I went to the SPIE Defense Sensing Conference this week. It was a nicely arranged affair in the Marriot World Center in Orlando. They insisted that you park several miles away and use one of the shuttle buses to get to the conference, that worked out well. The buses were often enough that you were not forced to wait forever to go either way and they gave you granola bars and water for the trouble. Don't they know, engineers get bagels, factories get doughnuts? You can't make them think...
After perusing the technical book area, which was pretty well stocked with an array of SPIE documents and textbooks,, if you had the cash. I was pretty interested in their IR and Spectroscopy handbooks, but they were pricey. If anyone has a heart, I would gladly accept a torrent or a photocopy :)
We spoke with several vendors in the cavernous exhibition area. It was clear that in many ways we were just not up to the task of doing business there. I also noticed that people feeding out of the government trough were particularly mislead in the value of things. How can someone in good faith try to sell tank windows to a normal person? Especially when they cost $30k+ to start in bulk. We saw some neat optics stuff. To be honest, I was not even sure what you did with it. Even as slowly as we fly, a FLIR with 300 lines, 90deg range and 30Hz is going to be hard to use unless the goal is just to get an image.
All in all, a good trip. A little humility is a good thing.
Buzz Labs' unmanned vehicle blog and cool DIY remote controlled stuff blog. For techies by techies, maybe also some interesting tidbits about small business and international business.
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