So, how did your demo go, Bear?

Today was the annual (more-or-less) research review at our lab, where we tell our Japanese overlords what we've been doing with their money all year in hopes they'll let us play again this year. It's mostly a formality -- they're friendly, they like us, and we do lots of good stuff for the company -- but one likes to put on a good show and leave them feeling as though they've gotten their money's worth.

This year, instead of the usual two or three days, we had to cram everything into a single long day, which left our four-person group about 45 minutes into which to cram an innovative bit of user interface magic, a secure peer-to-peer document-sharing system, and quite a lot of verbiage.

Luckily, mr_kurt, our fearless leader, is a brilliant presenter, and Kim's UI demo was a big hit (totally expected -- it'll blow you away when it finally gets out of the lab and into the wild). That left finagler and me with a good build-up for the second demo, which involves four laptops, a USB keychain drive, multicast DNS, HTTP, and some unusual and subtle applications of strong crypto.

And it didn't work. Mind you, it worked fine on our three rehearsals on Friday and our two run-throughs this morning, and it worked fine back in finagler's office (all on different access points), and again outside the conference room on the same access point we'd used for the live demo. But when it came down to the wire, none of the machines could do GETs from one another, even though they could see their DNS records. Our best current thinking is that a power glitch (and we know there was one, because a UPS sounded off just about then) took out the access point right when we needed it.

Did I mention that mr_kurt is a brilliant presenter? It didn't really hurt the presentation much, since the slides covered the basic principles of the thing, but it was pretty disappointing, and left us with an intriguing puzzle on our hands. And another demo to do tomorrow afternoon. We're going to bypass the access point, thank you very much, and run in ad-hoc mode. And some other group can have the failed demo next year (there's always one).

So, how was your weekend, Mandelbear?

Pretty good, actually. Spent Saturday afternoon with super_star_girl, the Younger Daughter, and her eighth-grade science class at the Tech Museum in San Jose. The Tech Challenge was to build a device to fill sandbags with minimum human effort. (Wonder where they got that idea?) Only one other team member actually showed up; the two remaining positions were filled by kids whose teams hadn't finished their projects in time but were still hoping for some extra credit. They did fairly well: five bags in the three minutes available. The team on the adjacent pile, with an elaborate but balky Archimedes' screw lifter, didn't even finish one. (A team in the previous round did nine; we didn't stick around for the awards ceremony.)

Sunday the flower_cat, chaoswolf, and roaringmouse (who had spent the night with us at the Starport) had a Baycon meeting, the the Y.D. got taken to the movies, so I had the house to myself all afternoon. But instead of using the time to good advantage recording, I had some more coffee, went out for my walk, and went shopping for a new keyboard to replace our aging Roland HS-60. The clear winner on price and features looks like the Casio PX-310, with a street price of around $600. I'll pick one up tomorrow, since my dentist's office is right across the street from Guitar Showcase. It's a dangerous combination.

After dinner the Cat and I went out for a drive in her new van -- we likes it. Finally, came home and, yielding to a year or so of persistent pestering from the Wolfling, recorded her walk-on fragment on Bugs.

And for no good reason I can determine, both of us had the devil's own time trying to get to sleep. ( tmi )

I think I got about two hours' worth between 4 and 6. The Cat, as usual, got to sleep in -- lucky feline!