What do you do with your Canadian Tire money?

We didn't have to dismantle our robot after the competition last week as expected. Instead, ours was one of the seven robots (out of 15 in the class) to be invited to Science World in January.

For a while now, I've been thinking that the useful parts of my education fall into three categories: stuff that would be handy on Junkyard Wars, stuff that I can use at cocktail parties, and stuff that will get me on TV.

Matthew, one of our TAs, stood up yesterday and asked if anyone in the class could speak French. CBC/Radio-Canada (aka CBC French) had heard about our robot course and wanted to know if there were any students they could interview on a morning radio show. One guy tried for a while and eventually gave up, so I gave it a shot. They said I was good enough and scheduled a live phone-in interview for this morning.

I left the lab around 1am last night, so I wasn't in great shape this morning. Even so, they seemed to think it was good enough that they called back later to see if they could send a camera crew to interview me for the evening news. Well, if there's a better use for all those years of French immersion, I sure can't think of it.

Sadly, our robot didn't perform nearly as well as it should have and ran off the cliff in the quarter finals. We won the TA's Choice Award for "most reliable robot... in the time trials." It worked fine yesterday during our tests and then again when we ran it for fun after the competition, so at least I know we had a chance. Plus I learned a lot about electro-mechanical design and control. And people at cocktail parties find robots much more interesting than differential equations. And I wound up on radio and TV, thus making this course the best one I've taken.

I felt the gallery RSS feed really should have owner and parent album data, so I edited the script to generate them. God bless open source software.

gallery.antiflux.org/updates now has a fancy option to display individual user updates. For example, gallery.antiflux.org/updates/tim shows what I've updated lately.

Updating a nested album can trigger an update in the parent album. I would like to make the updates page indicate that an album has been updated only because one of its nested albums has been updated, but I'm not sure how it should look. Maybe it should build some kind of tree for each one.