October update

Hullo all! I have not, actually, fallen off the face of the earth.

.....I really haven't written about stuff in a LONG time.....pardon me for a minute while I make a quick to-do list with bullet points and sub-headers to sum up what's been going on!
[Facebook statuses below, in the weird font: ]

Hm, physics studied, sinus infection pwned, LEGO Robotics teams organized, calculus understood, pumpkin pie nommed, Team 956 registered for AOR, Nat'l Merit essay written, grant applications being worked on. Not bad.....




1) The patriocentricity debate has not gone away, it has just gone underground for the time being. I have a presentiment that it is going to come back with a vengeance eventually. When it does, it will probably create angst and horror on a level of what-all went on last month.


2) School is going very well.  I am taking physics, tech support, French 3, and AP calculus this semester [after January, I'll add in a pre-calculus/trigonometry class to the mix]. Calculus is going surprisingly well...no dear, I am not a geek....so is physics, actually. This is a really fun surprise, because I have never liked science very much. I guess physics has enough math that I'm happy, hehe.

Bethany just looked up from calc homework and proclaimed in an accusatory tone, 'It's a POLYNOMIAL!'


3) FIRST Robotics still dominates my life. Efforts on that front progress in several areas. I've been working a LOT on grants...writing and phoning big technology corporations and so on, in hopes of getting sponsorship. We need $5000 to participate in FIRST.....so far we have over 2K in school-supplied funding [saved from last year].  Just two days ago the first of the grants came through.  Platt Electrical supply will be funding our team to the tune of $1000. Very enthusing :)   Also, we have got a 25% discount on supplies from 80/20 [aluminum supplier].
That sum of 5K hangs, like the fabled Oliphaunt of old, like a doomsome and mythical phœnix, on the horizon of my every THOUGHT! [In layman's terms, I eat breathe and sleep $5000.]

Recruitment is also going with a swing. So far, we have got 5 girls and 4 boys on the team. This is UNHEARD of, most FRC teams struggle to make 30% girls....THINK OF THE GRANTS!! Think of the under-represented population being outreached to!! Anyways, we've got a really ENTHUSED girl who just joined the team, she could have been hand-picked to be my much-desired successor in Public Relations and organization and so on....YAY FOR AWESOME LEADERSHIP GEEKS!!

Hmm, on a side note, here's a link to that haven of geek-jokes, XKCD.....this comic right here sums up why engineering is cool, y'know? [Actually, that is probably far from the most epic of their webcomics, but I just had to share it...tee hee...because I am in a link-to-websites mood].


I am also [in addition for being to blame for starting 5 other FLL teams] in charge of coaching two FIRST LEGO League robotics teams for kids in 4th-6th grade. There are 15 kids there on a good day.  It is INSANE. Things are starting to go better tho, at our last meeting I successfully taught  them all some programming techniques [which entailed making a projector work, no small feat]. By the end of the meeting both teams had done some programming and had a LEGO robot that drove according to their enthusiastically programmed instructions.
The kids on the teams are AWESOME, they really are. I get all sentimental when I look at this little human geeks and see ....well my Facebook status can speak for me....

me, in chat, about 4th-6th grade kids in my LEGO teams: I look at 'em, and I see ENGINEERS....WORLD CHANGERS..LEADERS....
Michael: Where's the like button on chat?


4) Work has been rather intense....every weekday, right after school, my dad and I go to work until 9 PM, at a local phone bank. The pay is good, and it's only until the election, but whew, I am WHACKED after a long day [often starting at 5:30 AM] of school, robotics and work. It's actually rather cool tho, people always read at work [while waiting for the victim to pick up the phone] and I can often get homework and reading done.

Monday night I had one of the classic semi-yearly all-nighters. [Usually they don't start until build season, or at least NaNoWriMo, but I wanted to get into practice....]  At work that night I realized that I really needed to have this video project by the NEXT DAY's first meeting of our high school robotics team. Whilst at work, I took advantage of the lulls between calls to scratch down ideas [including where to find the desired footage on my various computers and hard drives].
Home and settled by 10 PM and prepared the coffee.....an enthused post on Facebook when I actually managed to find the coffee stash [we thought we didn't have any].  I got a minimal amount of sleep [ <45 minutes] but was nevertheless able to finish the video project. By 6 AM I was out at the bus stop to get to school, fresh as a daisy [sort of]. Fun times :P .....especially since we wound up not actually using the video at all.

5) The usual seasonal festivities are well under way here in the Pacific North-west. The trees are turning, fog is common, and we are inches away from our first frost. [Incidentally, the cosmoses and Mexican sunflowers are blooming at last, no doubt just in time to be nipped by a good freeze!]

Pumpkin pie has figured largely in the events of the past few weeks, as well.


Today we had a pleasant Saturday in and out of the homestead. I awoke at the leisurely hour of 9:30 AM, and we forthwith headed out to the farmers' market. Amidst much mirth, we then proceeded to Rice 'N' Spice to stock up on essentials such as natto [fermented soybeans] and chocolate-hazelnut paste.
Then it was off to the Co-op, where we actually bought some coffee. This is unprecedented, usually we rely for our caffeine upon the little packets of cheap and nasty coffee stashed in hotel rooms for hard-up decaffeinated guests.

After a brief stint doing stuff at home, I left again, this time with my mom, who patiently carted me off to the local shopping mall [in one town], and then off in the other direction into C-town to the library and so on. I spent a happy half-hour running around the library getting books to take off to work this week.

Hopefully I shall post more soon! There have been a lot of interesting and amusing events lately.

CGDC update #1

We've been having some epic techie times here. Wednesday prep for filming at daVinci Days, with top-of-the-line video equipment, today up to CGDC in Portland [Christian Game Developers' Conference]: AWESOME stuff! Tonight the FLL workshop on the other side of Portland, I got ENTHUSED.....tomorrow more CGDC conference, then Saturday and Sunday home to Corvallis for the best science and innovation festival in Oregon: daVinci Days, where I'll be filming with CCAT TV studio all weekend, and Saturday I'll be with Eagle Cybertechnology and Spartan Robotics FIRST robotics teams at the local-team demo. Hope to see y'all there!!

And I am pretty much convinced that DigiPen Institute of Technology is the place for me. There have been some amazing opportunities lining up in the last few weeks: starting out with a new FLL recruit mentioning that his dad is the leader of the CGDC and is heading to the workshop this weekend, then us getting to attend the workshop, then the speaker on 'Women in Game Design', then the awesome contact we made with a graduate from DigiPen whose WIFE is the admissions officer at DigiPen.....

Spent a few hours this evening talking with this DigiPen graduate. He is enthused about the town [safe, a bit outside of Seattle WA], the school [TOP professors, lots of core classes], and the general education [I was worried about game programming being too specialized: it now appears that anyone who graduates from DigiPen will be overqualified to do just about anything else: they 'get lazy' and go to work for Microsoft developing big-name programs and all. In short, four years of pure insanity and then--you're MADE. [Oh and still mad, but that's collateral.]

Not sure at this point which degree to go for. The contact [Joseph Vasquez] is massively enthused [......] that I could become the first woman to get the degree [recently added] in Computer Engineering....still wavering between that and RTIS [more programming-oriented].

We also got the very interesting story behind DigiPen: a Lebanese man got snuck onto a college campus, got caught, said he was there to apply, passed the test and went on to take 19 years of college. DoD work in 3d [hush-hush, blowing things up..] then got ties with Nintendo....DigiPen shares a building with Nintendo....anyways companies were going round to all the big engineering colleges who pooh-poohed their efforts to find game developers. And DigiPen was born.... ;)
First a Lebanese immigrant....Now it might have someone who is failing to get her high school diploma from Lebanon High School, Oregon, in order to complement her insane test scores and mad skillz.....not to pitch myself too high. But I have to sell my skills or no-one will believe I can do anything....

I blame FIRST for all of this, just for the record :)

Yoyos, fireworks, laptops, nerds, and other strange critters

Hoo boy have I ever been having good times! Busy....very busy.
Before returning the laptop to the studio yesterday, I spent quite a few hours editing the footage from Nationals. Robotics people, and robotics competitions, are so very photogenic! Hours of footage and it is all beautiful. The video is FINALLY getting close to finished.

Friday after returning the laptop we hustled out to school to collect the robot and batteries and so on.  That evening I scooted off to spend the evening at Eva's and go to the Philomath Frolic and Rodeo with her family. That was epic good times. I felt like I really hadn't seen any friends in way too long. Eva has a large and chaotic family and we all [minus two boys, and plus her sister's boyfriend, and the dog] were in the kitchen cooking dinner  :D Good times.   Then it was off to the rodeo, which was also great fun. I convinced Eva that she should to to Wyoming and get herself a cowboy :D  And a really nice fireworks show. I was told it was much better than the 4th of July show in C-town...glad I went to this instead.

Got home late and woke in less than six hours this morning, to head off to the Philomath Frolic parade. Our robotics team was there, and 997 [the team I traveled to Atlanta with] and 847 [the epically enthused team from Philomath]. We had a float, from which the robots were driven. Lots of waiting around and joking and talkin' nerd-talk. At one point there was a circle of guys standing around talking bout bacon-wrapped bacon...and then I looked over and saw one of the guys [code monkey AKA programmer] having a little spaz attack: and said, 'Eehee! I look over and Paul's randomly spazzing!' which another team member met with 'That's just Paul...he randomly spazzes...'.

 Then another group of awesome-people was discussing yo-yos. One of the students, 847's driver in fact, took out a rather awesome yo-yo and then told us about a prank rather well-known in the yo-yo community ['Where does the yo-yo community and the FIRST community intersect?' 'Um right here I think...'] about a fellow that got a bit of publicity...Zim-Zam yo-yo company or sommat...and just totally pranked the media...was 'displaying a nice yo-yo trick, but if you know anything about yo-yos you'd know he was faking it....he had about 8 yo-yos on his fingers and started waving them around in circles...' [he waves his hands around to demonstrate] 'and finally just starts flailing, the strings are all twisted up, he called it the Flaming Angel or something like that....' as the audience of five or so students busts up laughing.  There was a break for donuts...there was flag-waving.....I had pounced upon a hapless 8th-grader who wants to be on the lego team next year and so he came and we stuck a shirt on him and so on...
I sure am happy to be part of the FIRST community. It is like nothing else.  My people.  :)


Anyways the parade started quite a few hours after we started but fortunately we were moving away from the sun :P  Then we learned that the dad of the very 8th grader we'd recruited is the head of a Christian video game organization and is hosting a conference next weekend which I am signed up to take. DigiPen is the big gam design school, you will remember.  So I'll be in P-town for two days, and on Thursday I'll also be attending a seminar on how to start an FLL team...then Saturday it's back in town to film at daVinci Days with the TV station.....AND robotics scrimmage/demo on Saturday. Can't wait to hang with the robotics crew again  :)

Oh and my laptop came! I just installed an upgrade to the operating system: PerfectCritter, as the comp. is named, running Windows 7 Pro, Trend Micro security, with Autodesk 3ds Max about to be installed! And of course dear Macbook Eddie for everything else, because Macs still rule the universe.

Peace all.

Footing the Bill

I am quite batty, I think...I am footing the bill for the registration of our FIRST Lego League robotics team...which is a SIZABLE fee. Let us hope the team pays their dues and the grants materialize. I am also buying a laptop for CAD work [likewise for robotics]. There is a class in Autodesk 3ds Max given by one of the local FRC teams, and 3ds Max requires a Windows operating system  -.-    Spent a few days trawling frantically through newegg.com and pages of robotics forum discussion on what makes a good CAD computer [good graphics card, mostly]. Then this morning one of my friends did some hunting for me and came up with this rather awesome critter. All the specifications, for $800. 


Hrm, I have also kept busy chasing rabbits with feral roars [as witnessed by a friend on Skype >:D ], cutting and drying small amounts of hay, catching escaped goats, running around the homestead with a knife stashed down my shirt [in pursuit of the rabbits], hunting down a pie-cherry tree, subsequently pitting [by hand] a lot of cherries [solo] with music playing in the background [my FIRST robotics competition playlist :D ]

Enthusiasm is just another word for 'working your tail off'

Guess I made up for those three posts in one day by not posting all week!  School is wrapping up, for which YAY. But I'm going to miss my math class....

Our plans to start a FIRST Lego League [FLL] team at our school are progressing epically. All week I've been sending emails and plotting and talking with faculty and running around school with a clipboard.
Sarah [another robotics geek] and myself have been meeting at school, hashing through fundraising and other plans. It goeth well.

Tuesday we had a particularly productive day. We talked to several principals [high school and elementary] and obtained permission to officially have homeschoolers on the robotics teams...all the teams...and we now have a Robotics Department at Santiam [school], pretty much. We'll be starting a Jr.FLL team, and at least one FLL team. This means students will have a robotics program available to them from 1st grade all the way through high school.

We were also the happy recipients of a generous donation by one of the elementary teachers, of a sizeable quantity of legos, and several RCX lego kits. Nowadays FLL uses NXT systems, but these will be useful for us mentor-types to learn on....

At one point we [we being my dad the robotics and art teacher, Sarah, and myself] were striding determinedly through the school, three abreast. In the middle, me, armed with clipboard and feeling like we were out to save the world. In a way, we are.

FIRST is not about robots. It is about inspiration. If our young people want to be engineers, if they have a burning desire to succeed at something other than sports [to take a common example], we will have succeeded.
When I was at Championships in Atlanta, I had the feeling a few times that if everyone in the Georgia Dome felt the way I did, we would change the world. Thing is, feeling a certain way doesn't do much. Even enthusiasm [much as I hate to admit it] can't do everything. Maybe the difference is, for me enthusiasm is a code word for dedication, hard work, obsessive research, and a certain willingness to scream your lungs out at Regionals.

I know how FIRST has influenced me, I was thinking about this in assembly at school yesterday. In how far I will go to support people, my team or whatever. This was my third year at regionals and things are so different than the first year.  Now, I cheer at every full stop. The reason I had a sore throat for days afterwards was because whenever our team was on the field, I was yelling. At our end-of-season team party we watched a video that one of our mentors took at regionals: at one point the audio is completely distorted, the volume levels are maxed out because I was shouting a few seats over. I don't even scream like a girl, it's a YELL.  When the first round of awards was being given out on Friday evening, I wound up standing and clapping and cheering for each team that received an award. Our team was sitting at the top of the stadium, no-one stands up at the top of the stadium. I did....this coerced part of my team to do the same.  I meant it: I was happy for those teams.

When our team was called down for the Xerox Creativity Award....that was one of the best moments in my life. Running down to the floor of the stadium, past dozens of teams....down at the bottom, where the enthused teams stand, people had their hands out giving us high fives. You have to experience it, to know what I'm talking about. That was success.  Of course writing an essay at midnight was also success, but a different kind.

