Robot Fightin' Time!

I’ll start with the bad parts, just to get them out of the way: I-880 was slow, we had a hard time finding a parking place, the weather was rainy, and the porta-potties were down to expectations.

But those were minor inconveniences. The actual competition was great — five hours filled with flying sparks, flying parts, flying bots, smoke, noise, cheers, jeers, and the odd camera in the way. We got free hammers, too. The food was better than I would have expected and reasonably priced (unlike, say, the SF Giants); the giftshop was loaded with fun toys, too. They even had a long-sleeve T-shirt which was perfect for Jeffrey!

Don’t believe me? Check out another unbiased observer, MootMom.
Like her, I am bound by the release I signed not to reveal any details, but I can say that Lexan is good stuff.

I’d be willing to go back if they hold another competition in this area; I don’t think any of us are likely to build our own bots, though.

Today, we went to see Monsters, Inc., which we all enjoyed greatly. I want to get it on DVD so I can look carefully for all of the little jokes hidden in the newspapers and signage throughout the movie.

And tomorrow, I’m off to Austin for a few days. Sadly, we’re probably going to be too busy for me to take advantage of Austin’s fine restaurants — there’s even a rumor we’re ordering in pizza so we can continue our meeting late into the night on Tuesday. *sigh*

Gearing down

It’s been a busy week. Nothing much blog-worthy, though.

But I do have a question, and maybe you can help. I have some audio cassettes which I want to convert to CD; that’s pretty easy to do, but I wind up with one track per side, which is not so good. So I’m looking for a (Windows) program which can break a .WAV file up into pieces based on detecting silent intervals. Ideally, the program would make its best guesses, then let me override it easily. Free would be a good price, but that’s not a strict requirement. Thanks.

Today’s Science Colloquium at work was very interesting and enjoyable — Paul Doherty, Senior Staff Scientist at the Exploratorium talked about “Exploratorium Exhibits from Birth to Death”, complete with slides and live demos. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the Exploratorium — it’s time for another visit! December 14th would be a good day, I think.

Tomorrow, we’re off to see Battlebots live. Rumor has it that we’ll be asked to sign an NDA for the results, so don’t even ask.

Shabbat Shalom!