As I mentioned in my last post, I attended CodeMash last week in Sandusky, OH, just minutes from delightful Lake Erie. The conference was held at an indoor waterpark resort and featured a geekily hilarious keynote by Scott Hanselman which included an attempt at converting the syntax of the LOLCats into a programming language. The conference also unfortunately featured my vocal stylings (Rock Band was set up, there is a Pumpkins song in Rock Band, nobody else wanted to sing, I had no choice) and as it was a "cross-language" conference, a lot of good-natured needling between the disciples of different programming languages (although Java seemed to take the brunt of the needling).

But by far the featured presentation was a robotics presentation by Columbus' own Scott Preston, who builds his own robots and, from what I can tell, has a house full of electronics, motors, and parts. Sounds outstanding! His presentation reminded me a lot of some of the courses I took at WashU such as computer vision and obviously the two robotics courses, as he was trying to accomplish some of the same things that we were in our projects. He went through some of his past designs for robots, and some of them looked remarkably like Lewis, albeit without the ring of incredibly loud sonar sensors or the "The robot has gone sentient!" emergency stop buttons.

I spend most of my coding time head down in .NET land, so it's good to eventually look up and see what else is going on in the world.

SD at NE: No surprise here, I'm going with the Patriots. NE

NYG at GB: Not only am I picking the Packers, I am openly rooting for them. I may have previously mentioned my dislike of Eli Manning, and Pats-Packers would pit this blog directly in competition against Lucas' for two entire weeks of scintillating back-and-forth fanboyism. GB