I was intending to get out a post earlier this week, but it’s not going to happen. Competition results, finals week gripes, and much mouch more coming eventually. I even have a post drafted, about half done. Too much to do to elaborate–I’ll try to get to this this weekend, or else next Thursday.
–Nathan
I really need to go to bed soon. I was up until late Wednesday night, in part due to the fact that Nik and a few others came in and started playing Halo at 1:30. In all fairness, he asked if I minded, and I said no. I really didn’t think they,d still be going at 3, though. I went to bed a few minutes after 3, and I guess they quit about 3:40. None of them had classes until after 11, though. (My first class Thurs is at 9:45, not terribly early, but enough that 3 is a bit late.)
Then last night, I went out to Café Procrastiné about 10:40, and they were decorating the lounge. Well, Nick Zubach was, and maybe one other person. So I helped, and we quit decorating at 12:30, or so. We had Icicle lights all the way arround the room, at the top, and colored lights in various places. There is a tree, all decorated, and the mantle has garland arround it, as well as more lights. There’s even a train set arround the tree. After we finished, there were a few of us out in the lounge, just talking. The movie White Christmas was played, but by the middle of the movie, just Ryan and I were left. At 3, I decided that I was going to bed, and wasn’t going to bother the finish the movie.
After we decorated, while we were talking, several lights were starting to fall down. The duct tape just wasn’t enough, I guess. At one point, I had just turned the train on for one trip arround the track, adn then walked across the room to re-tape some lights. I heard the train get caught, and went back that way. I chose to go over the back of the couch. As near as I can tell, I put my foot on the top of the back, and pushed off, and my foot slipped back down towards the cushions. At any rate, I was going forward, and my foot was still on the top of the couch. I fell, and stopped myself with my arm. I was a bit sore after that. 😉 Actually, my arm still feels kinda funny. I don’t really think anything is wrong, but I have an appointment Monday at the health center, and I’ll have someone look at it if it still feels wierd. Otherwise, I’ll cancel. It kinda feels like a bit of growing pain, or something. I feel it ont he inside of my arm, though, and when I lift something with my palm up, I can really feel it. We’ll see how it goes.
—-
Starting at 1:00 tomorrow, and lasting til about 4ish, is the Design competition. My team is now in decent shape, we finished the device about 5:30 tonight. I don’t remember if I’ve blogged about the competition yet, so I’ll run over it briefly.
As part of my Intro to Engineering class, we have this competition. You are given limited parts, and you have to construct a device that will collect whiffle balls from a competiton arena. There will be four devices in the arena, at the same time, competing for the same balls. There are four balls the size of a softball, worth 10 points each, 8 balls the size of a baseball, worth 5 points, and 50 balls, worth 2 points each, the size of a golf ball. There is a 2 minute time limit. There are 4 prizes the easiest to explain are: one for most points, one for most ingenious. YOu have the option to stop collecting balls at any time, and so there is a prize for the most points per total time collecting. So if you aren’t going to get any more balls, you may as well quit, so you don’t run up your time.
As we built this, we were charged fake money for supplies. You got a basic kit, and then had the option to purchase additional supplies. There is no spending limit, and you have nfinite money to spend, but the fourth prize is for the most points per dollar spent. To my knowledge, very few people built their devices with an eye on this prize.
The competition is a pretty big event. Besides all teh freshman engineers, there will be a lot of parents, and they invite prospective students out too. I had the option of having invitations sent to some of my high school teachers, and sent ones to Mrs. Collins and Mrs. McAndie. I doubt either will come, but I thought they might be interested. Mrs. McAndie told my Dad a few weeks ago that she won’t be coming.
Here is what my device looks like:
We have a paddle wheel to scoop up the balls. This is a design shared with about 20 other devices. And to my knowledge, all of us thought we were the only ones that thought of a paddle wheel.
I have to show up at noon tomorrow, and we find out the order of competition at 12:30. I’ll try to take a few pictures, but we’ll see.