This sounds self-centered, but the best way I can describe FIRST is to tell what it's done to me.  Now I care about what other people have accomplished...it carries over into other things. I start a standing ovation for my friends' play, I cheer at ballet concerts [ballet concerts are very QUIET usually], I started the audience clapping in rhythm during the can-can piece [which the dancers like], I cheer at tiny robotics scrimmages.  FIRST hasn't been responsible for all this: it's just made me think more about how much effort people put into things, and want to recognize that effort.


I took the SAT again last Saturday.  I did a shameless promotion of FIRST in the essay.

Trigonometry final exam today: first part of two-part final, this with a partner. Tomorrow it's by ourselves, no calculator. That went very well. In fact things went along swimmingly until we got to the last problem, which involved working through two nasty trigonometric equations to prove that they are equal. Always requires oodles of work and sometimes one will pop up and kick your tail.

This one kicked our collective tails. My partner and I spent a good 45 minutes, and 3 pages of scratch paper, working out that one problem. We went down a lot of rabbit trails: as partner complained to the teacher, we had 45 minutes in which to go down as many rabbit trails.

The class period ended. Break passed, still we scribbled frantically. The next class period started, the teacher approached us to say 'The time has come...' but just a moment before that I had gotten off down the right path at LAST and scrabbled down the last box round the answer just at that moment.   ADRENALINE. High-five with my partner, who mentioned the fact that I dominate at math, and out the door, shaking from a combination of caffeine and adrenaline. Another WIN moment :)

wanderings on the dark side

We been having crazy times [when do I NOT say that....], even more than usual. Lotsa techie stuff.
Things pile up, things fall apart.  Plans for the Europe trip are off: in the last week or so circumstances conspired against the plan. Volcano in Iceland not going away, mom's health and treatments, dad's employment, and now my school situation.

   [Tuesday] I was given a note during math class, telling me to come to the office after class. I went down accordingly [remember the counseling office that I got so familiar with last fall whilst figuring out classes?] and found it full of geeks wondering what was going on. It developed that we had all signed up for computer science/programming for next year. Turns out there will NOT be any programming or CS offered next year at this high school.
   Time for a rant. This is disgraceful. My town is arguably one of the most technology-oriented in the area. The two biggest employers in the area are Hewlett Packard and the best engineering university in the state. Our area has the strongest high school robotics community in the state: people from other areas say they wish they had anywhere near the community and support that we do. The local 6 teams regularly are some the strongest at Regionals, chiefly because of the support from the university [mentors and such] and local tech/engineering businesses.  Now the biggest high school in the area is cutting their advanced computer classes.
   Computer programming/advanced computer skills are an absolute requisite in today's world. Sure, some people can learn those skills on their own.....but why are those same skills any less important than courses high schools would never think of dropping, like math or history. We hear every day that the US is losing its competitive edge in the technology market. If students do not have access to quality instruction in techie stuff, how can we be surprised at this?

  Women in technology: another rant.  I am not a feminist. But I do believe that girls should have every chance that boys do when it comes to choosing a career, if they decide to do so. In the last few days I have had a few conversations that have to bear on this.  The programming teacher from last year at CHS is a woman...here's part of an email responding to my query about the programming class: 


 "There are way too few of us in the industry, and employers are screaming for female employees in computer science/engineering.  If you want to be in high demand, and believe you enjoy programming, you're thinking pretty smart for a future! Especially when the government employment department is predicting that in 5-10 years the demand for computer science/engineering employees is going to be 70% higher than currently.  More so for women, too."

 Part of this is because of affirmative-action type stuff that involves quotas for female employees, I have no doubt. Be that as it may, you are still going to have to be top-tier to get a job in computer science [CS].

   Yesterday I hunted down the teacher who was reputed to teach the computer applications class...turns out that is not happening either, but he mentioned an interesting alternative: tech support.  Every year he has a smallish class of people who help with tech support around the school, from repairing computer operating systems to installing software...no experience necessary.  I paraphrase:   'It's always a good class for girls to take....to not be scared to go into the insides of a computer and tool around in there, because really it's just a bunch of junk, it's nothing to be scared of.  I find it gives them confidence they might otherwise lack; not that it seems like you have a problem with that' [I had all but swaggered into the classroom, wearing classic black and carrying Bag of Holding full of textbooks, and spoke with my characteristic poise: anybody who knows me knows what I'm talking about ;) ]

  Tuesday also.....at the meeting for the advanced computer class, I was one of only two girls in the room. Nevertheless, I was the one able to offer forth info about Autodesk Maya [computer assisted design program].

  I'm primed to become the Mid-Valley's leading robotics geek.....I'm practically on two teams, at meetings for one team I wind up leading the meeting, at the other team I tend to have info on whatever event is being talked about. Beloved laptop in hand, I sit at the center of a web of information. A few taps of the keys, and I can tell you the names of the teams registered for the off-season competition at OSU in two weeks; the possibilities of college credit at the area high schools; the season scores of any robotics team; and any other miscellaneous stuff you might need to know at the time.....

  Of course I also have resources other than purely technical. Contacts for one...I know everybody everywhere, or at least I'm working towards that goal. Theatre, robotics, film-making, I get around.

  Then there are the....skillz. Skills like getting people to do things for me. That sounds creepy doesn't it. It's not really.....I think the deal is that I am so sure that people will do what I want them to [this is usually along the lines of, hiring me as videographer, or helping me scout, or getting me into a class, or trying that take of the movie ONE MORE TIME] that THEY think they want to do it too, and away we go, and everyone is happy.    
  And knowing what's going to happen. I don't make much of this, because it sounds presumptuous [to my ears at least], but it's definitely there.  I knew a lot of the things that were going to happen this year...

    Anyways.

I'm back in black.  The past two months are over. Life moves forward.
  

   Don't die, guys.

Late nights and good times

Well we been having epic times......gots to post this right now, before I hit the hay (yes at 6 PM). 


Sunday I started writing out this post:

heHEEEEE I just got back from hanging out with my dear friend Eva. We had planned to get together sometime soon, and have a few Red Bulls to help get the good times rollin'.

Went over to her place about 4 this afternoon.

We wound up going to the university library in search of stuff she needed for her college class, thinking it would be a breeze to find. Medical journals, relating to physical therapy. We spent a solid 2 hours there. It was very frustrating, dealing with unhelpful librarians, and the fact that she didn't have an account there so we had to buy a card to make photo copies, and then I was hacking into the library computers to google stuff to see if we could find it online easier. Well not hacking EXACTLY.....well, ANYWAYS. Went up and downstairs there, FINALLY found the stuff and had tech problems trying to photocopy the pages.

Great fun, I have had enough experience doing that sort of thing on my own that it is nice to be doing it with somebody ELSE for a change, hehe.

THEN we stopped at Dari-mart on the way home and asked for the most caffeinated drink they had. The manager didn't know, so we went for the classic: a Red Bull and some sort of Monster, Assault I believe it was called.

Had dinner (toothsome) at her place, always exciting with a big family. Cleaned up the kitchen, I was getting worried because I'd have to go home soon, even though I had managed to get an extension from parents. About halfway through the dishwashing I suggested that we open The Goods. HEHEHE.

After cleaning the kitchen we holed up in her room with the remainder of The Goods. We were both twitching a bit, hehehe. Tried to play a game but got sidetracked to talking about random stuff. Things are vague, through a haze of caffeine, but I recall a lot of hilarity over Eva's mispronunciation of 'smog' as 'smug'. 

Then we had a lengthy and impassioned discussion over the horrors and sadnesses of feedlot animal production, don't ask me why, hehe. 'Well....enough of this topic!'   Got up-to-date on our various endeavors. 

