Spring break, Wednesday through Sunday. I was on a trip with my robotics team to the national competition down in Atlanta, GA. It was a blast. So much happened that it would be hard to not write pages and pages, but this will be an attempt at summing it up a bunch.
First of all, this was my first time attending nationals. Let me tell you, there is so much going on between the Georgia Dome, GWCC (where the pits and displays are), and the CNN center. I have never ridden so many escalators in my life! You couldn’t go many places without riding at least two escalators. Escalators can be lots of fun going the wrong direction..
Autodesk (the people who make 3DStudioMAX, Inventor, AutoCAD, own Maya) was giving seminars in the pit area. I watched one and got a really cool multitool from them that rivals $30 multitools from gerber/leatherman. Lots of free stuff was available there. Other things that I got were a nice pair of safety glasses (thanks to the USPTO), a backpack thingy from Rockwell Automation, 2 flashing led rubber balls from ITT Tech (which i replaced the elastic string with shoe laces for poi — hey, how could I not?!). I could have gotten much more stuff, but I didn’t go to all of the booths or ask for it from teams.
Derek did tons of demoing of the Ginger Project. Ginger is a Segway clone built by Jake, Eric, and Derek. It drew in lots of attention, and tons of people wanted to see it. We were known for having it. Dean Kamen even signed it, and in case anyone doesn’t know, he is the inventor of the Segway.
Mike got me into house again. I downloaded a few albums last night. Speaking of music, I am going to be using winamp5 to manage my ipod now, rather than iTunes. Taylor said that he likes it much better, and after iTunes lost a ton of my music by trying to organize it automatically (accidentally checked the stupid option), I really want to use something else.
There is much more, but it would be really long to say all of it.