I had a glass of water that I was drinking this evening sitting on my coffee table, and I noticed that the refracted light from the fixtures in my apartment was creating some really neat patterns on the table. Being easily fascinated by phenomena like this, I couldn’t help but take a quick snapshot and post it here.

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to Lake Roesiger Park, near Snohomish, to take some photos on the weekend when it was nice out. We basically just looked at the map, picked somewhere that looked sort of interesting, and went for a drive.

On the way

Upon arriving, we found a small park with a beach on the lake, and it was packed with people. A nice place, but not the kind of photo subjects that we were looking for. Until we found the entrance to the trail, that is.

Ferns

Straight lines and perspective

Old growth & new growth

Green

I’d say I was pretty satisfied with the photos I took. It was good to get out and take some carefully composed pictures again—with all of the preparations for the conference and all of the travel, it had been quite a while since I had done so.

See where these photos were taken on my Flickr map for this photoset.

I met up with Brad this weekend, first to take some photos, and then to hang out with Chris, Heather, and Paul for dinner and board games. Since this weekend was the University District Street Fair (one of the better known and longest running street festival in the country) coordinating a rendezvous on the Ave would have been impossible. Instead, I started walking toward campus, where it would be easier to be picked up. On the way, I snapped a few photos.

This weekend really made it feel like summer is beginning. It was definitely T-shirt weather. It was good to get out for a bit—Brad and I went to Lake Roesiger Park (photos are forthcoming.)

I spent the past week in Anchorage, Alaska for the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The weather was excellent for almost the entire trip. Despite the ice in the above photo, it was very pleasant to be out and about. Josh and I took a walk down by the water shortly after arriving on the first day.

Alaska

The conference banquet was originally planned to be on a train which would go through the mountains as dinner was served. But the train filled up and us late registrants didn’t get tickets. Instead, there was an alternate banquet at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Before dinner, we walked around outside and heard presentations from several native Alaskans.

Also present were several mushers and their dogs.

Alaska was fun to visit. It did take me a couple of days to get used to the fact that it was light out until pretty late at night, and then light again pretty early in the morning. I could probably get used to that, but would have a hard time in the winter when it’s almost constantly dark.

ICRA 2010

At the conference itself, I presented two papers, Robot, Feed Thyself and An Electric Field Pretouch System for Grasping and Co-Manipulation. Both talks went pretty well.

I also saw lots of pretty cool robot stuff. It’s always fascinating to see what other research is going on in the field. Several groups brought hardware to demo. I was really excited to see the completed PR2 beta hardware which looks like it would be really neat to work with. I make extensive use of the Willow Garage ROS software, so it’s always really cool to see what the developers are doing with it and find out about new and useful components that we can integrate into our own systems.

Welcome to the new Ordered Pixels. The site is still a work-in-progress, but I want to get back to posting on Ordered Pixels, and don’t really want to keep adding to the old site when the new one is so much nicer, so I’m switching over to this even though it’s not completely finished yet.

Site URLs

For now, you get here by going to http://next.bdm.cc. (It’s the “next” Ordered Pixels.) This will eventually change so that the old URL brings you here; orderedpixels.com is currently hosted on another provider, and there are more things tied to it than just the web site. In order to get the URL pointing at the new site, I need to make sure that all of those other things are moved over to the new server as well, and I still haven’t gotten around to doing that. So for now, use the temporary URL.

If you use an RSS reader to monitor Ordered Pixels, the new feed URLs are in the sidebar to the right (the RSS and Atom links).

Pardon the dust

I’m still putting together the new design, so there are still a few minor design quirks that will get fixed. Also, if you navigate away from the front page, you might run into a few pages that don’t have defined templates, and you’ll get a random blob of links and content.

Use a modern browser

I don’t guarantee that the site will look anything close to good in Internet Explorer 6. I decided that it’s not worth the effort to support ancient browsers anymore, and development is so much easier (and the page ultimately ends up looking nicer) when taking advantage of features of newer browsers.

Old posts

I’ve brought over all of my old entries from Ordered Pixels. I still need to fix all of the images, which I’ll get to eventually.

Welcome!

With all of that said, I hope you enjoy the new site. Hopefully I will be posting here more often again.