Things I think are worth looking into (and so I can take credit for thinking of them when someone else does it years after...)

Accelerometer brake on a Chainsaw
- Detects a large G-shock indicative of loosing control, immediately brakes the chainsaw to prevent injury when it gets away from you

Start an Intern Coordinating Company
- HR Departments outsource keeping their interns entertained to us. We do inter-corporation events
- Coordinate helping find housing / roommates
- Make interns go away with a good feeling about the corporation
- Possibly going too far: Handle intern recruitment. Meet wtih interns one-on-one and see who fits
in at which companies best, most likely chance at retention of the intern
- Key to success: having a higher intern retention rate after the company is hired than any other
company in the industry

Street Festival in Gainesville, shut down university ave.
- BeerFest!
- Bring in a bunch of beer companies
- Host games
- Art Showcase
- Live local bands

Build a BattleBot

Host the first National Autonomous Beerpong Playing Robotics Tournament at UF

Reconfigurable virtual servers with virtual network connections
- Simply design your network needs in Visio and deploy to the virtual servers
- Zero configuration necessary

LADAR interaction software
- Get Telegram information
- Write a Direct3D interface to display results

From WIRED news...

Gator Nation's "NaviGATOR" seemed downright hostile, cutting off a DARPA car on a left turn, and then gunning across the next intersection, very nearly nailing a DARPA car in the trunk. Officials blew the horn and dejected team members got the "better luck next time" handshake from Tether right then and there.

- http://blog.wired.com/defense/urban_challenge/index.html


Thanks wired.

....and time to sleep.

So we've been elimanted. Its been fun, Ill post more when I feel like it.

Knight Rider or Gator Nation?

Go(ing) west!

We're finally out of Virginia and heading west!

To recap the past few days:
Virginia sucks
Fredericksburg sucks
Hooters girls work hard to sell calendars
The fort's on base bbq place is to be avoided at all costs:
"We ran out of pulled pork, so this is... Different... Pulled pork then the other guy with you had... It's good. Its florida pulled pork"... " oh ok...."
Were totally stealing a guy for our grad program


Today in particular has been a loooong day. We started at about 5am packing up and checking out. We got to the base around 8am, set up for our gazillionith dry run with the NaviGator, ran it perfect twice, and headed off to find someplace warm to sit in till noonish for the REAL demo at 1pm. Our first demo, without the VIPs we wanted to impress went off without a problem. Then the VIPs came for the second demo and we had a computer failure. Ugh, not good.

So now Im on a plane, slightly delerious (apologies for the tense, POV, etc. constantly changing in this post), and hoping to get to sleep by 4am tonight. We flew from richmond -> charlotte -> phoenix ->Ontario where, hopefully, two vans will be waiting to pick us up.... Ya know, if they make it through the RAGING FIRES in cali.

When we get to cali, we'll take a look at how the highlander guys are going. Everyone else should already be out there (25 of us total).

To wrap up, miss everyone back home, VA sucks, cali should be aweswome, Im turning 21 in vegas, and I haven't looked at a single piece of schoolwork in about a week now.

Pictures explained:
Autonomous Solutions' vehicle badass truck that follows a lead vehicle autonomously.
Our tractor-trailer on loan from tyndall air force base.
6 of us plus luggage crammed in a minivan.
The garden Yetti. That's right, Yetti.

:)

Dear Virginia, you suck

Dear Virginia,

You are wet, cold, boring, tiring and crappy. Basically, you suck.

Sincerely ,
Jim

Ontime? Never!

We made it onto the plane with ohhhh 15 sec to spare. Someones telling me to turn off my phone. Fine, be that way.