[alicebot-archcomm] alicebot.org server status

[Dr. Richard S. Wallace]

> > And another person - preferrable from your face-to-face community -
> > should handle all that linux stuff, thus being a kind of servermaster

It is a remarkable blessing in my life that, during the past year, "two
worlds have merged."  I used to have the problem for many years that, I
lived one life inside my computer with all my ALICE friends, who were
numerous but scattered around the world, and another life here in Silicon
Valley, where there was a kind of parallel universe of history that didn't
seem to involve ALICE and AIML at all.

This past year however I can barely walk out the door without someone
mentioning ALICE, bots, chatbots, program D, program E, and the rest of our
alphabet soup.  Now that the Internet Bubble has burst, Bot Fever has
gripped Silicon Valley at last.   Actual profitable companies here in the
Bay Area are touting AIML wares, asking me to lunch, and inviting me to
speak at conferences.  Even my friends from the parallel world are starting
to wonder what is up with this bot stuff, and how can they get a piece of
the action.

Thanks to this blessed merging of two worlds, I now have the luxury for the
first time of recruiting Foundation volunteers from the local scene.   It
was amazing to have people come together from all over the world to
volunteer to work on ALICE and AIML.  But let's face it, we all know by now
that relationships cannot be built on e-mail alone.  There are too many
pitfalls and too many chances for misunderstandings.  We human robots still
need that face-to-face contact for some reason, even if we can't exactly say
why yet.

A Board that can actually meet and look each other in the eye is vastly
preferable to one limited to email, IM chat and expensive long distance
phone calls.   Thank goodness AIML is now big enough that we've finally been
discovered by Silicon Valley.

Rich