Until later
–Nathan
I have a lot of things to do, some more important than others. Since I can’t motivate myself to start anything, maybe listing them will help:
[EDITED 12/3 to try and cross off some stuff. Apparently, it doesn’t work right. Its not worth troubleshooting, so you may or may not see the crossed out stuff. It’s there, but I can’t see it.]
That’s a thouroughhy impressive list. Now to get started…
—-
Nik had an interesting experience with his debit card recently. He went downtown to pick up an amp that he had purchased before, and he also bought some strings. He paid for the strings with his debit card. Apparently, the machine at the store instructed the clerk to confiscate his card, as it thought it was stolen. He argued about that for a while, but there was nothing to do short of jumping the counter to get the card back, as I understand. So they asked if he had another way to pay for it, and he used the card for the other account, the one he got through Washington Mutual so he could use the ATM here. That went just fine, and he ended up with the strings. So he called his bank later that day, and learned that there was a temporary glitch in Visa’s computers that caused his card to come up that way. Either the card was already locked, or his bank locked it then. The bank will send him a new card in the mail. So this was the state of things when I first learned of the situation (that afternoon).
At some point, in the next few days, he noticed that the initial charge had gone through, before the card was confiscated, and he had been double charged. He called the guitar shop, and the guy checked his records, and could not find a record of the first card having been charged. He then told Nik that “I bet your bank is trying to screw you.” If one stops and thinks about that, however, you realize that the bank is in trouble if anyone finds out that they are stealing money, and what is the motivation for a bank where he has his whole savings to steal $20 from his account?
He called his bank back, and last I heard, they were planning on calling the guitar shop the next day and informing him that the charge had indeed gone through.
I have no idea why I thought of this, as this actually happened about a month ago, and I haven’t yet asked Nik how it went. He got some mail from a bank the other day, though. I’ll have to ask him.
All for now
–Nathan
As you may have noticed, I now have a domain name, nathanoliver.net. My website will stay at this address forever, or at least as long as I continue paying for the name. I got it for only $8/ yr, so barring any price increases, my address will never change.
I mentioned the economics of the name on my home page, but I’ll go throught them here. If I were to give you the actual URL of my site (olvr86.freeserverhost.com), you would be able to see my site, but if I ever moved it, or if the host closed down or went out of business, that link, and any bookmarks you might have had will just stop working.
On the other hand, there are free redirect services availible, (like my uni.cc address). They can be re-directed to new websites, and actually, my old address now points to my new website. The problem with this is that either the address makes all pages of my website look like they have the same address, which means that bookmarks all end up pointing to the homepage, or the re-direct sends you to the site(like I had it set up), and then shows you the real URL, returning us to the situation described above. So I got a domain name. All problems solved, adn I feel cool. 🙂
In other news, the man auction was last Thursday. I started writing a letter to the high school staff, and the first thing I thought about was the auction, this is what I wrote:
The Man Auction is Villa’s fundraiser for charity. Each dorm holds one fundraiser for a charity. This year, we were supporting a school of 150, grades 1-12, in Bangladesh. The cost to run the school, house the students (travel is not practical, so they board), and pay all the staff is $9600 for the year. Our goal was to raise enough money to support the school for next year.
