Between studying for my orals in a couple weeks and working with the 6.270 contest, I've been royally hosed. But here's some helpful information about real ninjas to tide you over until I'm less busy.

My doctoral oral qualifying exam is now tentatively scheduled for February 12th. Between now and then, there is going to be some serious filling o' the brain. Big thanks to Molvig for loosing all the papers I lent to him which would really help me study right about now.

Well, the day of miracles has finally come. The bank refunded my overdraft charges. I now have all the money I should have in my bank account. If I only had a working ATM card, maybe I could get to some of it. But that's in the mail as well. Geez.

Eric Carlson sent me a copy of the proceedings from the 3rd Symposium on Electromagnetic Launch Technology - absolutely full of great railgun stuff. It is wonderful.

And the prodigal advisor returns! I haven't talked to him since before finals. Today I get an email telling me that we need to get together this week because he'll be gone next week. So I guess I'm on my own with the studying for my orals, and I still don't know when they are.

Some comments on the flags of the world:

Libya gets the nod for least creative.

Indonesia and Monaco need to decide who really gets the rights to that flag, and the other needs to pick a new one.

If the United States only had two colonies originally, and now only had one state, its flag might look a lot like that of Chile.

So much has happened. And so little of it has been sleep.

I presented my design for the Rocket Team payload test vehicle and it got accepted, which means that I have a green light to purchase parts for the 11'4" rocket and begin assembley.

I joined the MIT Battlebots team. Aw yeah. They do some really clever stuff with their current robot. For instance, their wheels are full of rare-earth magnets, giving them an enormous normal force with the steel floor of the arena. No one can push them around. *grin*

I designed and built a bipedal walker for 6.270. It's walking now, though a lack of friction makes it look more like a case of severe seizure or something. I haven't implemented turning yet and I'm not sure I'll have time to. But it still looks pretty bad-ass.

Alex should be back from France today. He'll probably be unhappy with the fact that Greddy seems to have broken our heater. Greddy also broke his car. Drove it into a guard rail at speed, bending the rear axle and destrying both left tires and rims.

My bank problems have now mostly been solved. Without telling me, they issued me a "Credit Memo" for the ammount I was missing, which solves most of my problems. However, I am still being charged for the overdraft fees that were tagged on while they couldn't find my money. So the fun with Fleet Bank continues. But it's minor fun now, not the major hillarity that was going on for the last month. Ugh.

Gordita!

Parts sorting went well. I can't believe the quanitity of Lego that we have. Enough parts for 90 kits plus a bunch left over. There are some good new people on the staff this year that seem like they'll be a lot of fun to work with. And there are some contestants I know.

Jan asked me to do the official reading of the contest storyline at the big first meeting tomorrow, like I did yesteryear. If I recall correctly, I made a complete ass of myself. I intend to do a repeat performance.

After 6.270 I went to Holly's place and did some more work on the railgun. we got the veritcal power bus bars attached to the rails, cleaned all the parts, and did the final assembley of the railgun itself. With any luck, we won't have to take it apart again until it jams or welds the armature during firing or something like that. Excitement is brewing. Holly estimates 4 or so work sessions and we'll be ready to fire it.

Jessica wrote me today and told me that I was needed to help out with 6.270 this year since InsanityJohn was going to be gone. I went to the pre-parts sorting today where we worked out who would be doing what during the month and prepared for the big parts sorting fiesta tomorrow.

With any luck I may be able to get a kit out of this. Mmmm Lego. Mmmmm microcontroller.

Now I have to revamp the hideous 6.270 website.

The big news of the year [for me] [thus far] is ZorkBot. Dan and I have been working on this since I came up with the idea this summer in a fit of boredom. In the initial beta version, there was a TCL client and a C server and then the original source code. I wrote the TCL and Dan wrote the server.

At the last moment, Dan came up with a way to do it all with a single perl script and before even telling me of the simplification, he implemented it. Leaving me having not contributed anything to the current working code base. heh well it was still my idea...

The basic bits & pieces are working, though it still needs a lot of work. Luckily, there have been some optimizations and upgrades that I've been able to code and contribute to. The big problem right now is getting around the dumb rate limitations in the AIM protocol. If you have one AIM bot talking to 20 people's clients, it overrates itself in about one message.

We're working on a system now that will farm out subservers to each client to get around this problem.

For now, though, the single-server beta is up and running on ZorkBot. I feel ok posting that here because I know I have about 3 readers and one of them [yes you, rob] is too lame to have a proper instant message client [nudge]. If you're reading this and thinking of promulgating the link, please hold off until we get the rate limiting work