[BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

"Good Afternoon Teams,

I just got back from flying to Pennsylvania with Dean to look for additional FRC corporate support. During the plane ride (yes, Dean was the pilot) I thought of a few more things to tell you this week.

Safety animations are due this coming Monday, Dec 6th. Animations must be submitted by your team’s student award submitter in STIMS The winning animation will be shown during the live Kickoff broadcast on January 8th. I’m looking forward to seeing your submissions.

NASA grants are posted

FIRST received the $200K grant from AMEX. Thank you to all of you who voted!

Are you planning to have a week zero event? (For those of you who don’t know, a week zero event is when teams gather together the weekend before robot ship day to try out their robots in a competition like atmosphere.) We want to know who’s hosting week zero events (even the small ones). Please drop me a line at FRCTeams@usfirst.org and let me know.

Please note the version of Workbench provided in the FRC Kit of Parts (2009 – 2011) is not certified for use on 64-bit Windows operating systems. Please use the C/C++ section of the FIRST Forums for questions about this issue

If you haven’t visited Think Tank lately, you might want to check it out. WPI has just finished a number of upgrades and the site is bigger and better than ever. There’s a lot of information for teams by team about how to have a successful season.

With the extraordinary number of rookie teams this year (386 at last count) we’re looking for successful veteran teams to share their areas of expertise by contributing articles to the website. Does your team know how to use encoders? Have a fool proof method for debugging? Build custom driver station hardware? Submit an article to Think Tank and share your talent with the FRC community.

We’re also looking for a few good mentors to act as approvers for the Think Tank website. If you know of someone highly respected for their knowledge who consistently provides FRC teams with impeccable advice, please send their name and area of expertise to FRCTeams@usfirst.org. People with multiple nominations will be invited to join the elite team of approvers at Think Tank.

Watch Dean, Former VP, Al Gore and Sec. of Education, A. Duncan and the MythBusters’ team talk about FIRST during the Global Online Town Hall sponsored by Time Warner Cable.

National Robotics Week is looking for slogan suggestions to make more people aware of this annual celebration of technology. More details can be found here.

36 days to Kickoff
See you then!

Posted by Bill at 12:25pm

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

seems to have something Penn related

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

Noooooooooooooo!

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

I'm all for a game hint discussion...but could we start keeping it to the game hint threads? We have three of them.

(sorry if I'm sounding like a hypocrite - I'm pretty sure that I helped hijack the last BB thread (among others) with hint discussion, but I'm starting to see a few complaints across the forum, and the last thing we need is disagreements before build season starts)

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

Seriously. Legitimately important information and interesting topics of discussion happen in these blog posts, and it'd be nice to talk about them as intended instead of parsing through every single word to get even the slightest hint as to what this year's game is. If you want to do that, there's several other threads for that.

So about ThinkTank nominations - do we just nominate people that are notable and constantly give out good advice? If that's the case you could probably just go down the CD Reputation list and name like 15 names.

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

Cut the kid some slack, it was just one post, and Bill has dropped many subtle hints/clues/teasers like that in the past.

And you should ask your question on his blog, not sure he reads here.

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

He reads CD. You would be surprised who reads CD at FIRST HQ.

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

I would just like to point out that Bill seems to be missing a day somewhere. On December 1st, he said there were 37 days till kick off.
Today, December 3rd, he says there are 36 days left.

Anyone know which one is correct?

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

I trust what it says at the top of every CD page...

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

I had not noticed that, when did it show up?

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

It's been there forever. Now that I think about it, it probably goes unnoticed quite a bit because the font is such a light color...

But yeah. It's been there. CD is always full of little surprises :P

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

Then there's always Mark Leon's suggestion.

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

I just did. And the tiomer at the top of the page runs until 1500 on the 8th of Jan. I would say it is 6 hours fast. It should run until 0900. (The time the doors open at SNHU)

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

The countdown appears to be improperly accounting for the timezone. Unfortunately, changing the timezone to make the countdown correct changes the displayed time inside the event.

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

CD is probably their comic relief when their job is getting stressful this time of year!

"Hey guys, look how much they ran with one word in my sentence!" :yikes:

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

Or: "Hey, Dave! They figured out the game from your hint!"
"Yeah, but they don't know it, Bill. How about you drop a hint to confuse them next? Maybe something involving Jello?"

Re: [BB] The view from 30,000 feet
 

Pretty much. The ThinkTank moderation system works by having "subject matter experts" review and approve articles and article revisions as they are posted. Each moderator has a subset of tags in which they are considered an expert and they are allowed to approve articles marked with those tags.

Moderators are mainly asked to give articles quick reads to ensure that they meet the rules and formatting standards set forth on the website, and are giving correct information. Articles and revisions require a minimum of two approvals before they go live.*

ThinkTank is looking for people who are experts in their mentoring area(s) and are willing to spend some time checking the website and approving new articles. You can go to the ThinkTank website to get an idea of the kinds of articles that need approving.


*it should be noted that this was the system at the time the website was developed and released in December 2008. I assume it has not changed significantly since then, but I could be wrong