Well it turns out that I can’t go to the FIRST Pacific Northwest Regional. I already had plans for that weekend (going snowboarding with some of my uncles and my dad), and they could not be changed.
Bummer dude. I was really looking forward to the regional.
Greetings Pacific Northwest Regional FIRST Robotics Competition Teams:
This note is to inform you of an important date change for the FIRST Robotics Competition, Pacific Northwest Regional, in Portland, OR. Due to an un-resolvable schedule conflict with the Rose Quarter Memorial Coliseum, the dates for the Pacific Northwest Regional Competition must be moved one week earlier to March 10-12, 2005.
In the past few days, FIRST learned of a scheduling error with the Rose Quarter Memorial Coliseum. The error is FIRST’s responsibility and we would like to acknowledge the positive, constructive response of the Coliseum’s management in exploring all options in identifying this date change as the best solution.
However, while this may be the best solution, we are acutely aware this change creates significant implications and burdens for our schools, teachers, students, parents and volunteers. Please accept our sincere apology for the error.
Finally, we recognize that while our apology is necessary, it is not sufficient. We would also like to respond by working directly with teams to help minimize the complications of this change whenever possible. FIRST will absorb relevant airline or travel change fees and additional shipping costs. While it may not be possible to address all issues, we will try to cover other documented incremental costs.
In the next 24 hours, a FIRST representative will contact each of the teams by phone to review key issues.
Thank you for your understanding, your cooperation, and your commitment to making the Pacific Northwest Regional a success.
Bob Hammond
Director, Robotics Competition
I had forgotten how much of a pain in the butt computers can be. Three days ago, the campus network admins shut down my connection because I had accidentally left my windows share on overnight, my entire C drive. I came back from classes and my internet connection was off. Luckily they said they would turn it on, but the person who had authority to turn it on had already left for the day. I went through some withdrawl, but managed to survive.
Two days ago, after they turned back on my internet, my sound card started to act up. It would cut in and out randomly. I had the same problem before and a windows reinstall fixed the problem. So I decided I would reinstall windows. Since my last windows install I had installed a SATA hard drive on the primary SATA channel, my C drive was on the secondary channel SATA drive. Apparentely, windows does not like to install on my secondary channel SATA drive. When I told it to install on the secondary drive, it confirmed that I wanted to install it on the C drive. I said OK and it formated the wrong drive. Whatever. I can deal with that, there was nothing non-replacable on that drive. So I unplugged the primary drive so that windows would install on the secondary drive…
To make a very very long story short, I ended up installing windows 2 times to get my sound card drivers to install at all. Oh well. Now I am back up and running after three days without a computer with windows.
I got my first glimpse at the robot that the TRC is building for this year’s FIRST competiton here. The base and arm look virtually identical to last year’s, except the arm is double jointed. Hopefully the arm will be easy to control, I imagine that controlling a double jointed arm could be very difficult. I noticed that the wheels are on the outside like they were last year. Unfortunately the external wheels make the robot hard to control in a pushing match. If a robot pushes us from the side, the wheels will bind up and we lose mobility. With 6 robots on the field, it is very likely that robots will be pushing from the side. Oh well. I predict that the driver controlled part of the game this year will be somewhat pointless, almost all the points will be scored during autonomous mode. It will be an interesting game, hopefully it will work out all right for the TRC.
On Saturday I woke up early and went snowboarding at Bridger Bowl with Alex and Chris. I had to stop in the office to pick up my season pass so we agreed to meet up. That was the last I saw of them until we left at 4:00. So I spent the day boarding by myself. I thought that it was going to be really cold so I brought all of my warm clothes to wear. I ended up wearing almost all of them. It was the first time that my fingers have ever gotten cold while wearing fleece gloves and overmitts. Bridger Bowl is comparable to alpental, only much much bigger. There is an upper mountain full of moguls and a lower mountain that is almost entirely groomed. On Thursday night it snowed 6 inches so there was still some powder around. The only downside is that there are not any high speed lifts. That meant that I spent a majority of the time on lifts, not on the snow. Oh well, it was fun anyway. Hopefully I can go again sometime this week.
