Though SAIII starts next week, yesterday was the beginning of the command staff coming to town.

Felt good to put faces to names, getting to know the leaders of this exercise, and trying hard to be useful.

Took some pictures of some cool technologies (attached), something I will do the entire event.

Seabotix rep Sean Newsome showed us the 'bumblebee', a remote controlled modular submersible with a grapple. John Graham worked a way to remote control it from the Viz Lab. Hope I can see it in action.

Then David Ahlgren, brought in a portable unit that uses a battery during the night, solar during the day to receive inputs from remote sensors, and then transmit through wireless. Uses off-the-shelf hardware, packaged into a small hardened briefcase. Think it is being used by geologists right now as the nexus for a sensornet in a cave.

Kingston, the RAM company, gave us a gaggle of 4GB thumb drives that use encryption. When put into a computer (I assume Windows only from the look of the software included), a virtual CDROM is created in the drive map. This virtual ROM autoloads the software that accesses the encrypted thumb drive. I would prefer wiping the encryption side of the device, and just using the unit as a 4GB drive, but I'm betting the device has firmware that prevents me from doing so (so far).

I worked on the SAIII web page. Easy stuff, just appending URLs to the Organizations page. Did some tech support, nothing major.