Current life stuff

Greetings all! Just an update on my recent activities.

At the moment I'm taking a day off from doing anything since last week was somewhat stressful. Not because I had too much work really, but I didn't get as much done as I should have.

On the up side, I've gotten involved with the robotics club on site and I rather enjoyed my first meeting. Our initial project will be with Lego mindstorms which are very basic robotics, but great for learning. We're going break into groups and make robots to push other robots out of a ring then bet beer on them. You can see why I immediately am enjoying this club. There also is some interest in building a sugar rocket which involves making an amateur rocket that runs on table sugar and potassium nitrate. Apparently you can get impressive height out of this. We're considering launching it from a balloon at a height of 30 kilometers.

The balloon comes from another project in the works which is based upon the standard nerd project of put a camera and GPS (in this case a droid for both) and send it up. Then find it when it comes down. We're considering a steerable parachute for the descent.

Speaking of the balloon project, apparently it is against Swiss law to fly a guided flying object unless that object has a line of sight remote control. I guess to avoid amateur bomb delivery systems? I pointed out that people who are making bomb delivery systems are unlikely to care much about breaking a law about guided balloons, but oh well. The Europeans seemed to think it made sense. Myself and the other American did not. Cultural differences I suppose. Being true to Swiss form, if you do launch a guided flying object with remote control they could care less where and when you do it. We're less than 15 miles from the Geneva airport and they STILL don't require, say, informing the planes. We kind of want to avoid any potential deaths, so we'll likely find a mountain to launch it off of that is far from where planes are likely to be taking off in a dense pattern.

Beyond that I keep trying to get people to go skiing but NO ONE WILL COMMIT TO IT!!! Bah. Somewhat frustrating. I'm pushing for tomorrow skiing pretty hard... we'll see how that goes. I also am continuing work on my thesis.

One frustrating thing is that ALICE has decided (in the latest in a swathe of harebrained rules to come out of the most recent administration here) that no laptops will be allowed in the control room while on shift. This means that the 40-odd eight hour shifts I had planned to help me get my thesis done have been chopped back to 24, and even that will be pushing my available time. I am NOT a fan. Apparently people weren't focusing on their tasks for eight hours strait. Personally after eight hours of staring without much to do between what I normally would have been doing I won't be very focused either... Even less so without a distraction such as Facebook.

Beyond the marinade I just poured over some beef destined for fajitas tomorrow, not much else has been going on. Life continues.

Ciao!