It had been a while since I’d been to a hockey game. Decided it was time to take in a Thrashers game at Philips Arena. Got a couple of $10 seats way up in the nosebleed section. Surprisingly, the view wasn’t bad at all. Hey, at least we could see the puck flying around, so I can’t complain.

Frankly, it would have been more fun if the Thrashers didn’t get shut out by Toronto.

At least there was sumo hockey!

We went to JapanFest Saturday. Lots of vendors hawking their wares, a few food vendors, but we missed the good stuff and some of the lines were too long.

All the pictures can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/boredandblogging/tags/japanfest/

Found at BoingBoing:

The RoboCup 2007 competition is being held this week at the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta.

What is RoboCup? From the main site:

RoboCup is an international joint project to promote AI, robotics, and related field. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. RoboCup chose to use soccer game as a central topic of research, aiming at innovations to be applied for socially significant problems and industries. The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is ‘By 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer.’

Nearly 1700 students and faculty from 300 teams and 117 countries will be competing in events ranging from four-legged and humanoid robotic soccer games to search-and-rescue competitions. Here are some images from RoboCup 2006:

More pictures from RoboCup 2006 can be found here. There is a Flickr pool for pictures from RoboCup 2007 here.

Finals for the various competitions will be July 7th and 8th. Stop by if you are in the area.

Web Worker Daily has a post about the city of Atlanta hooking up with Earthlink to provide a city-wide wifi service. Check out the Earthlink press release here. It probably won’t be cheap, but its better than nothing.

The CNNMoney.com site has a couple of interesting articles: Top 10 cities: Where to buy now and Top 10 foreclosure markets.

Interestingly, Atlanta is on both lists. Some of the folks who have been commuting from the boonies are looking to move back into the city and driving up prices in certain neighborhoods. With the city expecting 500,000 more people over the next five years, the ‘burbs are also going to see greater demand, so the whole metro area should see a decent boost in home prices.

People like to show off in Atlanta. From all the luxury cars and McMansions, a lot of folks got roped into ARMs they can’t afford anymore. With GM closing down a couple of plants and Delta seemingly going belly up every other day, there are plenty of opportunities for real estate flippers.

Too bad I have no extra cash lying around to take advantage of this.