From the exceptionally low frequency of updates to this site this year you’d think that I have nothing interesting to post about. Not true. Things have been exceptionally busy at work, and I’ve also managed to find some interesting things in my pursuit of building robots.

I took a trip for work to the Sophos HQ in Abingdon, United Kingdom a couple of weeks ago. Its just outside of Oxford, and its a great place. It was really nice to meet people I’ve been talking to (over the phone) for quite a few months now, and the week I spent there was incredibly productive. This was the culmination of a lot of work since spring, and it seems like its only getting more busy now through the summer.

For my robotics hobby I picked up a Hammer board from Tin Can Tools. This is a development board built around a Samsung processor with an ARM 920T core. I have this crazy idea of making a Line Maze robot that runs Linux for the Seattle Robotics Society Robothon event this October. Seriously!

The other major “toy” is my new iPhone 3GS. I’d been waiting for the new model to come out, and I even took time off from work to go stand in line on the morning it was released. I really like it, definitely another solid Apple product. I’ve slowly been re-incorporating Apple products into my household: a 15″ MacBook Pro, a Time Capsule, and now an iPhone. It is just so much better than my previous phone (Motorola Razr) and its also much better than any other device I looked at including the Blackberry product line and the phones running Google Android. I’ve got the iPhone SDK installed and have started writing my first applications. Learning Objective-C is nifty although it makes my brain hurt a little after so many years of writing C++ and Perl/Python/etc.

The day I bought my iPhone I left it with Eileen and I went out to play golf with a friend. By the time I got back she had fallen in love with it too, and demanded we go out and buy her one. So now we are a two-iPhone household.

Golf. Yes, golf. I’ve been playing pitch-n-putt (par 3) golf with people from work this summer and having a great time. I’m not that good but still its a great way to be outside and includes a small amount of physical activity. I don’t think I’ll graduate to playing a full-size course but these short courses are a lot of fun. We’ve lived around the corner from a course for a number of years but never been there. Now I will often get home from work, pick up the clubs and walk five minutes down the street to play nine holes. Lots of fun!