Tuesday, March 8, 2011

3/7/11: Oh Joy, Technology

I forgot to post yesterday, so I'm writing this now.

Yesterday we woke up bright and early to have a nice breakfast provided by the Big Sky Resort. We all stuffed ourselves at the buffet. After that, we went to the presentation of Scott Martinelli, the LCA alum I mentioned earlier. His presentation was about heat-shield systems on things like missiles. Then, we saw Sreeja Nag's presentation about laser communication systems, specifically to the moon. She was also a part of Zero Robotics.

After that, we had a short practice session in the room we'd be presenting in... unfortunately, as is normally the case, technology hated us. The video of a simulation of HelioSPHERES that we embedded into the presentation wouldn't work. We waited quite some time to get the chance to fix it on the presentation laptop. Thankfully, we managed to fix it--it worked completely and properly.

While that one worked, there WAS something that wouldn't... Our Electronic Presentation Hall presentation. The EPH is essentially a room with a computer that has links to several powerpoints that are completely independent. We had been planning on putting our PP their, but the two videos we had embedded wouldn't work--We had been told it would be on a Mac, but the actual computer was a Mac with the Windows OS. So we've spent hours working on it, but still no luck. Thankfully, Alvar (who ran Zero Robotics) said he would help us fix it. So we're looking forward to that tomorrow (Wednesday).

We then went to the two "plenary" sessions, one of which was about the nose and its ability to identify things and the other of which was about supermassive black holes in the middle of our galaxy and others.

The EPH presentation is still depressing us even now, but hopefully Alvar will be able to fix it up for us.

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