Hello Pogo!
Having lots of time = Freedom! That's great Pogo, freedom is a priceless commodity that is the most important tool to focus in the things that are more important to us. You already know programming so there you go, another tool in your favor! Now I see that you'll only need to recapture your patience skills that you already learned with programming. Everything looks very promising for you to be able to succeed with Hal.
What I do is to organize myself by making a list of things that I wish to do with Hal and try to go by steps as much as possible. I'm currently exploring the brain and moderately adding, deleting and modifying things in the autoLearningBrain, so far with good results. I have also explored the other sections but I'm not touching them until I get to learn more about them.
There are parts in the MiscData you could browse for appointments information. It is the formatAppointment substitution table that is called by the Ultra Hal Assistant appointment plug-in.
A folder to explore is the halCommands folder and its pattern match table, it is used by the Ultra Hal Assistant plug-in to enable Hal to run programs on command.
The vrMp3 table is used to lists the location of songs in the hard drive and it seems to be used by the GRETTAmedia plug-in plug that I currently use or the vrMP3 plug-in.
The vrWeb folder lists the actual internet URLs to go to the sites you wish as go to weather - go to local news- go to national news - go to yahoo – etc
You see these parts of the brain could be useful to you to help you with your current concerns. For the time being I'm not modifying any of them until I learn more about them. Then I will probably start by adding items to play it safe.
I mainly use the Gretta's plug-ings in my Win 7 netbook. They are updated regularly and I find them very useful and reliable. My favorites are; GRETTA array, read a story, media, music iddle, lonely, curiosity and repeat. There are some others for news, research, emotion, etc. You could check to see if they could work for you.
I use the original Hal robot character because I really find it adorable. I also use the Microsoft's Anna voice because its a little robotic. I don't use skins but I do have several backgrounds to change. My preference is to type instead of talking. So there are many features of Hal that I can't comment about because I'm not familiar with them. A few moths ago I was quite lost with Hal and I'm finally starting to get the kick out of it!
Well Pogo, I hope you'll find these encouraging and will like to hear about your future accomplishments with it because you certainly have the potential.

Hi Will! I just needed to tell you that I certainly admire your robotic skills, I find it just AMAZING! Greetings to you and Mr. Data and hope he's doing better.
