The Botball 2010 Regional Tournament happened, and we won 5th place overall, the Overall Judges’ Choice Trophy, a Judges’ Choice Award for Outstanding Design Process, an Outstanding Documentation Award, and a Double Elimination Finalist Award. VECLabs was responsible for the Overall Judges’ Choice Trophy (the associated research will be published at the 2010 Global Conference on Educational Robotics in July).

By the way, I noticed that my e-mail address was eating e-mails (not sure for how long). That is fixed now, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

I would also like to apologize for the lack of updates here. Things are happening behind the scenes, and hopefully new public projects will materialize relatively soon.

Until next time, this is Jeremy Rand AKA Biolizard89 of VECLabs, signing off.

At the 2009 Global Conference on Educational Robotics in Landsdowne, VA this July, VECLabs received the 1st Place Award on Robotics Achievement Test, and shared the 1st Place Award for Outstanding Conference Paper Submission with Matt Thompson and Braden McDorman (the three of us published the paper Hacking the CBC Botball Controller: Because It Wouldn’t Be a Botball Controller if It Couldn’t Be Hacked).

The winning conference paper (as well as the two other VECLabs papers) will be posted publicly as soon as possible. (If you want to see the papers sooner than that, contact me via the Botball Community.)

A video of the VECLabs presentation on CBC Hacking will be posted soon as well.

(Sorry for the lack of updates here lately… school’s got me pretty busy.)

VECLabs will be presenting 4 technical papers at the 2009 Global Conference on Educational Robotics. One of the papers covers material which already won my Botball team a Judges’ Choice Award in March. VECLabs will also be live-blogging the conference. For confidentiality reasons, I can’t release the live-blog until the conference. It’s going to be a great conference and tournament; I hope to see you there.

Out of 36 teams from 4 states, the Botball 2009 team with the full coding prowess of VECLabs behind it came out in 5th place overall! We also won the KISS Award trophy in recognition of some specific VECLabs coding innovations. My old middle school team captured 1st place as well, so congrats to them!

VECLabs is already working on new coding innovations for GCER 2009 and the 2010 regional season, so other teams had better watch out!

(Also, VECLabs is now represented on the Botball Youth Advisory Council! Great stuff is happening there; hopefully some of it will be made public soon.)

The new year is almost here. Since 40% of people are making New Year’s Resolutions, and I like to think that I’m in the top 40%, looks like I should make some.

In Science Fair news, the 2008-2009 Science Fair Project is now officially scrapped. Just didn’t have enough time to get it working before the date of the fair. The project may end up being a GCER 2009 Robotics Showcase demo, if we feel like finishing it.

The 2009-2010 Science Fair Project is still planned; development will start probably after the Botball regionals. I picked up some equipment for this project last week. Let’s hope I don’t get bored or busy. New Year’s Resolution #1: at least put some effort into the science fair project.

In Botball news, two members of my former Botball team (which dissolved earlier this month) have joined my current team. They’re both very good, and I hope we have a decent shot at doing well this year. I’m working on some new code which may merit a GCER paper. That stays classified for now, though. (Sorry for the secrecy; we don’t need teams copying us before the tournament even happens!) New Year’s Resolutions #2 and #3: do well in Botball, and get something accepted to GCER again. Also in Botball news, I’m applying for the Botball Youth Advisory Council. Looks like a job that I’m quite well-suited to. There are probably lots of other good people applying too, so if I get accepted, I’ll get to work with some very good people. New Year’s Resolution #4: If I’m accepted for the Youth Advisory Council, do a really good job.

In Google news, I think the search index issues here are fixing themselves. However, my PageRank is still exceedingly low. A direct search for Viral Electron Chaos Laboratories doesn’t even pick this site up in the first 3 pages.

In school news, things are a bit weird right now, but I have a 4.0 GPA right now, with a good shot at keeping it that way. (One class may have to be dropped due to medical absences, though — I won’t go there.) New Year’s Resolution #5: keep a 4.0 GPA.

In other news, VECLabs is the web designer for the Autism Society of America Central Oklahoma Chapter, whose website recently got a facelift. Feel free to take a look if you’re interested in seeing my (adequate but not stupendous) web design skills. New Year’s Resolution #6: keep that site more or less updated as the organization requests.

Hmm, so 6 resolutions. If we accept the hypothesis that 40% of people making a resolution are making another, and so on, I’m in the top (40%)^6… which is the top 0.4%! Not too bad!

That’s it for now. Until next time, this is Biolizard89 of VECLabs, signing off.

