applied felts and lafayette

left tuesday morning with my boss for martinsville VA with a trailer we made for Maxliner and a robot prototype i have been building for Applied Felts (same building)
we got to the hotel and met up with dave mac in the hotel bar
we were hanging out drinking and chatting and enjoying ourselves for a few hours (some more than others)
the next morning we (mostly) met for breakfast and then after gathering the missing went in to the plant
they make the liner from scratch (starting from bulk material, making the felt, applying the coating, making the tube) so that was pretty neat to see
dave looked the trailer over and seemed to like it so the only thing left was my robot
this robot was overdue, had been having troubles from the beginning (customer specified hardware which while cheaper, cost more to program than the solution we wanted, 6 week lead time on motors which were Way underpowered so we had to order new ones (also 6 weeks), bumps causing both motors to jsut stop, headaches galore), and still wasn't working
we demoed that we had at least been working on it and there was Something to show for it but they wanted us to jsut leave it there and have their guy tinker with it to make it work
i worked on it for about 6 hours sitting on the floor of their plant programming and adjusting trying to make it better
finally lee convinced them that we needed to take it back with us
so we packed it up and drove back on thursday
friday we got our stuff cleaned up and that night i went up to lafayette to hang out with nick again
i watched his project fly some which was cool and we went to the bars and had a grand ole time
sunday we went to nine irish brothers for dinner and i got the goat cheese fritters (mmmm fried fat) fish and chips (uhg too much food) and the creme brulee (Way too much food, and the creme brulee was Not real creme brulee, it was really good, but not the real thing) and then i headed home