Nolan’s Notes

I’ve had a great few weeks in Portland since finishing up my year at Carnegie Mellon. More on that later, but I wanted to quickly point out a new section of my website that I’ve added: Colleges & Scholarships. After doing lots of research and filling out quite a few applications in my senior year of high school, I wanted to pass on some of the things that I learned from the whole experience. It’s not quite finished yet, but I’ve included a few links to get you started. Enjoy!

Hello again! So, another update from Pittsburgh…I got the opportunity last weekend to attend Carnegie Mellon’s annual Spring Carnival and had a blast! Here’s an overview:

CMU Carnival is about 3 things–No School, Booth, and Buggy–all 3 pretty equally important. We get Thursday and Friday off of school and the festivities don’t end until Sunday afternoon, which is awesome especially when the weather is really nice! Booth is a very eccentric CMU tradition where different student groups race to finish building a mini-house around the given theme for a year. Booths ranged from a giant “Wall-E-Pi” to a Giant Peach, a nuclear fall-out shelter, and even a giant Poke-Booth. The Kiltie Band also performed our Spring Concert to start off the festival.

Buggy is the other main event that occurs at Carnival. You might not know what it is at first glance, but it’s basically a hill race with customized racing buggies (over a few thousand a pop, if you want a good one) that often hit 40 mph at the bottom of Flagstaff Hill. 5′ tall women are aggressively pursued at the beginning of the school year to drive the buggies and ensure their team’s victory. Believe me–these teams are HARD CORE. The Student Development Council beat Pi-KA’s record this year, but I put a video from last year anyway to give you the excitement of what happens. 

Only 2 1/2 more weeks of school! 

Hello again from Pittsburgh! Quite a few things have happened over the last month and a half, so I’ll be spreading the events out in a series of several posts. To start it off, I have some cool videos to show–all of them are well-known robots both at CMU and around the world.

The first is of “Tank”, the official Roboceptionist for Newell-Simon Hall on campus ( home of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute). He’s surprisingly really smart, as he’s does facial tracking, gives directions, says the weather, and I’m sure much more while keeping a slight grin on his robotic face. If you’re ever able to visit, be sure to talk to him at NSH north entrance.

The second video was from the Young Inventors International “Inventing the Future” Conference, held at Carnegie Mellon two weeks ago and organized by Anne Swift and Project Olympus, a startup incubator for students at Carnegie Mellon. Performing a market analysis of Marek Michalowski’s Keepon Robot was just one highlight of the event, as we were able to participate with roundtable discussions with numerous VC’s, marketers, inventors, and established CEO’s in an informal setting–all geared towards young, college-age inventors and entrepreneurs.

For a more detailed recap of the event with some more videos, please check out the YII blog at http://www.innovatorshub.com/

I was able to make a lot of connections and listen to some pretty inspiring stories, and I look forward to participating in it again next year!

Lastly, Carnegie Mellon and Astrobotic teamed up to show off their new challenge for Google’s Lunar X-Prize competition for $20 million. I was able to get the whole tour on video, but feel free to skip around as you want. My friend Abhinav and I were able to talk with Red Whitaker, the founder of Astrobotics, CMU’s DARPA challenge robots, and numerous other CMU robotics spinoffs,  which was pretty cool too!

Hello everyone, I apologize profusely for not posting for a while, but be assured that the semester is going well and I’m back into the swing of things.

Over the break, I mostly relaxed and visited family and high school friends, tried to play in the 16″ of snow we got (a 40-year-record for Portland), and did some website work. Before I knew it, January had rolled around and I was leaving to fly back to Pittsburgh. As most of you know, the Steelers won the Superbowl this year, but apparently the tradition is that all of the college students have a “party” in Oakland to celebrate afterwards. Their interpretation of party included burning garbage bins,  breaking a bus stop, trying to uproot trees, and generally showing their enthusiasm for Pittsburgh’s win. Once a few of my friends and I got there, most of the ruckus was calmed, and mounted patrol units started coming in to clear people out. I’m definitely looking forward to the next time Pittsburgh wins!

The week before last was “Engineers Week”, a nationwide celebration for engineers and by engineers. Carnegie Mellon demoed some cool student projects during the open house including the awesome Hexabot robot (made by a member of our Robotics Club) and a project called HandTalk that translates pseudo-sign-language into words on a cell phone.

Also, earlier this week I had a first experience with “snow showers” (not to be confused with the Northwest’s “<rain> showers”)…they were so weird! Lastly, we had a great Kiltie Band concert last night, especially because everyone played in their kilts!

I’m looking forward to a great 2009. So long!

Also, here’s a bonus panorama of the CMU “cut” and “mall” last Wednesday. After snowing last weekend, it has been 50° and beautiful in Pittsburgh these last few days, and I felt like taking a few pictures to prove it.

Wow, it’s been a whole month since my last posting! These last couple weeks have been filled with exams, final projects, and a ton of end-of-semester surprises to fill out my first year as a college student. I didn’t have opportunities for many pictures that I haven’t done before, but I am plenty involved with various activities around Carnegie Mellon’s campus. The first was a highly interactive event put on by the CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center, called Building Virtual Worlds. It was first started by Randy Pausch (who I’ve blogged about before), and I had a lot of fun attending it’s various showcases. The first was an exciting pre-show event called “Get In Line,” where arts and science students separate into groups and try and best each other in various activites using their cellphones! And of course, inside McConomy Auditorium, the ETC students showcased their game-oriented projects with an excited crowd awaiting. Search YouTube if you’re interested in watching them, they’re really cool!

Later in the week I played in the Kiltie Band final concert, which was cool too. Skipping the ECE picture, the map of names is showing the hierarchy of a test that the “Science of the Web” professor Luis Von Ahn proposed to his students. Their task? See how many people could enroll in a facebook group. If they reached 3,000 people by the end of the week, they would get an extra 10 points on their final! The black circle in the top left corner is where me and a few of my friends are. Thankfully, they reached 3,000 people by Friday, and we got a really cool map to boot.

The last picture is of a new game that I discovered that is called Blokus. The game is basically like Tetris, except that you have to play the pieces at direct corners to each other, making the game a lot of fun for everyone, especially the engineering and computer science students at CMU. For those of you back home, I guarantee you, you will be hooked!

Can’t wait to come home for Christmas Break! Now…just to get through Finals