Like I mentioned previously, I installed gentoo on my laptop. However I can not get my wireless card or sound card to work. The only solution that I can think of is to reinstall and get my hardware all configured with the live cd and then hope it carrys over when I install the system. But why would I install gentoo again when there are so many distros of linux? So far I have used Debian Woody, Suse 9.1, Gentoo 2004.3, OpenBSD 3.5, and LFS. Out of all of those, I like Debian the best. But I already have a computer running Debian Woody at home, so I am going to install the version of Debian that is still in testing, Sarge. Hopefully I can get it configured the way I want it. We will see…
I finished installing gentoo on my laptop. I also put on X, OpenOffice and Gnome. One of the cool features of gnome that I found out about are the 2 customizable task bars. I put on a weather notifier which tell me what the weather is in Bozeman. This is the forecast for tomorrow:
SATURDAY
PARTLY CLOUDY. HIGHS 5 TO 15. SOUTHWEST WINDS 5 TO 10
MPH. WIND CHILL READINGS 10 BELOW TO 20 BELOW ZERO.
Ouch. Tomorrow morning Alex and I are going to Bridger Bowl. It should be pretty cold.
I just got back from an excellent weekend of snowboarding at Northstar at Tahoe with my uncle and cousin. There is a heck of a lot of snow over there. It was almost perfect, not quite steep enough though. Anyway, it was lots of fun.
I can tell that FIRST season has started, I got over 20 non-spam emails over the weekend, and I realized that I was not signed up for the high-volume TRC mailing list. So I took a look at the competition, and realized that FIRST is getting better at making autonomous mode required to win. Personally, I think that it is a mistake. A very small percentage of FIRST teams will be able to make a reliable autonomous mode. By making that section of the competition critical, it will be more like the first year the TRC competed. There will be one team on an alliance who will do all the work, and the rest of the teams will just run around aimlessly. By making the game 3 vs. 3, there will be much more pushing than in previous competitions.
In a brief moment of insanity, I volunteered to be the webmaster for titanrobotics.net. I received a list of wanted features and access to the code. I am still not quite sure what I got myself into. Previously, I wanted to port the site from coldfusion into php. But then I realized that this was an excellent opportunity to learn another serverside scripting language. Once I get my hands on a copy of Macromedia ColdFusion, I will start to hack the website up. Tomorrow life starts up again, I am going back to school. Sigh…
I have changed servers from my 233mHz pentium pro to a EPIA Mini-ITX computer. My old server Frank, will probably be retired from active duty and just sit around. Frank2 is quieter and faster, not that it matters to me because I spend most of my time in Bozeman where I can’t hear it. In addition, Frank2 is running the latest version of Apache2 and Php. The website remains unchanged, the files were simply copied over. Unfortunately, all the changes made to the webpage since the copy and the switch are gone, meaning any comments made in the last 24 hours or so are gone.
When I installed Php on Frank, I did not install any optional libraries or enable any additional features, I configured it with no options. This time around, I installed Php with an image library which will allow me to create and manipulate images, also I installed a spell checker. Eventually I will integrate these features into this website. Now I have a reason to recode this website, in my spare time…
I decided that I should make my own knoppix disk. I had this great idea of having it connect to a gmail drive via gmailfs. Then I could keep my email, internet settings and documents on that drive and I would be able to have everything with me on a single CD. So I found a nice tutorial and downloaded Knoppix 3.7. I managed to remove a whole bunch of packages that I did not need and then add a few that I wanted. For some reason, I could not get GmailFS working properly, so I decided to scrap that idea. Also, some of the changes that I made to KDE did not stay when I finished and the CD is not as fast as it is in the original version. I think that I need to find some way to order the files on the CD in a more efficient manner. Oh well. It was a good learning experience, when I am bored again, maybe I will make another attempt.
I was really looking forward to going to the FIRST kickoff in Seattle this upcoming Saturday, but my uncle offered to take me to Tahoe for snowboarding. I can’t refuse an opportunity like that. So now I am not going to be able to attend the kickoff or the meetings after. Bummer. I am still planning on going to the PNW Regional competition though. That should be fun.