Nolan’s Notes

Well, let’s try this. Here’s Day 4’s set, coming right at you from Flickr. Enjoy!

Finally, for those of you interested, I have some pictures and comments from my last two days at Carnegie Mellon. I think it was a very worthwhile trip, and there are a number of things that I couldn’t have taken pictures of. The people there are truly interesting.

A presentation by the co-author of Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture” book that documented all of his thoughts going into the presentation, pretty cool! Almost half the crowd had gone to the actual presentation. For those of you that haven’t seen it, visit this link for the YouTube of it. A nice tradeoff for missing Carnival week.

One Mac iSight camera, one mini-ITX, one Vex robotics kit, and a whole lot of wires and coding later, they finally have a competition robot!

My older brother forwarded me this video about the changing world of college admissions, from the view of the admissions staff themselves. They make some good points, but the scrolling bottom bar also has some good information too. Do you agree with what they mention? Let me know in the comments.

As the school year starts winding up and down at the same time, I find it more and more important to keep my wits about me throughout the activities I’m involved in. To that end, my posts will be a little more sporadic than usual until the end of May. Thank you everyone for checking up on my blog thus far, and I will be sure to keep you updated as time passes by.

Well, today was definitely a day to remember. After missing my alarm clock because the atomic clock was still set for Pacific time, I started off the day on my left foot and 45 minutes late! I scarfed down breakfast on the bus over to the airport, and then I set off towards Carnegie Mellon. Here are a few pictures of downtown Pittsburgh.

One thing that I noticed about the surrounding city of pittsburgh was the large open spaces with no lack of debris. This isn’t much of a problem near the university, but it still happens.

faintly reminiscent of the Tower of Babel…

This is actually the final project that introductory robotics student have to create a robot for. It’s a combination of line-following, obstacle-avoiding, and I’m sure other coding goodness. One thing I want to point out is the specialized “wheelchair” ramps that look specially designed for robots. Awesome!

Day Two is over. More to come!

Woo, I’m in my hotel and getting ready for bed. Here are a few pictures. I apoligize in advance for the quality of the darker ones, this cheap camera really only works in the daytime. Enjoy!