Interlude

Hey, all. So, as of 10:30 this morning, I just finished taking four tests in eighteen hours, so my brain is pretty fried. Life right now is mostly class and studying, so I'm gonna talk about something else. 

since I've started going to school, I've realized that there are a ton of things that can be used for more than you might think. For example- I've taken to making and wearing funky rubber band bracelets. Those are great for holding an ID when I go run. A pair of jeans ripped in the wrong place, and so now they stop my dorm room door from banging into the closet door. Hair ties hold together and organize flash cards (they don't rip them like rubber bands). Dryer sheets become air fresheners. And, of course, duct tape is used for just about everything, from actually fixing stuff to making the stuff we need. 

The cool thing is that, even though I live with mostly engineers, a lot of these ideas are not unique to them. Everyone is trying to save money or gas and uses things in a creative way in order to improve the quality of life. People tend to be more creative than they realize, even the ones who insist they aren't. It's amazing how people tend to make things work out a little easier for themselves and those coming afterward. Even better is that people help each other.

Yes, I am stressed about upcoming finals, but I am confident that everything will work out. I have a good support network and I know my stuff. 

(Also, for a final project, I'm designing a bike - and it's actually working!)

Almost

The semester is winding down, stress levels are driving up, and the heat here has started to become overbearing. I haven't worn actual shoes at all for the past week, and it's been beautiful.
This week is the week of finals that aren't - tests in almost every class that count, but aren't finals. I've got to be in two places at once for two of them. On the other hand, I've got a pretty cool final project going for my computer aided design class - I'm making a bicycle. I can't wait for everything to be over.

The weather here is becoming oppressive. It's been in the 80's all week, except when it rained, and it's been dry and awful for anyone with allergies. The cicadas haven't started buzzing yet, but you can still find birds nests around campus if you know where to look.

On Easter, I went to church in the morning, hung out with friends, and had dinner at Boston Market with some other people. It was nice and relaxing and not too taxing. 

Big news this week - Dave Franco and a few other guys from the movie Neighbors came to campus and blocked traffic for a few hours. I actually got a glimpse of them before they were sucked into a suffocating horde of screaming fan girls. The line for the pre-screening went out the door of the student union where the theater is and wrapped all the way around the building.

On Friday night, I participated in Relay for Life (a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society) with through Society of Professional Hispanic Engineers (I have a bunch of friends in that club), which was a phenomenal experience. I met a ton of great people and helped raise money both for ACS and for SHPE. Some people stayed all night until dawn, doing laps, talking, selling stuff, playing games. I didn't have the stamina and ended up going back to my dorm at 2AM.

Finally, I finally saw the Lego Movie. It was really cute, and any movie with Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, and Will Ferrel is a good movie in my book. One of the most entertaining things was seeing how characters in the Lego universe interpreted the objects they found from the full sized world, like "the blade of Exact-Zero." I would recommend it, although the basic plotline is horribly predictable.

Also, I've picked classes for next semester. I'm taking Electricity and Magnetism (which is supposed to be tough and never used again after the class), vector calculus (which, I've heard, can blow your mind), Statics (which I've heard is really fun or really hard), American Indian Languages (a Gen Ed which should be fun), and Spanish Literature (to finish up my minor). I'm considering adding beginning dance class to get me up in the mornings and get me moving, since most of my classes are in the afternoon and physical education classes do not exist. Either way, it will be another tough semester, but I'm looking forward to it.

I just have to keep telling myself that I'm almost there.

Rube Pictures

The vehicles (66+ hours of driving):

The Team

Dinner before building:

 Packing the Uhaul

 Mousetraps!!!

 Human Skeleton made of wire in COSI

University of Arizona machine:

Purdue Machine:

Washington St. Louis machine:

Penn State machine:

The room throughout the competition:

 

Awards:

 

Dinner on the way back

Rube Goldberg Competition

This past Thursday through Monday, I went on a rad trip to Ohio with 17 other awesome members of the UA Rube Goldberg Club to compete at the national Rube Goldberg Competition at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) in Columbus. Here's what went down:

Wednesday afternoon: I pack and bring my stuff over to the Rube room in time to see the 15 passenger van and a truck with a trailer expertly maneuvered into the Civil Engineering courtyard (trust me, the alleyway in is tiny). I left my stuff and observed the broken-down machine for the last time until we hit Ohio.

