Computery Stuff - You Stanford boffins...

are alright.

My company staged a mini-technical conference last week, where lots of people gave interesting talks, including a Stanford robotics professor from the team that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2o04. In case you haven't heard of it, it was a competition to build a completely autonomous car robot that would drive through 160 miles of desert, without crashing or anything (much harder than it sounds).

The guy's talk was awesome (they're now building a robot car that will drive around a city, trying not to crash/kill/maim anyone), and he mentioned an hour-long PBS documentary on the race which I watched and enjoyed, so if your name is Ricky you would probably be likewise interested (and even if it isn't, I still recommend it).