Team Toad: Treasure Island May 2001

3-Aug-2001: Toad Stickers

We've started loading frame grabs of all the Team Toad stickers showing up on Comedy Central Season 3.0. Check out the Toad Stickers page.

13-Jul-2001: SnowFlake on TV!

During the season premiere of 3.0, you could see SnowFlake fighting Gamma Raptor. Way to go, Jacey! Congratulations on making it to the TV rounds. You can also see Fuzzy loaning Carlo a Vantec RDFR33 for Biohazard, as Debbie and Carol watch.

29-May-2001: The bots are gone!

Sorry for the lack of updates during the San Francisco competition, but with 5 robots competing, we were extremely busy. The Chinkilla was there, 425 robots were there, including almost 400 new ones. Each kid in our family drove a robot in the box (and the big kid drove two), and everyone got to meet their favorite robot builders.

The bar has certainly been raised as far as destructiveness is concerned, but we'll hold off posting pit photos of individual bots for a while to give people to post their own photos of their bots.

The pit area was huge. Here's a screen background showing a bird's eye view of the pit area:

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Here's an aerial photo of the bay area taken as we lifted off for Pittsburgh this morning.

Thanks

Our hats are off to Rob Everhart for organizing the ECRA shipping, to Chooie for helping out with IceBerg, and to Trey, Greg, the CrewBots and everyone else for putting on a great competition.

I can say without reservation that last week was the best week of my life, and I am officially the proudest pappa on the planet.

For now, the kids are in bed and it's time for Debbie and I to start to catch up on our sleep.

20-May-2001: The bots are here!

We met the ECRA truck today, with 25 pallets of robots. Most of these found homes inside the pit building, and things will get sorted out tomorrow morning. The photos on the right show our two Team Toad crates. We were a little off on our weight estimate. We managed to bring 2,100 pounds of robots and spares (our estimate was 1,500 pounds).

A quick check of the contents showed that our bots arrived in good shape physically. Tomorrow the chaos begins.

19-May-2001: We're here!

Not much to report, though. Our Toad Reconnaissance Force has infiltrated Treasure Island to scout it out. Our heavy equipment arrives tomorrow, and our main battle force will be airlifted in Tuesday night.

We can report that the box is undergoing construction already. The pit area is still a large, empty room with several huge stacks of folded tables.

Things to note about driving here from San Francisco:

Follow the signs to "Bay Bridge", I-80
Stay in the far left lane
There is lots of construction on the Bay Bridge itself
The last sign marking the exit is hidden by a scaffold...be careful and look for the first chance to go left (15 mph exit)
There is an imposing looking Navy style entrance gate and guardhouse. There are no guards, so drive straight through, turn right at California Street, and Bldg 180 is the first big hangar on the right.

More reports as intelligence streams in.

Here's a view of the Bay Bridge from Treasure Island, itself: