Robotex 2017

We got the AR demo working, yays!

My nose gave birth to some mutant blemishes, especially for the event. Cheers for looking like an ugly witch. Nothing I could do about it, so I paid little attention to it. The place was pretty noisy, so had to shout throughout the day, for 3 days in a row.

Interesting people. A couple of kids hanged around for a whole day, always coming back with more awesome questions. Kids are really amazing these days. I hope I managed to amplify the enthusiasm of one of them with a brief description of what drove me to study physics .. and look into astral projection and psychokinesis. :: me imagines me looking like a witch with a large bulge on my nose, while having a creepy smile on my face and talking about psychokinesis experiments ::

Old man with gray hair

For 3 years, there has been a gray-haired old man (probably in his 70s or 80s) talking strange stuff. He has not been very coherent .. keeps hopping from one topic to another, often using incorrect terms and coming off with illogical arguments. I have taken him as a practice of patience .. whether there are other people waiting or not, I try my best at deciphering this old dude, his ideas and problems. It does not matter who says things, or how they say things, there is always the possibility that it contains pearls. Often the person speaking does not see the pearls by themselves. Also, some of these pearls are difficult to spot, unless one listens attentively. This old man is interesting because at his age, he is very enthusiastic about learning new things. Each year he has researched things that I have told him the previous years. He also puts forth an effort in explaining his challenges in my terminology (though, he often makes mistakes). Anyway, he's very difficult to decipher but he's a really interesting guy.

On Friday, I witnessed another student put up a display with a webcam and neural nets demo. The setup looked dangerous - likely to fall over. On Saturday, the old man accidentally tipped the screen. At the same time, a kid was looking at the display and caught it. Together with the old man, we then managed to set it back up but in the meantime, the kid got scolded by his dad -.-

Regardless of us saving the setup, the students forgot to switch it off in the evening and the system (actually its X server) had crashed by the next morning.

11 hours of sleep

Finally got to sleep a reasonable number of hours on Friday night. Forgot the dreams by the morning, though. What I do remember though: I was in some kind of a realm with beautiful scenery and unearthly creatures.

The rest of the dreams are from Saturday night.

Dream: Burning plant

Read goosebump-inducing stories on reddit before going to bed. One of them happened to be creepy as well - related to some kind of a dark pagan cult rituals somewhere.

In the dream, I popped up at the summerhouse, approaching the yard from the seaside / pasture. Most of the family was waiting for me at the well. All of them were in black clothes with red ribbons (I think). Many of them held red roses for this event / occasion. I did not have a red rose but someone mentioned that a candle would also do. Did not have a candle, either, so I plucked a "flower" that had caught my attention. It was a strange one. It didn't look particularly pretty, it reminded me of a typha only that it had thorns like a rose and there was a small flame on its tip (not sure if the flame appeared when I touched it or if it was there before). One of the family members asked: "Why did you pluck this one? It typically cuts up the skin pretty bad." I replied: "That's not a problem because I have gloves on. See?" and showed them my healthy hands with very simple white gloves on.

Held the plant in my right hand (the hand that I plucked it with), waiting for the event or somesuch. The plant caught fire and started burning top-down. It burned pretty fast, and when the flame was about to touch my hand, I let go of it. I was standing on a slab of limestone, so that it could burn the way it wanted without damaging anything. Well, it missed the limestone and with a tiny piece of glowing coal it lit the grass, which also caught fire. Quickly extinguished the grass and woke, covered in sweat and feeling a bit too warm to sleep properly.

Dream: White rooms

Shallow dream about exploring a building full of completely white rooms with white doors, white floors and ceilings. Actually, there were 3 of us exploring the building, trying to avoid being caught. The other 2 more like looked around without moving much. Noticed a janitor through a door with a glass window. Fled through the nearest door only to realize that was where the janitor had come from. This place had no shadows, nowhere to hide. Haven't had hide & seek dreams for a while.

Dream: Discussion on hacking networks

Popped up at a room with people discussing stuff. There was a young self-taught dude who described his methods and amazement at how easy it is. Looked like an interview or some friends discussing things. Totally lacking experience and theoretical knowledge in security, I floated around and listened with great interest. Also, I was surprised at how clear and detailed his facial features were. He stood in front of a window, and while the rest of the surroundings were dark and blurry, he himself was very clear.

Remembered the dream at a random moment today.

Synchronous geisting?

Listened to music with headphones on the way back home. The friend who was driving, was listening to a podcast. ::my music stopped and his podcast started glitch-looping:: Friend waits for it to recover but it does not, so he timeouts and reloads the podcast. An hour later, a stress-inducing song comes on and his car's on-board computer goes blank. He tried different things, but eventually waiting for all the systems to stand-by, then locking the car, unlocking it and restarting all the systems helped.