Last Wednesday I headed downtown to the NI Conference as I have a curiosity for things technological and innovative. My strategy was to see if there was anything I could draw a parallel to with my skills and interests. The basis for the convention is a software made by NI called LabView, and most of the people in attendance were programmers familiar with it. It was implemented in demonstrations of all sorts. Man-sized wheeled robots, small all-terrain robots that could navigate around very rough obstacles with the use of a Kinect camera, bottling plant conveyor belts with bottles being inspected by special cameras to insure their uniformity, airborne wind power systems, electric engines, a robotic space shuttle, and on and on. I had a hard time imagining the quantum leaps required to have my ventures benefit from the technology on display and the specialized hardware involved with running everything there, but it all works on Intel processors and a lot of it in Windows. The people there could definitely fix their own computers, but do they have the time?