This has been a great experience in my life. I have been with a great group of high school students which includes my grandson. Today is the start of the double eliminations. We start in the 41 bracket and our school is in the 23rd bracket. We have a good chance at placing high enough that we will make the final competition on Sunday which will include the last eight brackets. The guys are excited and I am excited about the prospects. To put this in perspective, there are about 65 teams at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics being held at the Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Our team came out 3rd overall out of about 55 teams at the regionals in DC. We are now with the best of the best in the country, and since this is an international competition we have one team from Kuwait and two teams from Poland. The competition is friendly and ideas for designs have been passing back and forth freely between teams.

Since things have settled down at work, I have decided to take my name off of the job market. I am starting to warm up to the work that I have been assigned on an Army program, and I seem to be getting caught up on a different project that has been going on for the better part of 8 years in a maintenance mode. I realize that I may be taking my future in my hands at this point but I think that maybe the Lord is wanting me to rethink my position at this point. Anyway, I am about to remove my name from the pool of people on several job related web sites at this point. Time will tell whether this was a good move or not.

Well, time to think about the trip out to Illlinois with the BotBall team. In a little over 24 hours, I will be carpooling with the BotBall teacher to drive 5 guys out to the Conference. If you would like to know what is going on here, go to http://www.botball.org and look at the information. It looks like my grandson and I will be taking the Prius with the robots and the teacher will be taking 4 other team members. The trip will be about 13 hours and I will keep you posted.

I am finally back from my vacation with my daughter and son-in-law at Massanutten. Over all, I really liked the facility. It's too bad that it could not have been for another week. I was just getting used to the place. I went kayaking down the Shannandoah river and flipped the kayak twice. I will post pictures here and on my Facebook page when I get the pictures developed (I was using a water tight disposable camera on the river). That was an adventure. I also had the opportunity to hike up the ridge line from Massanutten almost to the area where the ski slopes are at. I didn't want to have to climb down the ski slope because it is a double black diamond slope, a little too steep. So I went half way on the ridge and then came back the same way. In all, I spent about three hours on the peak. My wife and I got a chance to sit in the jacusi on the last night of our stay, that felt real good.

At the moment, I am typing this on a bluetooth keyboard. I decided that since I was not going to be purchasing an iPad that i would at least make it possible to key in a lot of information into my iPhone. In short, I am finding that the keyboard works a whole lot faster than typing on the tiny keypad that comes up on the iPhone screen. That should be obvious to anyone who is a touch typist. I have been a touch typist ever since I graduated high school some 40 years ago. Cool, now I can blog a little more eloquently and hopefully I will have more to say than the simple tomes that I have provided thus far.

I am finally on vacation with my wife. My daughter invited us to their time share for the week and I am finally getting to the rested stage after 4 days. I have to say that the Shannandoa Valley is a great place to be. Too bad everything costs money here. The view is terrific and I have enjoyed the time with my wife and my granddaughter.

Well, now that I have passed on purchasing and iPad ($, utility lacking) and/or a NetBook ($, utility lacking, lack of horsepower) I am in pursuit of getting an Ubuntu laptop up to the point of having everything that I need.  So far, Ubuntu meets my software development and web development needs, my need for reading documents, and my need to get on the web at various times.  The only thing that Windows did for my home system that I need to determine is the apparent lack of a dynamic compressor for audio manipulation.  I used a package on Windows 2000 that gave me the ability to manipulate audio pretty well in a very professional manner.  The dynamic compressor on this thing was pretty impressive since you could set it according to both amplitude and frequency.  I need to find something like that for Ubuntu but so far I have come up short.  Time will tell.  I will be going on vacation this weekend and hope to remedy this issue while I am gone.