Today Anthony Daniels, the actor who plays C3PO in Star Wars, came to visit the ETC. He had just been inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame. As cool as it was to meet him, the exciting part of the day was only leading up to that.

Yesterday I got CCed on an email from Steve to Dave giving him some old lightsaber demo files. I was clearly coming in in the middle of something that I didn't understand. I wasn't sure why Dave wanted the lightsaber demo, but I volunteered that I had the latest copy since I was the last to update it. I also boasted that I could probably rewrite the code in Panda in 3 hours now that I had an Alice to Panda model converter. Only then did I find out that they wanted the demo to show C3PO today. So I got stuck with the job of either rewriting it in Panda or at least making sure the Alice one would run.

I chose the tougher path. Before I could start, I had lot of BVW stuff I needed to do to get ready for the next day. At 2am I started working on the lightsaber. Converting the models ended up taking me 3 1/2 hours. I thought it would be quick but because the demo was in an old version of Alice, I had a few problems. First was fixing it just to run in the old version. Then I had to solve a problem with a function I was calling being wrong in the old version. Finally, I had to handle scaled models which I hadn't had to do before. Writing the code in Panda was really easy and fun. It was very quick, 6 hours plus 1 for tweaking. I finished just in time for our visitor. Randy and others in the ETC seemed really appreciative and impressed by this task in this time. "Miracle-worker" was a term I heard used to describe me. I love stuff like this.

As far as the demo itself, Anthony Daniels liked it. It was really cool seeing him turn to the R2D2 model and talk to him like C3PO. After playing the game he told us some stories about filming that scene and other things about Star Wars. It was a great day.