I’ve been making some minor changes to the site. I started investigating the Google indexing issues, and in the process noticed that some clever cracker had managed to insert about 11KB of spam text at the bottom of every page on my site. He/she had hidden it by enclosing it within display:none; CSS, meaning that it wasn’t visible unless stylesheets were disabled (but he/she probably figured it would help out the site it was spamming for). I don’t have any proof that Google was punishing me for it, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. That is fixed now. Also, I noticed that the header was not quite as machine-readable as I would like (it should be machine-readable, but it seems some user-agents are not as standards-compliant as they should be). As a temporary fix, I added a header to the sidebar, which should also help human visitors understand what the site is about. While doing this, I upgraded WordPress and installed a Widget-compatible theme, which may or may not be useful.

As for actual project work, I’m sad to say that nothing major has happened there which I can share with you. Some Botball and science fair work is going on behind the scenes, but really not much else is going on, due to schoolwork. Sorry.

My old Botball team officially disbanded on Tuesday due to lack of funding. There’s all sorts of commentary I could make here, but I’ll save school politics for Facebook.

I am seriously considering sticking a Google ad on here. I wouldn’t mind a couple dollars of revenue, and they’re not particularly intrusive. If anyone reading this has a serious problem with this, let me know before the next time I have free time (ranging anywhere from tomorrow to next month). I probably won’t listen, but I would like to hear if anyone has an alternative suggestion to make a bit of money off my programming. And before you ask, all content on here will always remain free. I don’t charge for my hobbyist work.

That’s it for now… until next time, this is Biolizard89 of VECLabs, signing off.

As expected, things have been quiet here on the projects front. A new project of mine was unofficially announced recently over at a friend’s site. I’m not going to discuss it here, though; I don’t need craploads of IM’s over it, and lack of attention seems to be the only way to ensure that.

I notice that Google isn’t indexing this site correctly. I don’t know exactly why, but I don’t have time to investigate. It’s probably screwing over my potential viewers, since it’s very hard to find the site, but I’ll deal with it when I have a few hours to spare.

School is going okay, although I really detest the English 4 curriculum. My classes are eating up virtually all of my time, though, which is a problem, since it’s restricting the time I can spend on the science fair project. Hopefully that will change.

The Subversion host that I was using for my projects has started charging for private projects, so most of my projects will be delayed while I decide whether to pay $8.30/month, switch hosts to a crappier one, or just not use Subversion.

Finally, Obama won! W00t! Now I can stop donating money to him, and not feel guilty sending my money to ACLU, EFF, and Accountability Now PAC.

This is Biolizard89 of VECLabs, signing out for now.

People may have noticed that I added a page for VECLabs Network Connection Manager. I initially expected to have a release a while back, but my use cases changed a bit, and I need to rewrite some major portions of it. I don’t know when I’ll have time to do this — it depends on how annoyed I get having to mess with connecting and disconnecting T-MobileWeb. Luckily, when it does get released, it will have a few new features which nothing else on the market has right now for any price. Just think, I could charge money for it, but it’ll be free! The new features are not specific to T-MobileWeb, nor are they even specific to dial-up connections of any kind. They will be useful to anyone who switches network connections on a regular basis. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, science fair season is here again. I’m going to be resurrecting the project I was going to do last year. I’ll post details later. There are plans being cooked up for a science fair project next year, which may result in some awesome stuff. That project will stay secret for a while, however.

Also, I would like to wish everyone a happy belated International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arr, see me Facebook for details, me harties!

Updates may be less common for the next few months, as I have school obligations which take priority. Botball, surprisingly, won’t be taking much time in the near future, which is fine, as my science fair project involves robotics, so I can get my fix there.

Until next time, this is Biolizard89 of VECLabs, signing off.

I was at the 2008 Global Conference on Educational Robotics, including the 2008 International Botball Tournament. Details are on Fuzziqer Software forums. I won two trophies: 1st Place for Outstanding Conference Paper Submission and 1st Place in Robotics Achievement Test. W00t! The GCER papers’ titles are listed on this site now. If you’d like to read them, purchase the 2008 GCER Proceedings CD from KISS Institute for Practical Robotics. We’ll be back for GCER 2009 in the DC area, so other teams had better watch out!

I’ve decided to reopen Kirby’s Tribble Challenge to development, in the event that people would like to see improvements. Therefore, the project is now accepting donations. The first improvement would probably involve fixing the flickering issue. Further development would probably involve a two-player mode using an XBC serial port (XBC required, obviously). A GBA link port two-player mode is also a possibility.