Winter street dust

Ok, so I lied before. No time to up those pics tonight. But I'm always thinking of you guys! Honest!

Um, anything new today? Let's see... nope, not really. Oh, yeah, we had some crazy Dutch (? not sure... they sounded like they were speaking Klingon) Cable TV crew come into the lab today to do a TV spot on Robovie-M. It was pretty hilarious - the reporter sounded so! excited! About EVERYTHING!!! and he KEPT! talking! about how all the robots!! we were making!! were so ... USEFUL!!!!!

Honestly, I think the robots we build are anything but useful. That's kinda the point. A big part of our research is focused on non-goal-oriented interactions between humans and robots. It depends on exactly which groups in the lab you're talking about, but many of the robots we use aren't really good for much of anything in the short term, except maybe entertainment or as tour guides, but the idea is that this research will prove useful in the future, to create robots that can smoothly interact with people in a social context.

Still, it was great to hear this guy going on about how EXCITING this all was! After spending hours tracking down threading errors in poorly-documented code with wonderfully insightful variable names like "*ppp" and "ll" (which incidentally looks like "||" in my font at work - did a double-take on that one!) it's good to be able to step back a bit, watch some cool demos, and realize once again that I have a really fun and interesting job!

Ok, another half-hour studying Japanese and I'm going to call it a night.

Word of the day: 車風 - "shafuu". It means "winter street dust".