Old Friend

Talk about serendipity...

Today I presented a talk on PGP/GPG for the Charleston SC Linux Users Group. Later, I discovered a member was a robotics fan. It made me reminisce about my "days of olde" and I started googling things.

The first result took me here:

http://www.govdeals.com/eas/closedItems_sold.cfm?itemID=1010&acctID=685&CFID=7282408&CFTOKEN=65738827

I'm truly amazed. I'm also very disappointed that I didn't find it a week ago.

For those that don't know, I'll fill in with the back story. It'll also give you some insight into LabThug.

That item is MARVIN -- Mobile Autonomous Vehicle with Intelligent Navigation. He is a CyberMotion (now defunct?) NavMaster K2A mobile platform. That was the star of USC's (now defunct?) mobile robotics lab. That lab was the birthplace of LabThug. See back when I was a student there, I was lucky enough to work-study for that lab. I worked on MARVIN: reprogrammed him to navigate mazes, showed him off to visitors, assisted in hardware repairs, etc. I lived in that lab for 3-4 years. I made friends there. MARVIN was one of them. I wanted to take MARVIN with me when I left. I would have paid (and still will) more than $180 to do so.

LabThug was created because people/things in that lab were being bothered by freshmen (or was it sophomores). So, we decided that a friendly "leave us alone" message would assist in keeping things on the up-and-up. So we made a sign, a copy of which makes up my homepage. It was at moment, within that lab, with MARVIN at my side, that LabThug was born.

And, the rest they say, is history.