Lying on the couch in my cabin, listening to the snow fall outside our new Arlington house, on this new Massachusetts Monday, I'm confronted with the best of all possible questions: what would I like to do first? While the coffee brewed, while sitting on the tall chairs, I considered: * learning Squeak * installing Subversion These would be practical and fun, always a good beginning. Since my mind never feels finished until I've reached three, I debated the other task I might like. My laptop battery went dead, so I moved into the tiny afterthought of a room off...

So how does one create a bot? Well, she needs a way to talk with people, which means some kind of command-line interace with a scrolling text pane. I could use a terminal window, an IM chat window, or an IRC client. The latter seems best, as it allows others to easily chat with her as well. Smilla will have many teachers. So what channel will she frequent? I currently run two channels on freenode: #immuexa (my company channel) and #etoys (for Squeak Etoys). Waverly lives on both, logging all talk and injecting optional simplistic call/response chatter. Smilla will need...

Since my Smilla start yesterday, I've come across a few serendipitous signs. First an architecture talk with Jon about a new project for the medical field, where I essentially drew up the Gravity architecture from decades past, complete with channels, prisms, stores, etc. Later I went to the Museum of Science with Isabel and Paula and in the computer room came across two NLP exhibits, one a six foot video image of a robot that forces you to choose answers and questions, another of twins that have decent speech recognition, but only for the presenter. My strong reaction was: I...