< ego >

So the manufacturers of a certain robotics company were on campus today repairing a beta unit which is being tested with out student body as a target market.

I walked up...asked a little about the machine...just hoping to see the inside. Turns out the company had sent a legitimate engineer to debug the beta unit instead of some tech. We talked for a while, he showed me some stuff, he started talking about how things worked. He seemed kinda uncomfortable talking to me and preferred to discuss things mostly with Vex Victim who also showed up to see the robot.

The other guy who came with him found me pretty interesting though and we talked for some time. The first guy was pretty upset with the machine and after Vex Victim left he ranted a bit, half at me half at the machine.

"The log files stopped working...the logs...why do the logs take up this much space?"

I waited patiently watching him. He turned to me and grinned, "What, genius girl going to fix my machine for me?"

So I did.

I'm now holding a business card with the email of the company's CTO on it.

Now all I have to do is survive the formal interview.

PS: For anybody who cares what was wrong with the machine...they were running a full windows system on the robot. It was throwing a lot of "send error report" requests and generally locking up. Eventually when it started up again it loaded all the names of the tabs but not the designated content. I confirmed that the contents of the tabs were indeed stored in separate files from the GUI structure. Then it I remembered that the other guy was complaining about the size of the log files. My guess was that the log files had grown so large that windows didn't have any more HD space to swap out data in and so it was unable to load the file which contained the tabs content. Guess I was right!