Bill Blogged - It’s a good thing Ben & Jerry’s delivers

7/15/11 Bill Blogged - It’s a good thing Ben & Jerry’s delivers

Good Afternoon Teams,

This is the time of year that the engineering staff are almost glad they work in the basement of the old mill where FIRST is headquartered.  It’s hot here in Manchester and most of us need regular applications of ice cream to keep going.  Matt and Ryan are camped out on the third floor with a field improving radio performance in the presence of a large number of wifi networks.  Derek, Rob and Monica are behind closed doors testing prototypes and finalizing designs for the 2012 field elements.  We know enough about what the game will look like to want to remind everyone, “’tis the season to buy Pool noodles”.

Here on the fourth floor, Marketing is switching the usfirst.org website to a new content management system which should be up and running by August.  The website will look very much the same, but behind the scenes the system will allow us to make important functional changes.   During the transition we’re limiting content changes (to prevent having to make the changes twice) but once the system is in place we’ll be back up and running and we can start improvements to functionality.  

The initial results from the May Brandeis survey of FRC teams arrived today.  Brandeis will be in next week to discuss their findings and if anything interesting comes from that conversation I’ll be sure to let you know. 

I hope you are enjoying the warm weather.  If you can’t get enough LOGO MOTION during the off season, be sure to check out the Off Season Events listing on our website.

Congratulations to Sergio Seguel of Team 2576 The Chilean Heart who mentored the FLL team that has been selected to participate in Moonbots 2.0.   To every FRC team member who mentors other teams – you make an important difference.  Thank you for changing the culture one student at a time.

Best Buy is offering Community Grants that could benefit your team (if you have a 501 ( c ) (3) ).  The deadline is August 1st.

Time Warner Cable is holding a trivia contest every day until Aug 4th based on “It Ain’t Rocket Science”

177 days until Kickoff

See you then!