Botanical Communication

Ok, this has to be one of the coolest things ever! It’s called, “Botanicalls,” and it’s a project aiming to save plants’ lives by notifying humans of their health status via phone calls. I love it! I have a hard enough time trying to keep track of my (not real life) plants on Final Fantasy XI… let alone what real life plants I’ve had. This is definitely something I would invest in! You should check out the audio samples of the phone calls on the site too… it cracks me up! In thinking about this, my brain waves start to fire up. What if they… or someone… could develop this technology further to where a device, or a set of devices could monitor plant health details such as mineral/food /water, etc… and would be able to upload that information via Wifi to a website listing up to the minute stats on all selected plants. And then one could work to connect a watering/feeding system up to a Linux server. I could really get into that. Hrm… a good idea for a programming project. LOL. I can see it now… future jobs posted for Botanical Systems Administrators… “I need to update that cron job to water those plants more frequently this month…” Or, “I need to modify that Perl script to start adding minerals to the feeding process…”

Red Hat High 2007

I so wish that I were a kid in Raleigh, NC and could have gone to Red Hat High 2007. Red Hat is so incredible. What better than to have a bunch of kids hang out at the Red Hat headquarters and teach them about the benefits of Open Source software and let them use a live lab where they can be as creative as possible and have as much fun as they can without having to worry about licensing fees. Or in my case, back in the day… use (ahem)… cracked software and feel guilty about it. Of course, the price (or, the lack thereof) isn’t the only benefit to Open Source software… but that’s getting into another focused topic all together.

Update: New article posted of the week’s summary of events here: Red Hat High 2007 Update. Also, be sure to browse through all the great photos taken during the week here: Red Hat High 2007 Photos.

Special thanks to Bascha and Greg for commenting on my post! It’s truly an honor to get comments from real people at Red Hat! I’m not sure how either of you found my blog, but your comments really made my day!