....