Pretty soon Eva started reminiscing about the good times our homeschool co-op group had when we were all about 10. 'Remember one time we came up here and had a fainting contest?' [Faked fainting, I must hasten to add: we are all theatre geeks.]  Sez Eva, isn't it a pity that we're 18 (or nearly that) now and too old for such things....I LOOKS AT HER WITH A CRAZY LOOK IN ME EYES. Yes, we both fainted dead away. 

Then [has anybody seen Ice Age 1?] we somehow found that we both thought the bit hilarious, where Sid is trying to get to sleep and is turning round and round in place and 'HUYYY!' as he stretches, 'HYUKK!', and then round-and-round....well, hehe, you have to save seen it. Had a good time demonstrating that, hehe. Two almost-grown-ups, giggling hysterically and [on my part] making the classic Insane-Bethie face. 

I had to leave shortly alas, as most of the time had been taken up with library endeavors. Got home around 9, still wildly caffeinated. Proceeded to scare one or two friends via chat >:)  

Tuesday I had a chapter test in math, which went pretty well. Our teacher does give evil tests....

Yesterday [Wednesday] things really heated up. I was told that the laptop I borrowed to edit on was needed by the studio on Friday. I also had to study for the College Algebra midterm exam today, and read my week's worth of biology homework for today's bio class. And the robotics team is having an end-of-season party Saturday and wants some footage. 

I was out of the house til afternoon more or less, what with group-study at school, and farmers' market. By late afternoon I could tell it was going to be a long hard night. SOMETHING was going to be happening at a LATE HOUR, but it was a toss-up as to which thing. Studied, showered, ate, transferred music til 10 PM.  Then I finally settled down to editing the four-odd hours of footage from Atlanta. 

Keep in mind that this jollity came hard on the heels of several nights of poor sleep, and STILL not being caught up from Atlanta. It's getting rather serious, only the other day I was randomly pounced on by a friend, via chat, and told to get some sleep [this was around 8:30 PM]. 

Yes. ANYWAYS. Worked away at the editing, with a few distractions til 1:45 AM, what time I was told by my mom to go to bed, which I did very willingly, hehe. 

I ALSO set my alarm for 4:10 AM. 

........

And did not get to sleep for a bit. I believe 2 hours was the grand total...got up, made coffee, ate breakfast, and back to the editing. Fortunately it was only a rough cut. Coffee fumes swirled in my brain.

Around 6 AM I got worried that I wouldn't be able to get it done in time to be able to render while I was at school [I KNEW there would be a problem with the rendering]. I stopped worrying about editing much, and just cleaned up the gaps and adjusted audio levels. 

THEN I ran into a problem, all right: I had no idea how to export the file. One would think it would be straightforward enough, but when I tried 'export as Quicktime' it merely exported ONE file.   >.<  

Tried exporting entire sequence, and popped off an email to the equipment check-out manager and all-round techie. 

AT 8:45 AM, I HIT RENDER AND RACED OUT THE DOOR. Providential timing. 

Off to the math exam. I BEASTED IT. I TOOK IT DOWN. I DESTROYED IT UTTERLY. 

Not very hard at all, compared to the tests OUR teacher writes. I think I mebbe missed one or two points on on problem....it was 'name three truths expressed by the fact that x = 4 is a zero of P(x)"....I fudged a bit on one  :P

After that, I attempted to catch forty-winks on a bench by the school library [head pillowed on Bag of Holding] failed, because I am always nervous that I am going to be pounced on.....

Then out to spend the interim before biology at a friend's house. Biology was good, very low-key, I was let lie on a couch in the living room and DID catch forty winks, gotta love homeschoolers who allow you to take responsibility for your own actions. 

Then home, where I found email from forementioned techie with instructions on how to burn to DVD. Just drag the Quicktime file [which had successfully rendered] into a little program called Toast. Sweet thang....I really need to look into buying it for Eddie [MacBook Pro]. 

It's taking a while to prepare the file, but so far this has been the smoothest render-and-burn process I've EVER gone through, and I've used quite a few editing platforms. 

Also downloaded Bean, a nice little text-editing app for Mac OS X. A definite cut above your basic TextEdit, but lean, doesn't take so long to power up as, say, OpenOffice [which, by the way, I use for everything on Eddie. Nice open-source software, but bulky].  

If all goes well, I plan to be in bed by 7 PM tonight....let's see if we can do that..... hehehe! :)

Hope you enjoyed reading about my recent exploits...as much as I enjoyed having them :D

What I've been up to

warning, this may be a very geeky post.


Mebbe I should start a tech blog, where I post successes and failures of the amateur videographer....


Well I was supposed to return the camera to the studio on Wednesday morning after school. Naturally, this mean that I thought I didn't have to start uploading footage off of it until Tuesday night.....yeaahhh. That didn't go so well. I had problems with that, 5 hours of HD video footage eats up hard drive space pretty quickly. Left it to (as I thought) upload all night, only to come down and discover that it had stopped halfway through because Eddie's hard drive was full. There was a lot of dealings with transferring all the footage to an external hard drive.
Wound up returning the camera Thursday instead.


After that we had to decide which computer to edit the footage on. I've never taken the time to learn the ins and outs of iMovie, so I was planning to edit on the (very slow) HP desktop machine running Windows XP, with Sony Vegas Movie Studio editing software. [May I recommend SVMS, it is a very nice and easy-to-use piece of software. However if you EVER plan to switch to a Mac OS, don't buy it, because it is, as I found too late, a PC-only program.]


 Well I thought I had things nailed. I installed SVMS on my dad's computer and lugged the whole setup upstairs. My dad's comp. is from 2002, Windows XP, and only has about 70 gigs of hd space, but it is still really fast because we don't go online with it EVER.  Then the computer and I migrated upstairs to my bedroom, hitherto used for nothing except sleeping [or failing to sleep] because, well, let's just say it's not exactly climate-controlled. Fingers get NUMB in winter.....


The innocent tiny bedroom was turned easily enough into what my dad referred to as a hacker's lair. Come round the corner of the bed and you are confronted by a menacing array of sheer computing power.


Things were all fine and dandy until I actually tried to import some of the video footage into SVMS.
........


This did not go so well.


.......
Hm. No go.


I've had this problem before, the audio comes in but NO VIDEO. Then I attempted the tried-and-true method of drag-and-drop the files into the program, instead of 'File/Import'.  btw, this usually works, try it if you're having trouble opening files.  This did not work EITHER. I was becoming rather ticked.


Next we tried to view some of the video clips using Quicktime for Windows. 'Need to install more Quicktime components to view this file'.   Thinking that this would be fixed easily enough by downloading the newest version of Quicktime, I did so.   NUUP.  I had had warning that this might be the case and further research confirmed that Quicktime for Windows does NOT allow you to play hi-def.  .mov files.   Note that a .mov file IS a Quicktime file. A program doesn't play it's own format of files!  


This caused displeasure on the part of the lordly ME.  Remember all the hoopla a few weeks back with DivX media player and Gspot and all that? Well I took one of the files into Gspot to see if it could diagnose what codec was needed to play the file. NOTHING. File not recognized or somesuch.    .mov is a fairly common file, ONE WOULD THINK. 


All these files played FINE on my Mac. 
There were various other options considered, but in the event it was my non-techie mom who suggested the solution. The studio has Macbook pro laptops running Adobe FinalCut pro [professional, top of the line editing software] available for loan.   Friday I went in and got the laptop. Toted it up to the Lair and Then There Was a Scary Amount of Computing Power in the room. 
Eddie [my own macbook], dad's desktop comp (for show), dad's speakers with (to quote him) Scary Bass, and the loaned 17" macbook. Also an external hard drive and a power strip bristling imposingly. 