Thursday morning: Time is 2:30 AM MST. I get up, get dressed, and down a bowl of cereal to use up the last of my milk. I grab apples out of the fridge as an attempt to preemptively counteract all the junk food we'll be eating, shove my snacks and some deodorant into a backpack, grab my water bottle, and walk over to Civil Engineering. I'm one of the first to arrive, but I when I get there, I see the club president wearing pajamas, socks with flip-flops, and a bright orange top hat. People start to trickle in, and someone brings donuts. We discuss the route we'll be taking, the driving schedule, and the mad hype that we're all feeling. I start out in the truck, which has more room, and once we're all loaded, we hit the road to begin the thirty hour cross country trek.
This truck, along with having all the normal road trip stuff like water and blankets in it, also has a few coils of wire, a package of BB's, and a 2-foot long Styrofoam cactus in it. The first hour or so is spent rocking out to Pit Bull, and after that, the two of us in the back try to sleep a little.

Thursday midday: At about 1:30 PM MST, we get to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We stop off at a Walmart near the freeway to pick up some walkie-talkies, batteries, and mousetraps. We eat lunch at the first of many MacDonald's at the Walmart. By this point, we've all shuffled vehicles and seats a few times and are mostly awake. The kid's meal toys are hoarded.
After that, it is my turn to copilot the truck, which means it is my job to keep the driver awake and to man the walkie-talkie. Along the way,  it is decided that the call name for the truck with the trailer is "Rattlesnake" and the van is "Mongoose."
After my shift, I go back to the van. We play the Question Game, stop off for dinner somewhere in Texas, and keep going.

Thursday night: Sleep - as best as possible with stops every four hours and no room.

Friday morning: We stop for breakfast at a Subway at a gas station in Missouri. And we keep going.

Friday afternoon: We get to the hotel in Ohio - finally - and unhook the trailer from the truck. It's about 2:30 local time, and we take about 45 minutes to shower and clean up. We change into team shirts and eat lunch at a diner that's right next to the hotel. The people working there seemed really surprised to see a bunch of ravenous college kids all requesting separate checks at that time.

Friday night: After eating, we hook up the trailer again and headed to COSI, where we unloaded the machine and start putting it back together. We're the first ones there. Turns out that the same weekend as the competition is a Girl Scout Camp-In at COSI, so we get in at about the same time as a bunch of neon shirted girls.
About an hour after we start putting stuff together, Purdue's team shows up. There machine is much easier to put together as theirs beaks into just two parts plus weights (ours has two walls, a 3-part floor, a ceiling, and a bunch of shelves, plus weights). We say hi and admire each other's machines.
The people running the competition had ordered pizza for us, so at about 8:00 PM local time, we stop and eat. The judges and Rube Goldberg's granddaughter show up, and we spend some time chatting and bragging about our 31-hour trip.
Eventually, Washington St. Louis shows up, and we help bring their stuff in. Their machine also only breaks into two parts, so they set it up quickly and help finish the pizza.
We run our machine once, decide most of the strings are too long, and work on the machine until we are kicked out. We then go back to the hotel and sleep - horizontally!

Saturday morning: The day of the competition has arrived! We get up early and eat breakfast at a Tim Horton's across the street from the hotel (apparently, those are a big deal) and get to the museum at 7AM to start fixing things and setting up some more. Penn State eventually comes in and gets everything set up on time. At this point, the museum isn't open yet, but the occasional groups of girl scouts and docents walk through and ask questions. All four teams are setting and running their machines. The clatter of marbles and mousetraps begins. The real crowds start coming through when the museum opens, and from then on, there are tons of people watching, admiring, and asking questions.

Saturday midday: Game time. "Rules" start at 11AM (only two people touching the machine and a total of six allowed around it), and the competition gets underway at 11:30. Before running the machines, teams get two minutes to explain them. The other teams just run through their steps, but we have a skit based on the adventures of the Sonny Waters Adventuring Guild (our machine's theme).  After some touches, Penn State and our team decide to void our first runs, while Washington's run was perfect. After 20 minutes to reset, the machines are run through again, and Purdue and Washington take their voids. We had our first perfect run at Nationals! Another twenty, and a third round.
Each of the machines got set and run a few more times before awards, and the crowds never went away.
Awards time - we all hold our breath. The overall winner and the legacy award go to Purdue, Washington St. Louis gets second, People's Choice, and Best Step for growing flowers, and we get Third.
This is Purdue's machine.  
This is an earlier version of Penn State's. (They cleaned it up a lot and added a dragon.)
I can't find a video of Washington's.

