First one

Hi, my name is Ziv Rozenblum.

This is my first posting. I hope it will be a long, frequent and fruitful relationship. So lets start:

Yesterday it was snowing for the first (and a half) time in Cambridge. The half is because it was snowing couple of week ago but it was very light. For us (Orit, Shuki and I), coming from sunny Israel, it is a big thing to leave in a snowy area. For the experienced Bostonian how ever, this is an extremely light winter. According to Boston.com: "This month, 0.4 inches of snow has dusted the city, putting Boston on track for the fourth least-snowy December since 1872, when official record keeping began".

I am studying at a program called SDM at MIT. According to the SDM web site: “The goal is to educate future leaders in architecting, engineering, and designing complex products and systems, preparing them for careers as technically grounded senior managers.” I agree with that but I also see it as a great way to meet other people who share the same interests and are interesting in general. Actually some of our best new friends are current or alumni students. I also see the program as a place to have a lot of fun.
But this is not the point. The point is that every January, the program takes the new students (victims) and put the through a month of basic training. The aim is to get them to bond, to learn about the power of groups, challenge there mind and in general to put them into the MIT atmosphere. A part of the “old” student’s fun is to design one of the design challenges for the new comers.
I am part of the Jan committee. We are designing a “grab and put” challenge based on the new Lego Mindstorms NXT kit. It will be a lot of fun to watch. Last year, when I was on the victim side, we had to build a robot to go through an obstacle course. Gadi (a co-student) and I designed a build an electronic campus that helped the robot to navigate.

We try to put the focus this year on tradeoffs as well as balancing between mechanical challenge and algorithm.