The last few weeks have been rather hectic for me, personally. Let's recap:
I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in Information Systems and a minor in History. Commencement itself was really interesting... we had Al Gore as our keynote speaker, and Randy Pausch was a sort of "surprise" final speaker. As always, Pausch is able to turn his speeches into really inspirational stuff. We're lucky to have him at CMU.
First leg of my trip after graduation was home in North Dakota. That meant clearing out my apartment, boxing things up, and shipping them home (which isn't cheap). I stayed at home for a few weeks visiting old friends and tying up a few loose ends, and then did the process all over again.
So again I packed up my stuff (luckily a lot of it was still in boxes or suitcases), shipped some things out ahead of time, and shipped myself out to Palo Alto, California, which will be my new home. Yeah, I'm doing the startup thing. Tomorrow I start work at PAC, a cool Mac-flavored Rails company that has some really cool plans for the whole employment process (which, if my last year is an indication, sucks, since the job hunt in general is one huge long headache). Looking forward to picking up a lot about Rails and software development in general. Plus, on top of that, I'm in Palo Alto... how cool is that? Work+location+everything should just be a blast. If you're in the region, drop me a comment, email, tweet, what have you.
I'm assuming a lot of you are interested more in this section. What is the status on this fabled new version, anyway? Things were wrapping up quite nicely in early May, but then between graduation and two moves across the country, well, things unraveled a bit. It's to be expected. Now that I start getting settled in here over the next week or so, I'll start getting back on the horse, so to speak, in earnest. I'm hoping to push out the new version come July, give or take. You'll know more as I know more. Lots of fun and exciting new things in store, though.
A few things happened today that I can finally talk about. Google announced the Google Lunar X Prize, which is a form of the X Prize that is targeted towards getting a privately-funded robot on the moon. It's a $20 million prize for the first group to do it, with additional prizes for runner-ups.
My university, Carnegie Mellon, has been at the forefront of robotics for decades. The Red Team robots have done really well at the DARPA Grand Challenge the past few years, and Carnegie Mellon's going to be fielding Boss in the new DARPA Urban Challenge later this year. Naturally, this is right down our alley.
A few hours after Google announced the Lunar X Prize, CMU announced their participation. About a week ago I was recruited to toss up a website for the CMU Moon Prize Team, so that's what I've been doing the last week or so. It's all very exciting stuff- some of the possibilities are very interesting, even for us non-robotics folk out there. Live video streaming from the surface of the moon, using the robot as an email server, letting web users drive the robot, interacting via different communication options for visitors to the website, and so on. It's not your old-school Apollo 11 mission anymore. This is something that could really be an eye-opener for your average guy who can hop online. It'll be interesting to see how this might change the public's perception of space travel.