I'm on vacation from my dayjob this week, so I have a lot of time to catch up on side interests for the next couple of days. Right now I'm mostly still just de

I'm on vacation from my dayjob this week, so I have a lot of time to catch up on side interests for the next couple of days. Right now I'm mostly still just deep-diving into various bits of "stuff" related to AI. I just finished reading a The SOAR Cognitive Architecture by John Laird, and Engineering General Intelligence Part 2 by Ben Goertzel, as well as Words and Rules by Stephen Pinker. Also spent some time building and installing all of OpenCog, and installing SOAR. The goal is to start messing around with both, and start actually implementing some simple agents. I'm also now reading Foundations of Computational Linguistics: Human-Computer Communication in Natural Language by Roland Hausser, and have a book on Cognitive Modeling queued up. And I need to find some time to get back to working with Apache River (the OSS version of what Sun used to call JINI). If I'm feeling inspired one day soon, I might finally finish wrapping up the software for my "convection oven to reflow oven" conversion project. The hardware parts have all been done for months, and even most of the code is written, but I sort of mentally stalled out on that and just haven't bothered to push everything across the finish line. Really need to wrap that all up.