Floyd for all

Since I have started this whole blog thing I have noticed one thing that most all blogs have in common: song lyrics. Almost every single blog has in some way or another put up lyrics to a song. I've been pondering for the past few days if I were to put up a song what would it be? Usually this would represent an emotion or feeling, but as of late I haven't had a reason to put up a song. So I dug deep and found something that fits my mood:

Time:
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in a quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say


Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells

-Pink Floyd

Why does this fit my mood you ask? School is 1 week from being over. Now I know people are talking about this ALL the time, but it just makes you think. The days when I thought I would never get old have long since passed, and now its time to move on to the days where I will never be young.

Wow

So guess what ladies and gentlemen? I am at work on wednesday April 27th and seem to be farily awake and attentive. As most of you know my senior design project was due yesterday. But what most of you don't know is what we had to do to get it working. So is my schedule that I for the past few days:

Friday:
-Classes from 12-3pm
-Working on senior design from 3pm till 4am
-Went back to get some sleep for the weekend

Saturday:
-Woke up at 10:30am
-Worked on senior design from 1pm until 3:30am
-Headed to something for Katie's uncle for about 4 hrs at 7pm though
-Went back to sleep (I was lucky getting sleep)

Sunday:
-Woke up at about 11:30am
-Got working at about 12:30 - 1pm
-Went to dinner with my family at 5:30pm, returned at 7:00pm
-Stayed in the lab until 8am, at which point I took a shower and went BACK to the lab

Monday:
-Worked until my first class started
-Skipped my first class to get something done
-Second class was cancelled
-Got to my 3rd class on time and started dozing off ALL class
- Got back to work at 3pm and worked until 8am again
-All throughout the night we were provided with food (namely we split 2 crave cases of while castles, at 12am and 2am, between the groups)
-Went back home again at 8am to shower
-Got back to Senior Design class around 9am

Tuesday:
-Worked on stuff until 12:30pm whereby I went back to my apt. to change clothes and get ready for the presentation
-All the while Tom was working away on Matlab (math software) to get things done
-Got back and Kicked ASS on our presentation
-Tom finished Matlab and got most of it working
-We went to UGas to get beers to chug, where I promptly lost
-Hit up laclede's for happy hour (I met Katie there) and had a beer (mini pitcher that is)
-Had gotten so little sleep and food that I HAD to leave to go to sleep at 6pm

Wednesday:
-Woke up at 7am to the alarm
-Left to eat a celebratory breakfast at McDonalds, then got ready to go to work
-Got to work tired still, but able to write (like shit, as usual) in this blog


DONE WITH SENIOR DESIGN!!!

Another Short One

Sorry for the short posts but I was just reminded that my last day for my last semester is a week from this friday. Holy space heater Batman, that's pretty soon!

Flubber

Now that's a kick ass word.

Sheesh

Finally I have returned to the wonderful world of ITS. For all of those who don't know, I was on a trip to Denver this weekend, for some IEEE robotics stuff. After a fun drive to Lawerence Kansas and a pretty good show by Danny V's brother's band (louder guitar on the Muse) I was all ready to go to sleep for the night, wake up and continue the boring drive to Denver. Dan and I (the primary drivers) were ready to sleep, but EVERYONE else decided it would be a good idea to drive through and get there early. So we set out for Denver, Dan and I driving of course, and let me tell you the drive through Kansas SUCKS. There is absolutely nothing in Kansas, lookie there a farm, oh wait it's all farms in KS. At about 6 am Dan decided to stop driving and let someone else take over and drive till Denver. I was riding shotgun most of the way, keeping the driver awake and such. I slept about 2-3 hrs which seemed to be enough. We arrived in Denver midday Thursday and attempted to check into the hotel, but that apparently started at 3pm (lots of time to burn in a city most of us have never been to). At this point we decided to head to the brewery (the New Belgium brewery), and enjoy the rest of the day. On a side note: The New Belgium brewery not only makes some of the best beer, but happens to be one of the coolest places to visit in Denver, they would have given us free beer all day long if we had stayed. If yo are in Denver, GO THERE RIGHT AWAY, and enjoy! After the great experience at the brewery we headed back to the hotel and for once in a week I almost got a good nights sleep. Most of the other people were "van lagged" and wanted to stay in the hotel except for a few of us. Dan decided to go swing dancing with some people he knew in Denver. I stayed in the room until he was done and went with someone else to pick him up, and had a nice drive through downtown denver, after we picked Dan up at about 1:15 am we thought it would be a good idea to head to lookout mountain so that we could see the city at night and just be on a mountain. We had directions from a waitress from earlier in the day and hoped they would get us there. Here they are :
-Take 36 west
-Get off at 80, wait no 85, it could be 58 though (reassuring)
-Go left at the fork in the road (the fork happened to be the exit ramp, so basically exit onto the correct street and you are fine)
-At the FIRST stop light go left, this part might be tricky (we started counting when we got onto 58, started at zero.... kept driving.... still at zero.... long highway.... still at zero.... wait here is a stoplight.... ONE, we are at the FIRST stoplight, wow that was difficult, zero to one was hard)
-Go up the mountain
-Look at stuff at the top of the mountain

