Far from Italy indeed, but nothing is better than a sunny day on the beach. Thanks to one of the brightest blue sky in a month, we reached Cushendun.
 Beach in Cushendun |
 Rocky beach |
 Flowers on the rocks |
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As you may be aware of, I spent more than a month in Northern Ireland, mostly working.
But I had also a very nice trip with my girlfriend, around some of the most beautiful places. This is the log of this amazing journey 
Let’s start with a map.
View NI 2010 in a larger map
In the above map, you should see the whole trip, divided in several trails. Each trail is the route (more or less) we drove in a day, so you can keep track of the trip ^_^
An entire month is passed and no more news from Belfast. The fact is that until yesterday, I was actively working (more or less) on the reason why I’m here.
I was able to pack a little demo that show the base architecture I did and now I can relax on my last week in Belfast. I have to complete the documentation, you know, otherwise nobody will understand my code, but, there is time for that. (BTW, the source code and the description of the project will be available soon here).
Northern Ireland is a great country. I really like it. I call it “Northern Ireland”, because it’s Ireland, but it’s United Kingdom, too. People that have been both in UK and IE say that the countries and people are quite different. British tend to be more cold than Irish, and student are absolutely rude with professor.
To me, it seems to live in PleasentVille (do you remember it?) People are very kind and they are so polite and helpful that is a pleasure to have troubles here (beware: not Troubles!). There is always a smile in their face, and it is impossible to not love them!
There are many inconsistencies. For some aspects it is very well-advanced. All the buildings are wheelchair accessible (and I mean every) and the medical care is free for everybody. Which is great, but it is a non-sense: the medicines and doctor are paid by the Government, that uses money from taxes. So, what is free, in reality it is not. The technology, on the contrary is not as advanced as UK. The recycling system just works, but the heating system burns oil. Seriously. Simply there is not any gas methane here. And everybody loves their car. Even in the remote village of very Northern Ireland you can find many big cars that sucks petrol and smokes the air.
In this case, however, this country is lucky: it rains every week (you can count on it) and the air is always fresh. When I first arrived here, I felt cold, but now, there are 15° and I am in short and t-shirt. And of course, the grass is green. And cut perfectly. Even the smallest garden is perfectly cut, at the University campus the grass is cut once a week, and they even collect the rubbish.
It’s almost a pity I already (will) have a job, otherwise, who knows…
The first week is gone, and now is almost time to start… wait, I forgot something: why I am here, in the first place!
Well, let’s start again.
Hi everybody! Here it is you beloved Luca that is writing from Belfast, the main city of Ulster.
Since I am between two jobs (I love this, because it seems that I had a salary before and I will one after. The fact is that I did not see the former one and the latter, who knows…), I accepted the kind proposal of a professor to spend a period at the University of Ulster. So, here we are!
RoboCup 2010 - The Final (copyright by Reuters)
Long time claimed, but impossible to demonstrate. With these words could have been described the goal scored by CHITA team to CMU (Carnagie Mellon).
Long story made short. During last RoboCup, in the match won by CMU, our team scored a goal from our half-field by using back-kick. The video is unavailable, inexplicably the CMU guy claimed: “I did not record that…”.
We believed that the proof of our moment of glory was gone forever, buried just in our memory.
But we believe in Internet! And, finally we have the proof!
“I’ve never seen back-kick scoring like this in real soccer,” he said after one of his robots found the net with a spectacular back-heel against a team from Carnegie Mellon University of the United States.
Read the complete article for discover the identity of the one!
(btw the source is reliable, is nevertheless the “Reuters“)
The first day of the RoboCup 2010 is gone, and we are almost sleeping.
The code has still some problems, and some of them are critical for having good behaviour.
The “joint” part is not completely tested, but we are quite confident we will have good matches.
The hot is damn “hot”! For those of you that were in Osaka or Suzhou, the weather is like that. I will say that it is hotter than Osaka, but with this humidity is almost impossible to breathe.
We will start the official competition on Monday, and that means we have still time to be better!
Our first test against Nao Devils was quite a mess: the behaviour was ok, but it has a critical bug preventing a good playing.
We fixed this, so next time we will play better, but they can fix bugs too…
BTW, do not worry, I believe we can made it.. LA VINCIAMO!!!!
Now, it is time to go to bed… but stay tuned for another update tomorrow (if I will survive to the humidity…)
AH! For those of you are eager to know the results, point your browser here…
Let’s go win SPQR!
Here we are… we packed everything, our code is on the svn, the shirts are printed and the robots are sleeping in the bags.
Our plane is scheduled at 15:30, so we are almost done with the time in the lab.
Well if you did not understood yet what I am talking about, we (SPQR) are leaving for the RoboCup 2010 in Singapore!
The schedule are already on the net, check it out here.
Now, I have a plane to catch, so… see you on the other side of the world!
… we are choosing the new T-shirt design for the RoboCup!
This year the SPQR team will join the UChile team to become the “CHITA hominids”.
As you can wonder, CHITA comes from CHIle + ITAly = CHITA.
So… here it is the 2010 logo:
The CHITA RoboCup logo
As I was telling you before, this year design is based on this logo. The shirt will be by “Fruit of the Loom” like these.
There will be some change in the colour (last year we had red-shirt, but the ball is red too, so…) and here it is some draft.
Tips’n'tricks: for a larger view, click here
Pick up your choice!
WARNING: there are two slightly different design: inset (D,H,I) and filled (the other). Vote your below (multiple choices are allowed)!
[poll id="2"]
At last, today I’ve finished with a very stressful period of time (until the next one, of course…).
I’m in Istanbul, because of the OberSeminar 2010.
I did my presentation in the morning, and it was very good to have many question to have a feedback.
Istanbul is a beautiful city. We arrived yesterday, and we took just a little peek.
The skyline is full of spike like this:
The Istanbul skyline
Unbelievable…
It seems people at Google completely lost their mind. They just changed the name of the company in Topeka.
Google goes Topeka
Why such thing? Well, they launched a fiber optics experiment, and Topeka changed its name in March as “Google, Kansas, the capital city of fiber optics“.
So, it seems they did a surprise to us, but I guess that people there they have their reason. Maybe, there are also some hidden reason here what it the day today?, but who knows what will happen in the future.
As the time goes by, we will see if Google Topeka will be right!
Let’s go Topeka then!