Saturday night: Afterwards, we travel to Ohio State to get dinner and do the touristy thing. The place where the team had gotten dinner last year had closed, and everything else was full because it was a game day (spring football or something. We got plenty of strange looks in our green shirts), so we end up at a bar at the student union. We go explore, find a glass 10 story library and whispering steps, and after walking around a lot, we head back to the hotel for a toast and the last horizontal non-squished sleep we'll get in a while.   

The way back: In St. Louis, we decide to detour because there are tornado warnings in Oklahoma. Instead of hitting tornado in Missouri and Oklahoma, we hit massive thunderstorms and traffic through Arkansas and Texas. Sleep was had, jams were played, stories were told, and a random spin-the-bottle app was laughed at. I spent the last stretch in the truck, helping one of the guys develop creatures for his fantasy novel (faceless shape shifters and hallucinogenic flowers, anyone?). We made it back to U of A at about 6:00 MST, unloaded, and went to sleep.

And that was what I did last weekend. (Pictures coming)

Catching Up

I have been busy, and a bit negligent about blog posts, so there's triple this week.

On the note of the Arizona Wisconsin basketball game and subsequent riots - There was free food at Park Student Union, so before the game I walked across campus to get some. I saw at least 10 police cars lined up between Old Main and the cow fence just outside of University Drive. I decided to walk back to my dorm and watch the game with people I actually knew, so I headed back to Gila after consuming some pretty good hot wings. I watched the game. The groans with the last shot could be heard all over campus and off it. There was shouting, you know, "U of A" and all, but nothing serious. I headed upstairs and played cards with my friends. About half an hour later, the sirens started, and they continued through the night. I was not in the streets, but I know people who were.
I walked University the next day and could see no lasting damage. Sure, there were a few stray beer bottles, a few tree branches were broken, but there was no lasting damage. The most distinctive sign of what had happened the night before was the white powdery streaks on the street in front of Gentle Ben's (a popular bar), presumably from the pepper balls. And that was that. It cleaned up very nicely.

What's going on with me - I got a perfect score on my last math test, so I'm pretty proud of that.
I've been working on homework, and my grades are looking better.
The Spring Break tours are still happening. It's kind of funny - you can tell the prospective students by the red folder they carry and the blank look on their faces. There are a ton - much more than any other time that I've seen.
I've got an MSE test tomorrow. Funny thing - my professor posted a study guide on April Fools Day with a link to "additional information." He totally rickrolled the entire class. What is rickrolling, you ask? Well, it's this trend that started on 4chan and some other programming boards. He basically did this.

Biggest news though - next week, I'm embarking on a 30 hour car trip with 17 other crazy people to compete at the national Rube Goldberg Competition at COSI in Columbus Ohio. A video of what the machine looks like can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPczsnDSdWU  (and yes, this is a real link). So, we're leaving early Thursday morning, taking a truck with the machine and a 15 passenger van, driving cross country, crashing for a few hours, setting up the machine, visiting COSI and Ohio State, competing and exhibiting the machine, crashing again, and then heading back in time for school on Tuesday. It's going to be so much fun - and of course, we're going to beat Purdue. I'm really looking forward to that.
I will take pictures, and, time and brain power permitting, I will post from the competition.

Other than that, it's been pretty boting. Lots of schoolwork, a little Dungeons and Dragons, some hanging with Clayton, and little time to chill. I'm still loving college and taking it all in stride.

What I did over Spring Break

I apologize, I've been negligent for the past few weeks.
So....
Two weeks ago was Spring Break.
I stayed on campus, mostly. I caught up on a couple of TV shows friends told me I was supposed to watch, got through the Divergent trilogy (that ending was harsh), ran a little, explored, and slept in.

That first weekend was the Tucson Festival of Books, which was huge. White tents full of established authors, publishers looking for the next big thing, food, science, and more covered the Mall from Old Main all the way up to McKale Center. I saw Lois Lowry plugging her new book, the guy who wrote Warm Bodies doing stand up, Bill Walsh (a copy editor from the Washington Post) explaining why "literally" should literally mean "literally", a really good high school steel drum band, and Maguire School of Irish Dance (brings back mixed memories). I also finally got some good frybread. I spent most of Saturday just exploring by myself and with Clayton. I also met his mom, who is really nice, and we went out to see Non-Stop, a pretty good Liam Neeson movie. Tons of fun.