We are now on an even keel video-wise, have only to learn the ins and outs of FinalCut......'oh this is such a cool program! massive amounts of computing power! 17" screen laptop! professional-quality!......um how do you edit the volume levels?' 


Then two nights ago I was summoned forth from my lair by my mom, with the announcement that the computer was having a problem. The family PC, that is. Its antivirus (Norton 360) had expired, we knew it was going to happen but going to Atlanta kinda interfered with making arrangements. 


This entailed a good bit of research, and we bought Trend Micro pro version, as suggested by various geeky friends. Installed that today with surprisingly little hassle. 


Hmm, guess that about sums up the techie side of things.....I'm doing me online homework for math, logarithms great fun hehehe......anybody know how to solve an equation involving log squared?  not log (x^2)   but (log x) ^2
My book fails.....

THIS should have been called Über-geek....

Only the other day I was mentioning that 'I have no life'. This was refuted by my worthy compatriot, who has also been quoted as saying that my days don't end, they just slow down a bit.   I am definitely back in the insanity-zone....

Sunday we drove back up to P-town to RETURN the sink we bought two days before. This was after a pleasing interlude in the sink aisle at Home Depot whilst the three of us discussed the respective merits of various sinks. There was some heated debate over whether or not it was important to have a sink that is resistant to scratches, stains and grey marks from pans. I became quite fired up, and mentioned that I planned to write a manifesto laying out a 'Workers' Declaration' that the sole consideration regarding kitchen implements should be Utility and Function, not Aesthetic Appeal.  However instead of Rallying the Troops, I wound up laughing as we trailed through the store looking at countertop materials. 

Monday it was back to the daily grind of school and expeditions into geekery.  After school I went to a robotics meeting for the CHS team, and wound up staying the whole three hours. DIscussed video-considerations with the team captain.....there was a huge amount of things to be hashed over and planned out, and now I am engaged in making a short ad to air on the local community access TV station, and also filming the introduction of the robot at tomorrow's assembly. Yesterday I rendezvoused after school to film the voice-over for said advert.    Today I stayed at school the whole day, in order to be present at the robotics meeting after school and likewise the assembly run-through at lunch. 

Also on the way back from P-town I read over part of the infamous novel I wrote last November, and was surprised at how hysterical it was. Most amusing to read the incoherent copy I wrote at the height of the lack of sleep. And a couple of terribly funny lines that I honestly do not remember writing.... O.o  

Wednesday tech stuff:  I didn't know it was possible to be this much of a geek. I'm wearing a pair of earphones over my earbuds, am working simultaneously on two computers, have two flash drives in play, am downloading a codec for Mac and Windows...all this as preliminaries for editing an advert for robotics. 

I was given a .avi file of Team 997's winning match at the championship games at regionals. This is for use in making the ad to turn in to the broadcasting studio in the next day or two. The file plays with no trouble in VLC media player (a really nifty little free media player, btw...download here) but when I tried to import it to my editing program (Sony Vegas Movie Studio) only the audio was visible. The same thing happened when I tried to play it with Windows Media Player, or (switching to Mac) import to iMovie.  

I have heard this is a problem sometimes, and it requires fiddling with codecs. A little hunting on the internet revealed the VMS editing platform tends to have trouble with certain .avi files, and I found recommendations to download GSpot, a tiny application which diagnoses which codecs are needed to play the file.    Downloaded that...found that the file needed the DX50 codec, supplied by DivX. I downloaded a version for both Mac and Windows.    That is currently being installed, so we shall see.....


and because I have nothing better to do than my bio homework, here's this....
Date: Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Starting time: 18:38
Mood: geeky :P
Outside my window: sun on huge snow clouds
I'm thinking: I hope this codec works.....
I'm reading: Baha! Who has time to read?  Well Great Expectations, on and off...finished 1984.
I'm listening to: Scott's voice-over for the robotics ad  XD
I'm wearing: dark grey tank, black and white plaid shirt of me dad's, jeans with a TON of stuff in teh pocketses
Yesterday, I: went to robotics potluck :)
I'm excited for: Atlanta
I'm sad because: not sad :)
I'm hungry for: salad
The song stuck inside my head is: Another One Bites the Dust
I want: FinalCut Pro
I love: being awesome :P
I loathe: cold wet weather
This week, my goal is: to get the robotics stuff done on time

most epic times :)

Facebook updates give a summary of the week:

March 1: Bethany is 'drilling holes in the robot to make sure it's not overweight'....i.e., shaving about 40 seconds off of the Chairman's Award video. Good times.

March 2:And now we hit "Render" and let 'er chug away all night! :) Ah the life of the video-editor.....

March 3:Tomorrow: Portland!! Three days of peace, love and robotics! :P [and hard work and really late nights]

March 4:Bethany is in a hotel room in Portland

March 5:YES YES YES WHOOO WHOO WHOO!!! This may rank as the best day of my life. No matter how we do tomorrow, today was WIN all the way.

March 6, 6:23 AM: Four hours of sleep, I'm twitching slightly. Add caffeine: today is going to be awesome.

March 6, 10 PM: Best weekend EVER!!!!! :) I am hoarse from screaming, I got four hours of sleep last night, didn't eat for 24 hours, and have run up and down thousands of stairs. Our team got into the finals which was really all I wanted. And we got the Xerox Creativity Award, for the third time...this is the first time any of our team members have gotten an award. GOOD TIMES.




On Saturday I wrote the following during a hiatus in the goings-on: (caffeine, adrenaline and lack of sleep will excuse all questions)

Writing this on Saturday, before the finals at the Autodesk Oregon regional. I want to capture the excitement right now, because regardless of how we do in the finals, we have had an EPIC season.

Thursday, after an early morning drive to Portland, we competed in the practice matches. Thursday's competition is really just practice and I have never seen such a slow start to the weekend; it was rare that we had a full 6-robot field, there were low scores and stalled robots. We did only so-so. I got a handle on the scouting scene: Wednesday night I had been up til midnight packing and getting scouting materials ready to go. Armed with laptop, spreadsheets and clipboards, I and my team advanced to the stands.....spent pretty much the whole day there, watching matches and taking notes. I kept commenting on the lack-lustre performance of most of the robots to my scouting buddy (new to the team) Hannah, and explaining the energy would be exponentially higher Friday.

Whoever not on the field was in the stands scouting (or being told to by me, hehe). We made friends with a few people from other teams: I do so appreciate the camaraderie and sportsmanship at robotics: everybody cheers for everybody, there is good-will and helpfulness all over, chiefly because you know that in one match you will be playing against a team you'll be buddied up with two matches later. Gracious Professionalism is the watchword of the day.

half hour later: Holy cow we just one our first match!!!! WOOT

hour later: we won once and lost once, and are waiting for our next tie breaker. one of the teams has called a timeout, and there is a huge mosh pit going on....YYY EMM CEE AYY! woot! :)
Gotta love the nerds and geeks dancing and rocking out!

Techno, rock, dance. ADRENALINE. 


Anyways, Thursday after the matches we had to stick around for a few hours until the pits closed, working on the robot. All our engineer-types were doing that,whilst our scouts curled up in the corner of the 10'x10' pit and tried to catch forty winks (trenchcoats make marvelous pillows).

