I went to NI Connect in late April, which was held for the first time in Fort Worth.
Notably for someone like me, a cool action shot of me made it to the NI Connect Fort Worth Session Content page. Scroll to the bottom to see…

I went to NI Connect in late April, which was held for the first time in Fort Worth.
Notably for someone like me, a cool action shot of me made it to the NI Connect Fort Worth Session Content page. Scroll to the bottom to see…
Moving up from the Intermediate to the Advanced League has been rough on the team, now on our 19th season.
We still look good, though.
A couple of months ago, I was made a very interesting offer: Move to Bangalore, India, in order to be the Technical Lead of a new R&D team being formed at the office over there.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but after lots of deliberation with my family, I decided to accept.
This will be a three-year stint that could be extended, starting in the fall. We’re very excited and looking forward to eating lots of Indian food.
Further information on exact date, farewell party, and so on will follow.
Manuel (of the opposing team) recorded all their Volleyball matches using a little Geek Pro. They use them to analyze their matches, correct their mistakes, improve on their technique… or to make fun of each other. He sent me the video of last Thursday’s Championship match which was right around one hour long.
Because nobody wants to watch a one hour long video of mediocre amateur volleyball, I thought it’d be a good idea to edit out the significant dead time. But that’s a lot of tedious work, even for me.
Enter: Amazon Mechanical Turk: “The Artificial Artificial Intelligence”.
Cleverly named after the 18th century fake chess playing machine; which I thought was a well known story but turns out I only know about it because of my odd childhood reading habits; Mechanical Turk is a service that allows you to set up jobs for someone else to do. It’s a great way for those who earn in US Dollars or Euros (but not British pounds!) to get people in China or India or some other low income country to do their menial tasks.
In any case, I uploaded the video to Dropbox and set up a gig, offering $5 to whoever does it.
For your enjoyment, the full edited match:
Iker, Santiago, Carlos
Los Mascotes – NI’s summer volleyball league’s oldest (maybe) team – is back. Against all odds we reached the final last year. And lost it.
Can we win the league this time? Yes, we can.
2015 edition. Also Jaramillo’s last match as a Masacote.
Some extras:
A frisbee-shooting robot built by students of Westlake High School using NI products barely missed the face of Vice President of Marketing Ray Almgren. Better luck next time!
Robotic elephants build with Lego Mindstorms EV3 prepare to take over the world:
This is me and NASA’s next Lunar Lander. That things is going to be on the Moon. With my fingerprints on it.