Primus goes to the office round 3

And now for something completely different - Primus talks to the Xmas decoration and gets a response. I have a wireless, slightly animated pair of Xmas decorations, a santa and a dog posing as a reindeer, playing a guitar and banjo respectively. They play Dueling Jingle Bells, and communicate via IR. The song trades back and forth between them. They are cute. Since Xmas is well passed, I have moved them off the table and put them on top my bookshelf in my office. So here we are, waiting for all the members of a meeting to gather; Primus the center of attention in the center of my round table. Primus looks up at the bookshelf, and the slave of the pair of Xmas decs, plays his inital part of the song. We humans do a double take. The behavior does not seem to be reproducible so we get on with our meeting. Scroll ahead to an afternoon meeting waiting to start (we do that alot at the company - wait for meetings to start). Primus, again, the entertainment for the day, looks up at the book case - and the slave Xmas dec plays the first round of his song. Oooooo - different witnesses this time. This happens a couple of more times over the course of the day and solicits "wow"s from folks in the room. Primus as a "real" entity: I now have one of my guys talking to Primus, in baby talk, trying to get Primus to come visit him by calling to him. (We need the language parser and the routines to go with it - as come on command would totally blow people away.) Primus, apparently sharing genetic material with cats, responds by walking in the opposite direction so he can explore the outside of a small trash can. ;-) What I love about this is that Primus is being accepted and reacted to as a being in and of himself. He's enabling people to show sides of themselve that I would not ordinarily see. How cool is that?

Posted February 01 at 18:35 PM