After getting back to the hotel we played the DVD that I had made for Chairman's Award. it was much approved, but the playback volume on my laptop was far too quiet.....this involved a lot of panicked talk of speakers, and I took a look at the rendered .avi file and raised the volume. The problem was solved finally by swtching to a different media player.....the standard Mac dvd player was not giving enough volume....VLC is far superior.....VLC is the best media player EVER....it's just about the only thing that will play AVCHD files (which was the format our new camera recorded in, to my initial alarm.)

Got into bed that night, late: "This is the best part of the whole day!" as I lay there groaning for a minute. 

Friday we did even better. Won most of our matches. During autonomous we were just about the only team to be able to score. Other tems were coming around groveling to us, although I only heard this by word of mouth because I spent the entire day in the stands, inputing data and team scores into the laptop. There was a lot of what we could call light banter around us. "I do not want to play patty-cake with the cement!"

At the end of the day we ranked about number 18 out of 61 teams....not bad at all. At the end of the day were the first round of awards: creativity in design, team spirit, etc. We were not expecting to get anything....mass hysteria when Team 956 was announced as the winner of the Xerox Creativity in Design Award. (Ironic, don;t you think, considering that a xerox used be a term for a photocopy?)

Last night we came out of there absolutely insane (or at least I was....maybe the coffee had something to do with it...) Mass euphoria pretty much.... Went to dinner (around 8 pm)


The first year I was marginally involved in robotics was 2006. My dad, as mentor, went along when our team went to the Sacramento regional...in fact the whole family. There was one interesting incident on the way....we were supposed to pack the control board (which is really, really important). We got about an hour on the road when "OH DEAR where is the control board?" We went back for it, very very glad we hadn't gotten to, say, Corning (California folks know Corning....we know and loathe it...hehe)
Our team did extremely well...placed 4th in fact (as a side note, another Oregon team took first place which made us happy). I sort of got hooked on robotics that year.....although the next year I wasn't involved. We won the Xerox Creativity Award that year....this year was the first time since then that we've won any awards.


In fact this feels exactly like 2006....from the really strong team, to the award, to the festive goings-on at dinner last night. Our team captain was building with sugar packets, and then there was what one of our mentors termed an "ice-breaker' when foresaid mentor managed to spill a lemonade over the table, and mostly over myself. the subsequent mopping-up process involved the whole team and loads of paper towels, and ice cubes slithering around under the table.

We got back to the hotel about 9, and met another team in the lobby and talked with them for a while, and firmed up potential alliance partners for the finals. Got into our team meeting around 10:30. By that time I was more or less exhausted and not inclined to view favorably the digressions....was nevertheless amused when one of our mentors did an impression our robot's jerky steering....then one of the other team members said, "I though that was the autonomous!" and we dissolved into laughter. I think possibly the quote of the evening was one of our Korean echange students, when we were discussing the intricacies of the scoring of the matches. As we argued over whether it was better to completely cream one's opponent or have a close game: "I think robotics is weird!"

The team cleared out around 11:30 and Sarah (our team captain and lead driver) and I holed up for some epic strategizing. I kept busy with the computer, entering scores, updating data, summarizing the stats on each team. Got done with that around 1 AM....the other two girls in our room had dozed off long ago. Despite exhaustion I was unable to get to sleep...around 2 I heard what sounded like a construction zone outside our window although it was probably just a truck backing up...good times.
I then went on to wake up at 6 AM.....do the math...I got less than 4 hours of sleep. Went staright to work on the spreadsheets again...coffee.....no breakfast....got to the competition early and started promoting our team. Then spent the morning in the stands.....ooogh...no food...I had too much adrenaline and not enough sleep combined to steal my appetite. At noon came the most stressful part of the the whole competition (for me)....giving Sarah the list of the teams we wanted as alliance partners in the finals.

We wound up not being able to choose teams, but one of the higher ranked teams selected us and we played in the semi-finals after lunch. Just the fact that we were able to play in finals was epic. We got eliminated after a few rounds but I am currently quite relaxed, don't have to worry about whether we are going to win or lose our next match.


Later still: Well that was epic! The final (or so we thought) round had a huge score on one side, and very low for the other alliance....it then developed that the winning team had had a penalty and was disqualified from that match.....hence a rematch.

Sunday night update: A local team wound up being on the winning alliance which is happy-making. We packed up after awards, tear-down in the pit, final farewells and then twas off. My dad drove Hannah and me home...he was dealing with some paperwork...got to the car and the battery was dead. We weren't parked close to the competition, no robotics people in sight. Amazingly we immediately found a helpful passerby to jump-start the car and we got off around 6:45 that night. Stopped at a health food store for refreshment and pursued our merry way home, amidst reminiscences over our epic 2010 robotics season.


Really I think this has been the most epic few days EVER for one reason and another. Now I am home, not much more excitement from here on out....well of course next weekend IS the DaVinci Film Festival, where my film Road to Freedom is being shown and judged, so who knows :)

ADRENALINE

Just a quick and over-capitalized note from Bethie-the-Insane! :D

Today got back our math tests from last Friday (finals week....fun times). We graded them in class, as well as turning in our calculator project (have I actually not posted on that? The assignment was to use a graphing calculator to draw a picture of a cartoon character, using equations.....fun but lotsa work).   

Me calc proj. (Charlie Brown :)  turned out well.....glad to be done. AND the math test was AWESOME!!!!!!     I thought I did rather poorly on it.....but NO.........

WOOOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!! 

COLLEGE ALGEBRA, HERE I COME!!!!!!

Came out of class and could not stop smiling XD  

Oh, and rehearsals are AWESOME :)  Three weeks til the show, yowp!   Tried on half of one of my two costumes yesterday, so puurtyy!  hehehehe    Blue tapestry-sort bodice. All the costumes are really awesome. It's so fun to be part of a huge production like this!!!!  We had a hysterically funny and awesome rehearsal yesterday, people running around with costumes, we've got a set onstage, balcony etc. and during the balcony scene bit they've got Romeo climbing part way up to talk to Juliet, and it was a really long scene.......the people watching from the wings were treated to the sight of the guy playing Capulet coming quietly up onstage with a long pole used in a later scene.....with Directorial approval, he later said.....well Romeo did not respond well to being poked whilst ten feet above the stage.........he just escaped falling off laughing......while the rest of the cast went into hysterics, more or less.....good times XD  

and with this, dear friends, I leave you......off to rehearsal! :P

Perhaps pedantic

 A quick note from the frozen North! Except it's not frozen.....we've had rather warm weather. Warm and very, very damp. 


My weekend proved harassing: lots and lots of math. Saturday afternoon I went to the second performance of Mary Poppins.....came home and did about 6 hours of math. Went to bed around 11 PM (late for me) but could not get to sleep: at 1 AM I decided that I was hungry and a carrot, some goat cheese on bread, and a cup of hot cocoa would be just the thing. And of course I had to check Facebook while I was up, went back to bed and set my alarm for 6:30 next morning, so as to get the math out of the way early.  On less than 6 hours of sleep I continued through the day, and by evening was slightly high from lack of sleep, and inclined to become enthused at the smallest provocation. In this mood I attended the last (for that weekend) performance of Mary Poppins. 

The show was fabulous, by far the best of the three that I saw. By the first scene I could tell it was going to be a good show, the energy was high, the audience was awesome. I remained positively bouncing with excitement the whole time and started a standing ovation at the end :D 

One of our little errands earlier in the day had been to go to Staples and buy a flash drive, to replace the one which went missing before Christmas. That was a lengthy process and I am now the embarrassed owner of a PINK 4GB flash drive. There was an interesting sequence of events that led to our getting it much cheaper than the identical black one. At least it is a dark, metallic pink, not bubble-gum. Ergh.   It needs a name now.....I think it may be a he.....

