• Rick Middleton, everyone’s favorite Kalman Filter guru from the NUbots, is now @ NUIM, the National University of Ireland Maynooth, and has brought RoboCup with him. They are aiming to get into the Nao league. Here’s a link [100mb] to a presentation he’s given along with some clips. As he says on his website, the NUbots have placed in the top three since they joined 2002. That’s pretty sweet.
• Speaking of NUbots, I’ve had the pleasure to hang out with Mike Quinlan out here in Silicon Valley. One thing he mentioned was that at his new lab, at UT Austin, they have enough room for the new 5×7.5m field and enough Aibos to invite to a tea party. That’ll certainly be an advantage for them this year.
• One of the things the 4LL (now SPL) prided itself with when each league gave a brief demonstration (gong show!) was the history kept on its site. Well, here it is — and it’s got some pretty sweet stuff.
• Is ‘Bits and Bytes’ too lame of a name?

Thank you, whoever put updated the logo, thank you.

Also, the Nao Applications have gone in. 24 teams are vying for 12 slots.

• Tucker Hermans, rockstar junior nBites member studying abroad in Berlin, now has a blog and a flickr account.
• The NUbots, or at least as we know them, have retired their aibos. From their website: “After a long and successful career our team of AIBO robots is going to retire from active competition. Their last demo game was at the University of Newcastle information day on 8. September 2007. Although the Sony AIBO robot is not built anymore and the RoboCup Four-Legged League is fading out the members and adjoints of the Newcastle Robotics Lab continue research on several exiting robotics related projects such as bi-ped walk, robot simulations, robot vision, human-robot interaction, as well as further development of the robot bear in collaboration with Tribotix.”
• Mark and Henry have found an apartment in Mountain View, CA, and are planning out their revolutionary products.
• Because Henry got an iPhone, nBites gets iPod-sized videos of all its matches. Check them out on the Media page.
• Google Video, High Quality, and iPod-sized versions of the other semi-final game, between the NUbots and WrightEagle, are now available.
• A well-meaning but very odd blurb showed up about us in the Orient, instead of the front page above the fold story we deserve. How exactly we won a gold ‘metal’ abroad in Atlanta, we’re not sure, but scientists are working on it as we speak.

We had the graphic — and now we’ve been pushed off. By Plant Biology!! Damn you, Plant Biology!

Well, at least we can have solace that we’ve reappeared in the ‘News’ section via our iTunes U article. Even though it’s mostly an article about iTunes U, it’s still cool.

By the way, who started the rumor that we play on a 3×5 meter field? All press articles seem to have this now. We play on a 4×6. Duh.