PANORAMAN

My father passed away this weekend after a several year struggle with cancer.  We were lucky to spend some great time together with the whole family in the last month.  We all knew that he was the kindest and most loving father, husband, and friend, but he was also revered in his professional life as well, as is evident by the articles in CT’s newspapers after his death.

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-tom-murphy-death-0109-20120108,0,3561876.story

http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2012/01/08/news/doc4f09ce9f10a59595603992.txt

Thanks to everyone for your support.  He will be missed by all.

Time for my annual birthday self-portraits.  31 old years old.

Senior portraits are in.  They just grow up so fast!

When i was 6 years old, my father brought me to some kind of tech expo in New York City.  We also visited the top deck of one of the World Trade Center towers.  I guess that made some kind of an impression on me, as ~25 years later I’ve become a robot scientist.  The coolest part is, that little science fiction humanoid robot on the brochure in the photo, is now the real deal.  The company i work for just released the first public video of our new robot PETMAN.  I’ve posted photos before, but you kind of have to see it move to really see what we’re up to.

check it out

irregardlessly:

One whole year. Here’s to at least one more. Maybe one and a half even.

And they said we’d never make it this far…

Got to go surfing for the first time this past weekend.  Every time I stood up and rode a wave, i looked down to see my pink surfboard’s “SurferGrils” logo.

Newly released video of our robot AlphaDog (prototype) as part of our Legged Squad Support System (LS3) program.  More info on our website.

Say hello to Loki, our new kitten.

Likes: nocturnal aparment parkour

Dislikes: waiting for alarm the clock to wake us up

Boston Spartan Race 2011.  So much harder than last year.  Involved carrying 5 gallon buckets of gravel up and down a ski hill, straight rope climbs, lots and lots of mud and barbed wire crawling, and, of course, jumping over fire.

The epic-ish video on their main page sums it up nicely.

 I think I did pretty well, but a bunch of us appeared to trigger the starting line sensor during our warmup so there may be some math involved to figure out my time.  I successfully completed all of the obstacles without penalties except for two (balance log hops, and the spear throw [again!]).  Really wiped out right now.

Update:  I finished 11th in my heat, 3rd person from my company.  Way better than last year.

My little sister Kerrigan married my new brother Kevin last weekend!  She asked me to set up a photobooth at the reception.  I soldered up a foot-pedal to my camera kit with some lighting, and this is what it captured.

Somebody’s getting impatient.

Jusssst getting started packing. I need to look up the clinical definition of ‘Hoarder.’

Oh the cliffs of moher.  10mm fisheye and you still can’t fit it all in one image.  We walked down to the shelf and disregarded the ‘do not climb over this wall’ signs.  I had dreams about falling off these cliffs while looking through the camera, so that made me pretty cautious.  

This is my overly dramatic photo of Poulnabrone dolmen in the Burren Park in Ireland.  The thing is actually kinda tiny and it was a pretty clear sunny day, but that makes for a boring photo, so you gotta get down near the ground and shoot toward the sun.