Another little highlight of my weekend involved chasing an escaped goat through the mud while Siamsa (Lord of the Dance soundtrack) played in the background.   I had neglected to fasten the gate while getting hay for the goats and of course Fiona made off across the yard at top speed. I slid in the chicken-yard mud and almost miraculously avoided getting any mud on my trenchcoat. Twas truly epic. 

I am feeling more nerdy every day. How embarrassing to decide, in what may be my last year of high school, that I actually sort of like math and might want to be a computer programmer! A little late, don't you think, considering that I barely knew how to use a computer at age 11? 

I haunt the counseling center at CHS, hunting down interviews with officials, trying to iron out the National Merit situation. Note: if you ever qualify for National Merit, do NOT pass it up for any reason! You will regret it and spend your life hanging around sketchy hallways attempting to schedule alternative means: like retaking the SAT.....      

And it would be very handy if I could decide whether I want to be a writer, theatre geek, or computer programmer, or event planner. 

Math was AWESOME today, the teacher is splendid, the energy is high. Conic sections! woot! 

AND my programming book finally came in at the library :D 

A quick note: a beloved follower commented on my use of brackets.....hehe, long story! It began with my messy handwriting and the fact that parentheses look like a C, sort of. Hence I made the switch to brackets and it carried over into typing [as you can observe in this painfully obvious example]. 

I promise, sometime soon we will have a Trenchcoats United award......   >:)   Meanwhile, the name is Copyright!! :P

Did YOU wear your trenchcoat with pride today?

end-of-year Tag

Here's an original tag by the author of "Oh crud!", "The Whoops Factor revisited", "One, Two, Go!...and there's just one thing", " 'Hysterical Laughter' is my favorite quote", "CRUNCH is the new normal", "For the Win!", "Nom-nom", and other sundry works of genius: in short, none other than Bethie.

Please feel creepily compelled to steal this tag.
Remember: Bethany knows where you live and she may hunt you down, and POUNCE....and then ship you off on a freight train to Detroit.....

So!

Funniest moment: good grief, one can't really choose, can one? Likely something to do with the movie:

- "Ahem! Audience, quiet please, we are about to make a major mistake!" (Joseph)

-"Dallan, stop talking on two! That's Bethany's job!" (Sophie)

-Adriel's enthused gestures in the background: "Sorry! I was explaining something!"

-Phillip trying to whip around in the climbing-out-the-window scene, when Eva enters, and catching his pistol on the table while his vest pops up in the back :D

-The Key Episode (hehe Eva! :P )

-of course, the oar snapping off when Eva tries to push off from shore, while the crew struggles helplessly in the blackberry vines

-"You're trying to make it look like I actually LIKE her or something!" (Joseph)


then there were other priceless moments at rehearsals for Top Hats:

-Eva's impersonation of the 'dozen bored dancers', combined with my mention of "we'll cut out the 'charming little pieces' line"

-Dallan's infatuated grin, chin on hands, whilst gazing at me across the table on stage


Other funnies:
"Zesty mint flavored fake blood! And Tic-Tacs..."
"Here's an opportunity to sound lame, let's not take it"
"OH CRUD"
"There is rain puddled right under my sleeping bag." "Well you'll have a water-bed!"
"Oh right, I'm supposed to act shot now!"

classic Epic Times: surreptitiously handing off stage weapons before Top Hats, the Hazelnut Incident, 46 hours without sleep during NaNo whilst blasting music successively louder, swimming in a mountain lake, filming a scene after midnight, seeing a bison walk down the road towards us, trying to prop up the tent for the movie with a twig, white-balancing with the back side of a sheet of music for the score for the film using the light from a candle!


FIRST: program successfully written and compiled, mp3 player, Macintosh (LOVELOVELOVE), film shown at film fest, feature-film accepted to film fest, time to read Hitchhiker's, play directed, all-nighter, theatre audition, time at public school, time liking math, BIG birthday party, physical manifestation of anger on unrelated inanimate object, novel almost completed, friend's novel published, song to mean something personally, standing ovation, tip for a waiter out of own pocket, really nice pocket knife, time in semi-finals at robotics regionals

Most nostalgic songs: the entire soundtrack for Road to Freedom!

Best group hug: at the end of my birthday party, or maybe after filming the ball scene.

Favorite memory: TOO MANY!! birthday party, premiere of Road to Freedom, cast interviews day, RenFaire, Halloween weekend.....

Major Hits: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Eddie (laptop), raw tofu, trenchcoat, Gaelic Storm, folk dance, Montana, C++, goats, robotics, t-shirts, ivy, blogging.

Merry Christmas!...and the big robotics post!

Hope everyone had a nice Christmas! Yesterday was our third day to go into town for supplies food-wise, hehe. Delivered a few gifts on Wednesday, bought hay, etc. Christmas Eve was deeply foggy all day, and turned icy later which helped in the decision not to go to Midnight Mass, somthing I've always wanted to do. Went to an evening church service, opened a few presents and I went to bed late. Before going to bed I heard a couple of owls hooting at each other outside, and a third one maybe half a mile or so away :)

Woke up late also, to sunshine and the smell of bacon wafting upwards, a great rarity...natural bacon is rather pricey.

Had lunch at grandmother's house, outside in the sun at the 45th parallel! Good times.

Just spent an hour or so on the Autodesk website, being annoyed by the apparent impossibility of registering. Finally got that all straightened out, then found that their software is only compatible with Windows, I'd have to partition Eddie's hard drive to run Windows (which has to be BOUGHT of course!) in order to run the software (animation, helpful for robotics stuff). Rowr.

And about that robotics stuff: I keep promising an in-depth post on what exactly I am talking about when I wave terms like "build season", "regionals", "what on earth is a lugnut", "FIRST", "ship date", and "scouting" around in the aluminum-shaving-filled air.

Sooooo....FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology) is a nationwide organization. They have several branches including Lego-league robotics competitions for middle schoolers (such as I helped with a few weeks ago) and FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) for high schoolers.
My dad is the team coach/leader for our team so I tend to get sucked into the madness :P

I went to a competition in CA at the age of 13 and sort of got hooked...this will be my third year on the team to some extent.

The kickoff (Jan. 9th at an early hour of the morning) consists of the teams from all over the state coming to La Sells auditorium (goaded by coffee) and watching a live streamed broadcast of the kickoff in New Hampshire (where the founder Dean Kamen has his lair). The stream tends to go down sometimes but that's all part of the fun, hehe. Role-call: all the teams that made it over the dangerous high mountain passes and such give rousing cheers and so on.

There we learn what this year's 'game' will be: whether our robot will have to be designed to herd balls, go up ramps, throw things, or etc. We also listen to a lot of inspiring speeches by Kamen and Woodie Flowers and all those folks as to why we do this, the benefit that engineering is to the world, "gracious professionalism", and how we are going to have the best season ever. Then we all head over to the other university building to collect the kit of parts: the "Kamen tote" and the "Flowers tote" (Woodie Flowers, another beloved founder) and pack the industrial-strength wheels and metal and motors into the van and head out to school for the first day of the build season: planning.

Please note that I am not mechanically-minded in the least. My role on the team has pretty much been confined to 'scout': at the 3-day competition in March I do the whole PR bit with the other teams, convincing them that our team would be a good partner (the games are always played in alliances of three teams)--teamwork is one of the big goals of FIRST. I also do random stuff like team buttons, graphics, etc. This year I'll hopefully be helping more with the build, you know, holding bits of metal whilst people drill them :) Also doing the work for Chairman's Award (animation, essay, etc), and more communications/facilitation stuff like figure out accommodations for the competition and so on.

