[miketwalker]

Now that I'm back in town and passed the exam I had to take (yay for time to study this weekend, eh? :-p), I've got a pretty big list of people to thank. There were so many people (and if I forget anyone, yell at me, because I'm still recovering on sleep).

John Burke - I can't count the number of times I've been on the phone with that guy in the past several weeks. He's been at the heart of this competition and has been an incredible coordinator.

David Ellich and the rest of the committee - They did such a good job in the planning phases with getting things in line that I rarely needed to talk with them to keep things going, even when everything turned into Mayhem. They organized the sponsors/venue/volunteers so incredibly well that in crisis the support groups were completly in place.

Arefin Bari - Mr. Burke's right-hand man. The two of them together did an incredible job organizing the volunteers/sponsors/venue/etc.

DeVry - I have never seen such an excited sponsor/venue. The entire community became part of FIRST for the days we were there. The IT guys were so amazing, everytime I had a problem/request I got 10x what I asked for in return... and with a large smile. After all of the problems on Friday when I talked with several of the higher-ups they just smiled and said "Hey, this is all part of how it goes... you guys will figure something out." to coming in Saturday and them loving the final product.

A personal moment that really, really made my weekend was when I came in at 6:30 Saturday morning and it was just Billfred and I with the security guard opening the door for us. Then when he started singing I just went "Wow, you have an incredible voice..." and I listened to him sing the national anthem. He later was invited and changed out of his security clothes into dress clothes and sang the national anthem for our opening ceremonies and was so incredibly proud to be part of what we were doing. It was really cool to see how happy he was both to be able to sing in front of all of these people as well as join in with all the work he had been watching over the past few days.

Jim Martz - I'd almost consider Jim my twin, even though we look nothing alike. Since we worked on Battlebots IQ early last year, it's been great working with Jim because he's always on the same page as me and is always there to help out without even having to tell him what the situation is.

Everybody in the GDC room - Wow! You guys made for one of the most exciting and incredible 3 hours of my life. When Mike from DeVry came into the room at one point he talked to me on the side and I just said "If you want to see a miracle happen, sit in this room for 10 minutes." and he just smiled. Great job to everybody in there.

Billfred - A long trip, an even longer weekend. Between helping finalize the game rules, and then working with the refs and teams to get everybody on the same page very quickly was great.

Kevin from 1251 - Without Kevin, the field would not have run. Plain and simple. He spent the day helping to keep our manual-field-control going by manually setting each team's radio frequency every match. After the first few matches he had gotten so good at it that we didn't even have to check with him to make sure everybody's radios were set properly. Between that and his help with John on the RTS USB Keyboard setup, he was a key member to the functioning competition. He also built the final modified 3-pt goals used to fit below the roof and also integrate with the field. I'm really glad he'll be coming to UCF in the fall, I look forward to getting to work with him more in the upcoming year.

John from 1251 - The video guy. He helped me out incredibly much when I was starting to figure out issues with the webfeed on Thursday. He stuck with it all day until we had it working that night and then ran the video and kept the webfeed going for the competition.

Everyone that built that field - There were alot of hurting backs after all the field movement between building, takedown, moving, rebuild, takedown, pack, ship. We couldn't have done it without the reliable members that helped out with the entire process.

George Wallace and Neha - Their in-game announcing was incredibly fun and made for a very fun competition.

The FIRST GDC - Although the modular field was probably not designed for something like this, its' adaptability was incredible. I have found even more respect for the GDC group after the events of this past weekend... you guys do an amazing job creating these games, and when we met to even try to creating something of that quality was such a challenge. Thank you for everything that you do.