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¶ resurfacing
Well, now I know what happens when life starts getting really busy. I stop writing here (surprise, surprise). Not sure that I really care to recap all the exciting events of the last six months, and not sure that most people would really care to read through it all, but here's the executive summary.

Life has essentially been dominated by my participation in the DARPA urban challenge. I've learned an incredible amount about working as part of a large team on a large project with high stakes. In all the other projects I've been on in the past, nobody really cared whether or not I succeeded. Okay, maybe one or two (me and my advisor) but that's about it. This one is completely different, partly because we have so many people watching. It's been an absolute whirlwind, with a short break just after we had our site visit (a qualifier of sorts). In the weeks leading up to June 20, we all hunkered down and gave it all we had, trying to get our car in shape for the site visit. As soon as that was over, I took off for a couple weeks and spent some time in singapore with stacy, and then a week in seattle to decompress. Now it's back to the grindstone, with just about 4 months left before the final race.

It's been pretty tough for me to find a balance in the last year. I haven't spent nearly as much time with my friends or family or stacy as I wanted to, haven't finished half the projects I've started, haven't made much progress on my phd, and the list goes on. Instead, everything has sort of been eclipsed by working on the urban challenge. On the other hand, I've gotten a chance to build a robot car, been interviewed by Popular Science and the Discovery Channel, and have worked on what I really believe is the future of automotive travel. It's an incredible experience, but I'm acutely aware of the things I've been missing out on. At this point, I've more or less dedicated all of my energies to seeing it through, and decided that I'll try to pick up my life where I left it come December. I am hoping, though, that I'll be better about taking some time every now and then to write here, if not only because it gives me something relaxing to do.





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