Competition: AKA 'regionals'. AKA three days of insanity. WHOOHOO! Portland (2 hrs away) is our regional...50 teams...one scout to interview those fifty teams (ME)...'The Coliseum' in Portland is rented for the three days...we go up early Thursday morning. Thursday is more or less practice, repairing robots that have glitches, that sort. Some teams pack up the bot at the deadline and are still tinkering with it (saws, drilling, soldering, you know, light little adjustments :P ) on Thursday. Thu. is also scouting heaven, not too stressful: I try to get around to all the teams by Thursday night and have some form of database up and running, be it ever so humble (notebook, last year. Laptop this year, hopefully).
We spend the night in Portland usually but funding is an issue this year. We may have to commute from home (groan!) but I'm looking into an offer of free housing in Wilsonville (friendly robotics team/supportive town = :)

On Friday the intensity reaches a whole other level. There are three areas of concern: The field, where 6 robots (and attendant teams) compete at one time. In the stands we have much-maligned and under-appreciated but very-important scouts watching the teams and jotting things down on clipboards. Music blares louder each day. The pits are the third and most chaotic area: big, big conference room downstairs, full of 50 teams (an average of 20 people on each team), their robots, and whatever their 10x10 assigned homebase has been decked out with (clock, table, toolkit, etc). Noise, noise, noise. Announcer saying who's queuing up next, scouts and team members hurrying to and fro, horrible metallic screeching sounds (remember the last-minute repairs?). Usually several 'bots on their little carts (gotter save the wheels) being shuttled out to the field.

This is when the harried scout feels the insanity. Most teams have 5-8 scouts, or people who can become scouts at moment's notice. That is because most teams have 20 people or so: for the last two years we've had about 5. That's usually the driver down in the field, a human player chucking balls (last year), and so forth. My first year I was THE scout, the one-and-only scout added at the LAST minute because there were so few people. Frantic. We didn't really need the scouting info that year because we didn't do too fabulously but I came back last year resolved to do even better. Had more people to help thankfully: and our team did very well. More on that later.
Yes, by the end of Friday it is essential to have full tabs on every team there: in other words, did their bot break down? Or stall on the field (even worse)? Do they pull a lot of fouls? Do they have a fabulous human player? Are they scoring a lot in each game?
Friday night the scout with full info (laptop with program and info input) rendezvouses with the driver to plot strategy for the final day of competition.
Saturday morning everyone is unbelievably pumped: the first half of the day is qualifying matches for the semis and finals in the afternoon. Scouts firm up alliances: in the afternoon the top-ranked teams go on to finals and get to choose their alliance partners. Last year we were ranked very high all competition until late Saturday morning when we had a series of mishaps. We were still getting courted by a lot of teams, I was in contact with the top-ranked couple of teams and getting things lined up. For the top teams, Saturday lunchbreak is stressful beyond imagining: go over your notes one more time, rank your top 15 teams or so, in case you can't get your first pick; agonize one more time....send your team captain down to the field after lunch with a piece of paper with team names on it.....collapse helplessly in the bleachers.

Last year we were ranked about 16...barely missed being able to chose our partners. We were hoping and praying to get chosen by the top team but the selection process allows #1 to choose #2, and so on. We got picked by a lower-ranked team, who also selected a team that I'd marked down dismissively. Thus placed on a weak team, we nevertheless played in semi-finals, where we played several games. There was an issue with the floor, and static electricity interfering with our remote-controls. Our team had conniptions in the stands as all of the teams on our alliance, by a crazy fluke, stalled from the static, and the 2-minute match went on, and the judges did not call the match (it had been happening all morning and they'd had to keep replaying matches). Needless to say, we lost resoundingly. We were positively livid with panic as they proceeded to have a long interlude....finally announced a rematch!! (getting adrenaline just remembering...)

I think we tied that match...lost the next one...the aforementioned weak team bailed, their robot was down.....that surely has to be the saddest thing that can happen. We got eliminated fairly quickly but there was such a great sense of relief that at least we'd had our chance, the judges hadn't gone with that failed match.

Late Saturday afternoon are the awards, creativity in design and that sort, and of course first place awards for the winning three teams who go on to the nationals in Atlanta. We've never gone, but one year we went to another regional in CA and finished about 4th...very fun stuff :)

And then the first game-hint came out yesterday.

It is supposedly a hint as to what this year's game will consist of. Last year's hint was a picture of a fish, for a game played on a slippery surface ^_^ There are already pages of speculations on ChiefDelphi, the hang-out place for FIRSTies. There seems to be a consensus that the game this year may involve soccer balls, possibly on some sort of raised pathway. That CAD-designed pic is now my desktop on Eddie :)


So! There is the run-down on FIRST and why I will be insanely busy between Jan. 9th and Mar. 6.

Hmm, this really sounds like I'm insane, doesn't it? FIRST is complicated beyond belief at first glance....sounds like a cult to outsiders :)


EDIT: Come, join us in the madness!!

I'm being eaten....

by algebra...the teacher was complimentary "There's some good work there, for not having had the class"....
I spent much of my Friday night working on algebra...particularly one problem which took me 45 minutes. Then on Saturday, with no snow in evidence but some very nasty driving conditions (read: solid sheet of ice on road) we got to the robotics meet at 11 AM. Believe me, the LEGO League robotics competition is a placid picnic compared to, say, the Portland FRC regionals! Fun though :) There was only one other person from our team, and only two other FRC (high school) teams there, but there was no shortage of help.
Me dad had planned to not stay any longer than necessary, but I decided I'd rather stay for 5 hours than go home and tackle the algebra! Most of the time I was working in the back rooms where the judges interview the teams on various aspects of their robot, teamwork and that sort. There were some other FRC peeps there, from Philomath mostly, and we had way too much fun in the intervals between groups of FLL kids coming to be judged.

I may have commented on this before, but geeks for the win!! At regionals in March I always notice how nice just about everyone is...as a scout I come into contact with a LOT of people and they are sweet and nerdy and funny (good combination, by the way).

Hehe, this year I'm finally on something of an even footing: engineering stuff is still out of my league (what's a resistor?) but at least I am not so entirely clueless. C++ is the code used for a lot of the programming so that helps :)
Chatted with aforementioned awesome nerdy people....Hitchhiker's Guide...computer science....math ("fun when you understand it")....admiration for my stock of batteries in pocket, and little 9-volt flashlight (SO cool..robotics people are unfailingly intrigued). Way too many jokes and fun for volunteer hours ;)

Then last night I was eaten by the algebra homework that I had so thoughtfully left til the last; also memorized my twenty lines of Shakespeare for the audition today. That's in a few hours o_O

On the subject of geeks, geekery and nerds, neeks, beeks, brains, and other intelligent things: let's talk. I think most of us would admit that we have tendencies to one or the other. Girls are afraid (really? are we?) of being thought nerdy....intellectual..."guys don't like girls who are smarter than they are"....all that jazz.
Lads: weigh in! Are YOU secretly afraid of being thought nerdy? What about nerdy/geeky girls? I have it on good authority that geeky guys like geeky girls....be aware that 90% of the few crushes I have had have been on nerdy guys...so fear not, thou'rt not despised by the entire female population...just the despicable cheer-leading type....give me the good programmer over the football quarterback any day! ;)

Let's get a nice big happy forum going in the comments, folks! hehe...tales of geekery...