DORKTASTIC

[rmd]

So, yeah, I spent yesterday wandering around the BU Agganis Arena for the Boston FIRST robot competition.

It was utterly dorktastic. It warms my heart to see kids wandering around with "$HIGHSCHOOL Robotics Team" shirts for their schools.

I have a pile of pictures over on flickr

Comments

[jmspencer.livejournal.com]

Even dorkier? My varsity letter was for the Quincy High School FIRST Robotics team.

And our team number is 69, which provided no end of entertainment when I was 16

[liralen.livejournal.com]

YAY! Yay! YaY!!!

[babasyzygy.livejournal.com]

Here's my contribution to the dorkvibe:

There's something about that that gives me a 1950's optimistic technofuturism rush, of the kind where high school kids were playing with building radios and such because decades down the road they'd be wielding technology to build a more perfect world.

Fuck the flying cars. We've got cleaning robots, on-line shopping, hand-held GPS maps with live traffic, and a really kick-ass standard of living. We're living in the future, and it's only getting futurier.

[babasyzygy.livejournal.com]

And as if to agree with my sentiment, the TV just showed me an ad for one of those inevitable technologies, ubiquitous in much of SF, that is finally being commercialized: an affordable personal combo GPS/satellite text message transceiver (http://www.findmespot.com/home.aspx).

They're marketing it to adventure travelers, playing on the fear of being incapacitated out of cell phone range.

[muffyjo]

I see you got your dork on. Nice. Really nice. Warms the cockles of my heart, it does. :)

[smcmullan.livejournal.com]

Is it wrong to be envious of my kids, who have had the opportunity to be involved in FIRST for their entire high-school careers? I have been involved as a parent volunteer, but having to work for a living really puts a crimp in my style during build season...