TriWard 88 is notable for having absolutely no means of interaction with the world around him. Although he has a binocular forward viewer, a tri-starport for celestial navigation, and a short wave antenna, TriWard's output is limited to varying the colors on his status panel, which has 12 character spaces, each with four possible states. So it's curious that TriWard and others of his class are often used as security robots throughout Robonia. We spoke to "Beeps" Rockefeller, TriWard's employer, about this unusual situation.

Gliese Times-Navigator: So why does TriWard work security for you, anyway?

"Beeps" Rockefeller: Well, he hovers pretty good.

GTN: But he has no way to warn away intruders. What does he do when he encounters someone caressing your factory, as is common in our fine colony?

BR: Hovers at 'em a spell. Just hovers there, looking. 'Bout 25, 30 minutes.

GTN: He just... looks at the miscreants, as they shower your factory in sweaty amour?

BR: Yuh.

GTN: Does he... record them doing it, as evidence?

BR: Couldn't say.

GTN: ... so he doesn't—... Beeps, TriWard's status panel has almost seventeen million possible states, more than enough to represent the official vocabulary of most languages. Does each panel state correspond to a word, allowing him a form of rapid communication?

BR: Couldn't say.

GTN: Does he use the short wave radio for anything?

BR: Might do.

It's unclear whether TriWard and those like him were factory-built, or are a product of the Robonia Intelligent Evolution Mandate. The Historical Record dates the first TriWard-type Robonian to AC 442, but outside sources confirm that a TriWard-esque Robonian was working security at the Record's museum at least 30 years earlier. The debate about what function they serve continues; for his part, "Beeps" Rockefeller "couldn't say" where TriWard himself came from, only that he appears to be a hard worker.

The class I'm T/Aing goes off-topic a lot, so I started recording OTs after a couple weeks. The class isn't through, but we're doing focused wrap-up stuff now so OTs would probably continue to trend down, with maybe just one or two short OTs until the class ends on 5 May.

Notice spikes in short OTs a week before spring break (1 March) and a week before we started working on final projects (7 April). The sudden drop in long OTs after Spring Break is interesting, but I feel like if I worked it out that drop wouldn't be very significant, mathematically.

This recording system didn't prove ideal; it's just what I came up with in 10 seconds on 27 January. More qualification would be a big benefit; >20s OTs occasionally mean "took up the entire rest of class," which is very different than the common two-minute discussions of hamburgers. Generally, I think a more qualified OT-rating system would have resulted in a graph that reflected when breaks were much more clearly. Consider the OT totals for each day, and you already start to see that.

In my opinion as a professional, there is an entire desert world populated with these—possibly the second planet in the Kolibri binary system. Each creature catches the falling records and secretes the resulting info-fluid into the last.fm datalink on its back.