So, in order of things that have occured, I got a hockey ball walloped my thigh. See beautiful picture below. What was kinda interesting was that I didn’t really notice my leg had taken the full impact of this girl’s hit, because it nicked my hand first and that hurt *so* much more. Both hand and leg are fine now, with mild discolourations. 🙂

In other news, Rob bought himself a new digital camera. JVC, 30Gb hard drive (so no tapes or dvds – records onto its own personal hard drive) 15x optical zoom blah blah with a 3hr battery. He’s *extremely* pleased with himself, and will be bringing it to NZ to show everyone. 🙂

Uni has been good. We got a letter from our Japanese sponsors (the ones who gave us the Wakamaru robots), who have told us that People tracking, gesture recognition and navigation are more important than object and speech recognition. Which means I’ve stopped working on both the object and speech recognition and am now setting up a surveillance system with fixed cameras on the ceiling to track people and wakamaru, while sending information back and forth between wakamaru and this separate system. Will be kinda interesting, except I’m gonna have to crash course in C#, coz thats what this interface program is all written in, and I don’t fancy re-writing it. *sigh* Such is learning.

We’ve also got Wakamaru kitted out with it’s stereo camera (seen mounted on his head) and its lil bum bag, which holds the computer that does the image processing. Looks clunky now, but we have options to tidy it up, such as a hat instead of a bandana, and shorter cables everywhere. I’ll sort it out – promise.

This is Om, by the way, my research partner.

Finally, today was exciting as they did a car crash test on campus. This lil car was driven at an installed lamp post at about 40kmh. The post definatley lost the battle, as it was quite cleanly sheared off its base. Very kool.

Rob and I are looking forward to coming back to NZ and seeing all you guys. We’ll be flying into Auckland on Christmas Eve and flying back to Melbourne on Jan 7th.

Hope to see you all then,

Liz