The first few nights, I hung out with the few people who were left in the dorm. We watched "Community," a show about a totally unrealistic community college which was also Chevy Chase's comedic last stand, for a while. One night, we played a serious game of hide and seek, which covered the bottom corner of campus and was intense (don't worry, we stayed in pairs and every pair had to share a picture every few minutes). The real craziness started when someone inevitably broke out the Cards Against Humanity - which, as it says on the box, is a "card game for horrible people." Hilarity ensued. This is who was playing hide and seek:


On Thursday, I went camping with a friend's church group. It started off pretty badly - the people who drove us almost forgot the food (but didn't) and, going up the windy road to the campsite, I got barfed on by a motion sick dog named Sly. He wasn't very.
Anyway, camping was really fun. There were ten of us all together (plus two dogs), and I was the only one who wasn't usually part of the group, but that wasn't a problem. I went geocaching for the first time and found an ammo box full of rubber ducks, among other things. We played a lot of Catchphrase, Buzzword and Egyptian Rat Slap in our spare time. The food was really good - one of the guys made a killer beef roast over the fire. The cold wasn't too bad, the lake we were right next to was beautiful, and the dogs made everything funny. I had a great time, met a lot of new people, and came back smelling like dog and smoke.
We got back on Sunday, and I caught up on homework, and returned to school refreshed.

On the Riots after the Wisconsin Game...

I've been promising a good rant for a while, so here goes...

Last night, Nick Johnson missed a last second shot after a tightly contested Elite Eight basketball game between the Wildcats of the University of Arizona and the Badgers of the University of Wisconsin, leaving his team with a one point deficit and a loss. That was the end of a good game where both teams played their hearts out. It could have gone either way, but Wisconsin ended up winning.

Within the hour, near the University of Arizona campus there were sirens, helicopters, pepper balls, screams, shouts, ambulances. The automated text went out to avoid University Boulevard because of a large "unlawful gathering," but sirens could be heard on 6th Street and Speedway as well. Social media exploded with videos and pictures of people going crazy, and subsequently with ambulance-chaser lawyer requests to send videos for evidence of police brutality. The noise lasted until at least two in the morning.

The age-old question of what happens when you get a bunch of frustrated drunk people together in a small space was answered - pandemonium ensues.

There is something slightly ironic about riots in the United States - when we want something changed, nonviolence is the name of the game, when we are frustrated about laws and things that actually mean something, we go out with our signs and march, pass petitions, call legislators. When there is something there is no way we can change, when there is no impact at all on everyday life - that's when we riot. A quick Wikipedia search shows that a good number of major incidents of civil unrest have come as a result of sports, and it doesn't seem to matter who won or lost.

Don't get me wrong - sports are great. They can bring a community together, they give an excuse to celebrate, they're fun to watch and to play. The problem is when devotion to sport meets energy meets lack of self-control, and the excitement that comes from watching a good games comes to the streets, and all hell breaks loose. People seem to forget that stadiums are not bubbles, and that personal responsibility applies both inside and out.

The thing that bothers me most is that, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Whoever won, won, whoever lost, lost, and whoever sold the tickets gets their money and everyone goes home and life goes on the next day. Overall, as Americans, we're pretty lucky that sports are one of the few things that incite people to riot. We've been looking at Venezuela in my Spanish class, where government corruption and lack of food cause people to take to the streets because that's the only way they can get their government to listen. Despite all the violence and crime, changes are being made, albeit slowly, to improve life for the average person. That is a valid reason to riot - there is no other way to get attention and it forces change. There are probably better ways, but they have more reason than a bunch of dumb college kids whining that their team lost.

Even scarier - there were a good number of people whose reaction to hearing about the riots was not "This is crazy, let's get out of here" but "F*** YEAH! Let's go join!" Facebook and Twitter were awash with selfies of people smiling with police in riot gear in the background. There's something not right about that.

See, we're lucky that we have the right to petition, to assemble, and to have our voices heard. There is something not right about doing going this crazy just on the account of a basketball game which was well played and refereed as fairly as humanly possible. There are much better more constructive ways to deal with frustration. Conclusion: people are crazy and stupid sometimes, but it all blows over in the morning.

Thanks for reading. Rant over. A catch up "what I did over spring break" entry will come soon.