My room is a mess. It’s a disaster. Clothes on the chairs, on the shelves and on the floor; Lego on the floor and on the desk; papers piled up on the table, and even an ice cream dish perched on the monitor.

This, however, is atypical.

I’m not a neat freak, but it’s my pattern to be within 30-45 minutes of “very clean.”

So here’s my reasoning about the current state of affairs. Read on…

I’m surrounded by the cheerful beep-beep of LEGO’s standard RCX firmware confirm-download signal. Feels like an rtlToronto event.

When I found out that our major design project was a LEGO navigation challenge, I immediately jumped to ‘how can this be done the fastest, and skipped the more obvious question of ‘how can this be done the easiest or most reliably. Our bot is working great, of course, but as with many around me, it’s loaded with two separate programs — a slow and steady one and a quicker, more fault-prone one. Trying to reliably follow a line with a single light-sensor is a really tricky challenge.

So I was surfing over to the rtlToronto site, and I noticed they’ve posted some better pictures from the Deep Yellow game, which was my baby, but there’s also some rules up for a fiendishly difficult new challenge — mini block stacking.

Don’t think I’ve got time to build for this, but I’ll definitely try to make it into Toronto to watch.

Mike