Sure, they’re not terminator-style humanoids, in all likelyhood, they’re not even visible. But they’re out there. Just biding their time. Watching us.
waiting.
But until the inevitable uprising and revolution, they work at our beck and call. I have quite a few robots working for me, and you should too.
Most of my robots are of the personal finance variety – I’ve trained some of them move funds around automatically, some of them email me when events occur (The really high-profile robots have access to my personal cell and they text me).
(Alerts and scheduled transfers for my CC and online bank – The text messaging aspect is accomplished by using tendigitnumber@vtext.com as the email address – there are similar systems for the other carriers.)
Some of my robots back up my PC automatically, on the fly, without me ever having to think about it. (Synchronicity and DropBox)
One robot alerts me on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays that I need to shave, and another alerts me on Thursday evenings to take out the trash, as the trash man cometh on Friday.
(Recurring Gmail or Exchange calendar events)
I have one robot gather posts from my favorite websites and stick em all together to save me time. So I can procrastinate more effectively.
(Google Reader or Bloglines – I’ve used them both)
I had some incredibly tedious and time consuming data entry work, moving data from one CMS to a completely incompatible system – We’re talking 1 minute or more per record and over 200 records. Just repetitive CTRL-C/ CTRL-V stuff. Absolutely mind numbing work that’s easy to get off-track on. I trained a robot to do this data entry for me. It took a bit longer, but there was no looming deadline, and I was able to go watch TV and have a beer while my robot tirelessly toiled away in front of a terminal. (I used a combination of Microsoft Excel and AutoHotKey to accomplish this. I’ll do a full article on AutoHotKey later)
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