Seven things about me you may or may not know:

1. I originally went to college to become a marketer. I started my Bentley career wanting to go in to marketing, with the eventual goal of going into Food Science R&D. I wanted to be the guy that designed snack foods, cereals, and whatnot. I quickly learned that attaining such a position either requires a long trek up the corporate ladder from sales or going to school for something more chemistry-oriented. I ended up switching to Information Systems, which eventually led me to my graduate work in Human Factors.
2. I’m an avid skiier and hiker. I know my bulbous form doesn’t show it, but I do enjoy glades skiing and hiking quite a bit. I’ve never been much of a runner; as far as exercise goes, I prefer slow and steady.
3. I play electric bass. This is funny when I think about it, because I didn’t start listening to music on a regular basis until I was in high school. I’m a huge classic rock fan, and I like blues and jazz as well. My bass skills are terrible, but I love the way the instrument sounds. I should really take some classes.
4. I love heavy story-arc television shows. Think things like Rome, Battlestar Galactica, and Six Feet Under. Character development is king!
5. My first name, Kyle, means “a narrow strait or channel.” It has its origins in Ireland and Scotland.
6. I used to run a mobile device software company. In the late 1990s when Palm OS was king of the handhelds, I ran a small 2-man development shop that built simple custom-form applications. Long since defunct, a few of our “joke” applications are still floating around out on the internet. It’s an eerie confirmation of the saying “once it’s online, it never comes off.”
7. I was a dental assistant for 4 years. Believe it or not, you actually get to talk to a lot of people. They just don’t talk back very much.

Now it’s time to tag 6 more people, because I can’t think of 7.  Here they are,

1. Greg Hjelte, a former Bentley roommate/classmate. He’s currently at IBM.
2. Matt Wagner, a former Bentley roommate/classmate. He’s a Systems Administrator in Charlestown.
3. Katt Richard, my fiancee and a Support Engineer at Cramer.
4. Ryan Bedell, my brother and a game-developer-in-training at Worcester Polytechnical Institute.
5. Thomas Simmons (aka Gravecat), photographer, gamer, and philosopher.
6. Peter Horrigan, a coworker of mine at Tangoe.

The rules:
1. Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
3. Tag seven (or 6 if your name is Kyle) people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Watch the video on the front page.

4:29:41 PM: Timothy Maguire: Discussed the looming threat of chemtrails.
4:29:44 PM: Timothy Maguire: going in my timesheet
4:29:50 PM: Timothy Maguire: under 4.0 development
4:31:14 PM: Kyle Bedell: Brief discussion of the looming threat of chemtrails
4:31:23 PM: Kyle Bedell: And my amazingly accurate guess about them selling rocks.
4:31:34 PM: Timothy Maguire: it had a copper pipe
4:31:42 PM: Kyle Bedell: But it was mostly rock.
4:31:53 PM: Kyle Bedell: A rock with a pipe coming out of it
4:32:02 PM: Timothy Maguire: pretty much

The basic idea is that said suitcase would take a few inputs:

Then the system takes all of this information, processes it (the fun part of this assignment), and gives you back:

(this poses some interesting problems)

To do this, we need to equip the system with a knowledge base of sorts. It should (at the very least) know the following:

We’re also considering a speech engine, as it was brought up that a system that could verbalize packing instructions would be quite useful. The biggest problem is adapting what one should wear based on changing weather conditions. The system needs to work with the clean clothes you have left, etc.

It also needs to be able to prevent cats from being packed into the suitcase…