Elizabeth, her fiancee, and I went to Waffle House today for the first time.  The environment was quite fun, the waffles were yummy (not to mention cheap), but the darn jukebox’s labels were totally wrong!  Instead of playing “Brown Eyed Girl,” the jukebox played some R&B song.  Another mismatch prompted a waitress to ask me whether I recently divorced.  I laughed it off and let her know that the jukebox was mislabeled.

These are some good times… I sure would love some even better photographic equipment to capture these moments!

It has been about a week since I headed back to Austin to work with the solar car team.  Ahead of me is the biggest gamble I am taking.  With me are some of my best friends, who are also working on the car with me, and some of my worst foes, who are preventing the team from entering the race over some legal mumbo-jumbo.  There is still a great amount of work to do, but work is being done a lot faster with no school.

On the electrical side, we now have full battery protection and fan control on the National Instruments CompactRIO!  Although we spent about two days debugging the program when things were abnormal, we managed to get through it.  Here’s a picture of the CompactRIO hooked up to the batteries:

Amidst the mad end-of-semester, final examination rush, we started the process of creating the carbon fiber body.  Saturday was our moment of truth as we pulled the body out of the mold.  Although it took 8 people to get the body out, it takes only one person to lift the entire body:

I know that it’s been about three weeks since Hardy Heron was released, but my delayed writing of this review was intentional to a certain extent.  Although I was busy with finals and solar car team stuff, I still use Ubuntu for my day-to-day operations.  I have taken this long so that the developers have the opportunity to iron out more bugs before it makes a real impression on me.

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