For the auction, there were twelve groups, each performing a skit of some sort. Two had live music, one was a narrated slide show, and the rest were skits, dances, or something in between. Each group has also put together a date, which is then bid on. The dates varied in quality, from a home cooked meal and a movie at one end, to a private plane ride to the beach, a sunset stroll, and a starlight tour, by air, of Portland at the other end. Then the bidding begins. Groups of girls bid on the groups, which can accommodate a certain number of dates. Groups ranged from 3-8 in size.An anonymous donor had stepped forward with a pledge to match, dollar for dollar, anything we raised. That meant that we needed to raise $4800. The first few acts did not bid so well, and it was looking as though we were not going to reach the goal. By the intermission, we were well off track. However, things were about to improve. Several of the acts in the second half received high bids. The single highest bid was on a group that called itself the “Men in Black”
The group consisted of three priests, one of whom is Italian, and one of whom was formerly a professional chef. They will prepare a 6 course dinner, with (live) Italian singing. The dinner is to be given in the house of the University President, in the formal dining room. Needless to say, this date was open to bidders of both genders. They had two groups interested, and ended up at the end offering two dates, one to each group. The final bid was $1000, meaning a cash total of $2000 raised, or $4000 with matching. Other groups also did well, the final group (which included my roommate) fetching $900+. By the end we had raised $8800, for a total with matching, of $17600. No word yet on what will be done with the extra funds.
Last year, they broke all records by raising a bit over $7000.
I’m going to bed.
–Nathan
This is coming slower than I’d planned. Apparently, uni.cc is not working now, so if you follow that link to my new site, all you’ll get is an error page. I want to use a re-direct so that I can move hosts again if necessary, and not have to change all my links and stuff. For now, just use my Sitesled Address. I will update when I get a better handle on it. I have until Dec 15 bef ore my other host closes down, but I want to get the new address up and running so I can link to it for a month or so.
Okay, I decided to do another week.
I have other stuff to post, but don’t feel like it right now, so here goes:
List provided by :
I was exploring the net, and discovered a thing that’ s been going around for quite a while. The idea is that by writing the first thig that comes to your mind after a certain prompt, you tell about yourself. I found a site that provides a list of ten things each week, and will do the first one now. I may or may not try again, we’ll see. Here goes:
I just found out that my free webhost will be closing down on December 15. I’ve known that they were not making a profit for a while now, and so the news was not a terrible surprise, but it is really dissapointing. With the webhost goes the forum, which I will miss most of all. There are several regualar posters who I have come to be good friends with, and we won’ t be able to hang out anymore.
Now I will have to find another place to host my website, but that doesn’t even bother me as much as the closing of the forum. It’s strange, they were almost like family. I knew their names, where they lived, where they worked, what their interests were, and much more.
For those wanting to keep up with my website, www.nathanoliver.uni.cc will always link to the home page of my site, wherever I move it to. For those of you who access my site through my Blogger profile, I will update that link to my new site, too. If you have a link bookmarked that has “Aloofhosting” in the URL, that link won’t work after December 15.
–Nathan
It’ s WAY too early. Today, Nov 1, I saw a Christmas Commercial. On the first of November! Christmas has already taken over Thanksgiving, but Nov 1! Next thing you know, we’ll be telling kids to be good, or the neighbors won’t give them any Halloween Candy (which they are collecting in a stocking). AArgh!
I got my Physics quiz back today. The quiz had only one problem on it, and it happened to be the problem from the homework that I hadn’t understood very well, but hadn’t yet bothered to worry about. So I spent the first part of the time alloted trying to solve it in a way that I realized wasn’t working. About the time I got on the right track, (as it turns out) she announced” “5 minutes left, you should be well on your way to finishing.” So I rushed though one or two parts, and then wrote down the rest of the process I would have followed. But I was actually stuck, and even if I had another hour, that was all I could have done. I had an equation with the Normal Force, the coefficient of Static friction, and the Friction Force, but couldn’t solve it becaue of too many variables. I finished, thinking I’d failed it, or maybe gotten 6/10.
I got the quiz back, and realized she gives more partial credit than I was aware of. I ended up with a 9/10. The only comment that she made on the test was that I needed the equation max static Friction=coefficient of Static friction*Normal force. (It’s really hard to write it out, so I’ve tried to draw it. See it to the left.) It’s a really good feeling to see that you’ve gotten 90% on a quiz you thought you’d failed. It’s an experience I hope never to repeat, though. That is, i hope I never have a reason to think I failed a quiz.