Finding My Thesis and Stanley, the robotic SUV

Over the winter break my advisor gave me a list of several things to work on, and top on that list was find a thesis topic. I haven't really been actively doing that. Instead I have been insulating the pipes in my house but in my attempts to procrastate I have been reading Wired magazine. The January issue has an article about "Stanford's souped-up Volkswagen blasted through the Mojave Desert, blew away the competition, and won Darpa's $2 million Grand Challenge." You can find it online at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/stanley.html Good article and definately a must read for anyone working with robotics and|or considering working with robotics. Makes me want to do research in the field. But I'm attending a university that has very little money for this type of thing and the best the AI classes have are some Logo Mindstorm bricks that are at least five years old. Would trying to work with robotics in this environment really mean that I won't get any meaningful experience and my thesis starves to death from lack of realistic data?! Probably.

First Night 2006

Christy and I went to the fireworks display at Springfield's First Night 2006 celebration. It was a nice way to bring in the new year.

Google's Picasa

I downloaded Picasa just a few hours ago and have been messing around with it while surfing and posting. It is awesome! Very easy to use and very fast. Sure, it can't even compare to what a good graphic designer* can do with Photoshop (or Gimp) to improve an image. But I'm no graphic designer. I strongly recommend this software.

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* I served with a graphic artist, Kussman, in the Army. He can do some very cool things. For example, after my last deployment I went to Scotland, and took a lot of pictures with my digital camera. Well, one picture I took with very low battery power had the bottom third damaged. Kussman was able to make it look perfect; I still wonder how he did it.