argus

Rarely does my company do anything that the mainstream media would deem exciting enough to report on — and I can’t really blame them. Most of our work is either pretty nitty-gritty technical with a near-zero flashiness factor, or it’s so fringe that most people glaze over as it’s described. However, every now and then something Really Cool™ gets rolled out. Like the ULTRA. To quote from an article on ajc.com:

Georgia Tech researchers have come up with what they believe may be the answer to the roadside bombs that have become the leading killer of American troops in Iraq. It’s a tougher vehicle built to better protect troops from the blasts that have claimed hundreds of lives.

Known as the ULTRA AP (Armored Patrol), the high-tech prototype was unveiled last week at the three-day Modern Day Marine exposition at Marine Corps Base Quantico. It was designed and built over the past year by more than 20 researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute with $3 million from the Office of Naval Research.

ZDNet’s “Emerging Technology Trends” blog has a good overview of the project and some pictures. The ULTRA is a funky looking vehicle to be sure — but as with most things GTRI, the design is functionality first, aesthetics later ..if at all. I got to see the ULTRA up close (even sit in it) at the Modern Day Marine Expo last week at Quantico, where it was unveiled — it screams “Mad Max” to me :)

A quick two-day work jaunt out to Camp Pendleton, exactly one year and one month after my last trip. Stayed in Carlsbad once again — although this time in a hotel right on the beach. Definitely an improvement. Work was a one-day affair, with one meeting scheduled for the morning and an afternoon set aside to work with another customer at the same site, installing and demoing our latest beta software. However, their computer lab was being renovated, so we had to postpone (for a later trip! woot!) our plans to install and demo stuff …which left me with an afternoon (2:30pm on) and evening free and to myself. A quick stop by Target for shorts and flip-flops and it was off to the beach…

Pictures are up in the gallery >>

In lieu of being creative, I offer you a random IM snippet:

me@work: man… it smells SOOOOOOOO rancid in here
me@work: jokers cooking fish in the microwave
Preble: Fish… FISH. Who does that? Really…
me@work: People that wanna get CUT, thats who
Preble: I mean, seriously… what kind of person brings that in? Tell me about them.
Preble: Better: tell The Blog.
Preble: [osphere].
me@work: Old guy. FORTRAN programmer. Primary project is called “SPAM”.
Preble: Brings in leftover fish.
me@work: Flagged for garbage collection.

A recent comment on Preble’s blog has inspired me to share a simple and entertaining word game that a fellow nerd here at work shared with me, and that the whole cadre of nerds here occasionally will bring up during conversation: preposition switching, usually in person-to-person action phrases. This lends itself to some really funny foreigner-sounding sentences (ala the aforementioned blog comment). And in our experience, the best phrases are “risque” ones. That we find these particular sentences funnier may not come as much of a surprise given that we’re all mid- to lower-20s males.

As an example, for the sentence, “I want to make out with you” the game would suggest that you replace the word “with” with a different preposition. Popular choices are usually spatial, such as “around” or “at” — and the more believable a ‘mistaken’ word choice sounds, the funnier it is: ala “I want to make out at you.” Dropping an unexpected preposition swap into an already-funny story tends to double its impact :)

Pics are up from the work dinner outing to David Tran’s family’s restaurant, Phoenix Noodle Cafe.