DIS ARE TING I AR MEENIN TA BEEN UPDATIN WIT

GIV ME LINKA?

(Origional title: HAY LOOKIT ME! AHMA BLOGGIFICATIN'!)

I love sarcasm. Say somebody's talking to you about something you have no context for. They say something like "Yeah I got a 79%!" all you need to say is "Congrats," and sound at least a little sincere about it. If that number is good, then they assume you're being sincere, but if it's bad, sarcasm comes in to save the day, and they think you're being sarcastic and go on blathering at you.

Things to talk about:
Ficly
Why I haven't been blogging
Leading up to the ASME competition
The ASME competition <- I got mostly through here. The rest is forgotten.
Current state of things
ATLANTA!

Ficly:
AH'VE BEEN WRITIN'!
LOOKITMEGO!
I found out about Ficly through Wil Wheaton and one of his podcasts. When I started out I was having so much fun! Then I kinda petered out. Then I went about a month without posting anything. I tried, I honestly tried, but nothing came to me. Then, one day while I was avoiding work (we'll talk more about that later), I was reading Every day Weirdness, and I was simply stunned by how incredible those writers are. I felt inspired, so I immediately stopped going through my list of bookmarks, and went for a walk around campus to see if I couldn't get any inspiration.

Nothing came. At least, not until I reached the Northmost point on campus. I had been thinking about what I consider my best story (Pop), and how if only I could do something like that again, and how I would probably never do something like that again, and how I probably had done several things as good as that but I wasn't recognizing them and thinking that my writing was not living up to that was preventing me from writing more and getting better. My mind jumped around a lot and it was hard to get any real THINKING done. But thinking about that story somehow led me into what became my idea for a sequal!

I was elated. I was giggling as I made the story more and more creatively vile. This process of running through material in my head led to another idea. This one I liked, but I wanted to work on my first one some more. I knew it would stick (and indeed it has), so I stuck it on the back burner, still just a frame of a story, and went back to being elated at how well I was doing. By this time I had gone about half again as far as I did before the first inspiration struck me.

Let me put this in some more context, however. I don't feel like I have properly explained how giggling, creepy smiley, hop skippy I was. I had spent about a month, and not a single day went by where I wasn't aware of how little I was writing. Ficly, being a community, needs feeding and care, and I wasn't feeding it anything. Worse, I couldn't come up with ideas. I spend most of my idle time coming up with stories and ideas, I have ever since my family started taking long drives up to Whistler or Vancouver, but here I was with nothing. Then, in one delightful flash of inspiration, it came back to me!

By this time, I had decided to cut my walk short. Instead of walking the full circumference of campus, I would head back to the library about half way through. I had two ideas and I desperately needed to write them down so I wouldn't forget them. I was walking through the library's second set of doors when I had my third idea. Now, I'll let you know I've not written any of these stories. Looking back, I'm none too thrilled by them (except for the third, I like that one), but the important bit was where they de-clogged my creative brain. Since then, I've written more than a few stories. I'm EVEN feeling guilty for not updating one of my TWO ongoing projects when I intended to. This is a good place to be in, and the moral of this story.

Why I haven't been blogging:
It's a combination of a percieved pileup of homework and Ficly, but mostly ASME. What with the ASME competition, Atlanta, and midterms, I really wanted to be caught up with homework before leaving. As such, I doubled my workload, with the intent of getting lots done and caught up. It was a very feasible plan... except, I didn't do enough of it. See, piling on more work makes me weary. I get that age old problem where I see so much work in front of me, and I just don't want to do any of it. Because of that, I spent perhaps a bit too much time on Ficly, and not enough on homework. Now, I haven't been blogging because I SAW so much work, and saw myself not getting enough of it done, so I figured that I didn't have time to do blog, or a number of other things that I really did have time for, and really should have gotten done much earlier. So yea, not a good situation to be in.

Again, with the ASME competition coming up, the Student Design team was kinda getting into crunch time, only not very many people were making time to meet and work on it. I was one of three people who actually met every day for the two weeks before the competition, and because each meeting went from four-ish to late, I really didn't have much time for homework. In hind sight, I probably should have been more resolved to work on homework, but I felt justified in using that tie on the competition. It didn't pay off, but I'm glad I stuck through with it till the end.

Leading up to the ASME competition:
This wasn't exactly a good year to join the ASME Student Design Competition at WSU. This whole time, I've just been waiting for the team to get together and work, and really unimpressed with the results. That said, I'm glad that I stuck through with it till the end (or at least very close to it). Firstly, when I first started going, I was told that they were about 9 weeks in. They only had a very vague 3-D model of their machine. I recall thinking that in 9 weeks Skunkworks would have gotten this planned, built, tested, and possibly rebuilt.

But like I said, I kept coming, and basically each meeting was spent making lists of reasons why we couldn't start building, and keeping track of which of those things we'd checked off. When we did finally start building, the construction, having been built off vague ideas, was shoddy and temporary. They didn't want to invest too much into it, and didn't want to make anything permanent, and that's how it went for a couple months.

At some point, we started having two meetings a week, and then a couple of weeks in, me and two other people on the team (Crissy and Eric) started going in every day. I did this because they did, and I had developed a stipulation for working on the project, that I couldn't be the only one working on it at that time. Crissy and Eric started working on it because the other competition teams (RC Baja and the Human Powered Paper Vehicle) had nothing to do. Eventually, RC Baja started working again, and they switched over to that, so I stopped working as hard on the recycler.

It's important to note that this was in the week before the competition, and the machine still wasn't functioning. Our design wasn't exactly solid, it was based on two conveyor belts, none of which worked, and it was literally held together with duct tape, rubber bands and wire. Finally, the whole team pitched in (sans Crissy and Eric, but that's perfectly understandable) during the two days before we left, and we got it to within a reasonable facsimile of functioning condition (though we still needed to wire the whole thing the night before the competition).

The ASME competition:
Short version: It was fun.
Long version: We didn't do well.
So here's the story. Like I said before, we were still working on the bloody thing the night before the competition. We wired it up, built some boxes for it to deposit its recyclables into. Let me tell you about the boxes. The requirements say they need to be opaque. Most other teams used those opaque, plastic storage bins. We had cardboard at hand, so we used that. I had checked the forums that are supposed to clarify rules (I'll not get started on this system of rules), and they said that the boxes simply had to allow the judges to see the sorted items. So we either cut our boxes low, or cut slots in their sides.

Come the actual competition, my final struggle for the team was just getting the bloody box to fit the requirements for entry. We had to pull together two more boxes (which we basically just found) for two materials that we weren't planning on sorting, we had to clearly label our on-off switch (which I promptly labeled incorrectly), and we had to find ONE LAST PIECE of material to sort. Each team had to submit 3 pieces of each type, tin can (as in soda), steel can (as in soup), plastic bottle, and glass jars. Thing is, the dimensions for the glass jars were TINY, specifically baby-food tiny. So that's what we did. We bought baby food and ate it. WELL, the group leader, Sam, ate it. She suggested it because apparently she does it all the time. It IS just mashed fruit, so why not? well, the first time they bought some (and ate it), they found out it was too small. SO they had to go BACK to the store, and buy more. They brought that to us JUST IN TIME to present it and qualify us, so we were officially competing at that point.

But there was an even MORE fun bit standing in our way even then.

THEN CAME THE COMPETITION ITSELF! The main problem with our design, indeed ALL the designs there, was the hopper. Those IDIOTS who designed the rules said you couldn't have ANY mechanisms