So we finally got to the mountain, and I started driving up, scary as hell at night let me tell you. As we progressed up the mountain we stopped at some places so that we could get some pictures and just look at the city at night. When we got up to the top, we stayed for a couple of minutes and I got to do something I have never done before, I peed off the side of a mountain. After we were done doing all the looking we headed back down the other side and hoped it lead to a highway. I kept driving, but knew that Dan would be ok to drive whenever I needed him to because he told me he would. Not 2 minutes into the drive down he was passed out cold in the back seat, it's cool, he would have been ok to drive. We eventually ended up back at the hotel for a decent nights sleep. We woke up a little late, headed out to get some work done on the robot. We arrived at the hotel at about 10 am and we were told that we must be crazy and need to drive another half-hour to begin our work. So we drove to Boulder, got to the school, walked in and again we must have been crazy because we were again at the wrong place (notice a trend?).
We ate lunch, hung out in the hotel room, worked on the robot a little bit and generally waited until we could actually get to the center to test our robot. Everyone is there, all of us ready to register, Dan and I started coding the robot and 3 of the other started getting HAMMERED. At about 1 am one of our teammates came into the room where all the robotics teams were and pass the hell out on the table right next to the entrance for about an hour. We got him home, kept working and eventually at 4:30 am we were kicked out of the robotics room, only to set up in the lobby of the hotel for the rest of the night. A little after 5 am we made the realization that our robot's sensors had died and we couldn't compete any further. At this point I had so much mountain dew that I wasn't about to go to bed so we made a body out of beer boxes and started having fun. The comptetition was fun and we did pretty well for having a disfunctional robot, and overran the buffer of the transmitter station and crashed their program (that was funny). Saturday night was fun just being lazy and such. We woke up Sunday morning and saw it snowing something crazy, which was awesome for the ride home. It was so bad that we had to stay another night in the hotel and leave late on Monday. Even then I-70 was closed most of the day and we ended up leaving around 2:30 pm or so. We finally ended up in St. Louis around 5 am and all went directly to bed. Wow, that was a long one, more to come later today or tomorrow.

Cursing at Work

So today is registration day at SLU, every other year this would be ok, just a little busier at work but nothing we can't handle. So this year they decided to upgrade some systems at SLU and the best way to test the system is to let every f****** person at SLU attempt to register at the SAME time. It's not that we built a bad system, it's a pretty good thing, but no one knows what the hell to do with it, cause nobody at ITS told slu what the f*** to do. And if that wasn't enough most other departments here have decided if they can't fix a problem, who cares ITS can fix it, but we CANNOT fix problems that aren't ours, f*** people, do your work and move on. At least it makes the time go by faster.
One other note: The robot is nearing completion. Ha. Happy Belated April Fools, we are no where near done and will probably not be done until the morning of the competition which should be fun except missing all that sleep, and coming back to do more work for senior design. S*** that will be fun.