Today I drove (by drive, I mean rode in a car while someone else drove) to Verona, WI for MICS 2014. MICS (Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium) is an annual conference that has a career fair, robotics and programming competitions, and research paper presentations. I am attending with two professors from The University of Minnesota and 12 fellow students. I am competing in the both the robotics and programming competitions. I'm very excited to compete! All I hope is that we have some fun and that our robot doesn't fail epically. Video of the robot shooting during testing
While in the 8-hour car ride from Morris, MN to our hotel in Madison, WI, I did my best to pass the time. After an hour of feeling semi-carsick from reading tweets and articles on my iPhone and watching an episode of The Simpsons, I gave in to just listening to music and leaning against the window and closing my eyes. Between listening to music and talking with my friends in our rental SUV, the time passed quickly and before too long we stopped in Woodbury, MN for some dinner. I thought I had missed Chipotle, but man, Had I missed Chipotle. There's nothing better than a carnitas burrito with rice, pinto beans, tomato salsa, corn, cheese, sour cream, and lettuce.
After Chipotle I upgraded from the very cramped back three seats in the SUV to one of the two middles seats. With the additional space, being farther forward in the vehicle, and the rainy weather, I wasn't very carsick anymore! After a couple hours of listening to music through my headphones and then through the car speakers I decided to finally be productive. By productive I mean editing my paper for around 5 minutes. It's hard to work on a research paper with no Internet (on my computer)!
I instead decided to write this post and work on adding a new page. Check it out here, it's a collection of websites that I have an account on or something similar to that. Writing code in a dark car isn't bad, especially with the darcula theme in WebStorm. But doing that in a moving car is a little more difficult. I just have to trust that I'm typing what I think I'm typing. Reading what's on the screen isn't the easiest thing. However, I was able to find the links in this post after finally leaving a 2G/EDGE only dead zone that we'd been in for an hour.
I hope that I'll have a good time at MICS! You can keep up with me on twitter, and I might even write a post on the way home with a nice summary (hopefully pictures and/or video as well).