Break

First off, Happy Holidays to everyone. Despite any kind of bad news I've encountered/experienced these past couple of weeks, it's hard not to maintain a good mood this time of year. It's a shame that it takes a certain time of year to bring out the good in people (for the most part).

I'm back at home for Winter Break, which is pretty much one of those bittersweet feelings. Good on one hand because there's no school, and bad in the sense that I'm laying in bed at 11:30 on a Thursday night. Ah well, such is life.

Hard to believe Christmas is only a few days away. This weather would have you thinking otherwise. I'm hoping it holds out through Saturday, when we get together to play football once again at the high school. And this time I'm definitely stretching and warming up; I don't want a repeat of the Thanksgiving game, where I couldn't move for three days after.

It's getting late, and I'll just stop now, seeing as how I have to work tomorrow morning. Nothing like filing and throwing boxes around in a warehouse in Madison Heights to enforce the need for a college degree.

Design Day Debacle, Part 2 - Video

Being a semi-pro engineer, I was pretty happy with the way the machine worked. Check it out and tell me what you think. Kickass paint job courtesy of yours truly.

Design Day Debacle

It wasn't so much a debacle, actually- I just felt like using some alliteration.

I just woke up from a fantastic 2 hour nap, which I feel was well deserved. Today was the College of Engineering's Design Day, and now it's finally over.

We pulled an all-nighter making sure the pizza slicer would work, and of course, getting that paint job done (Don't be fooled by the photo-realistic look, that is indeed just a painted on pizza to make the tray a little more exciting.

While we didn't win any awards, I was proud to showcase the Pizza Cutter, or "Fresa Della Pizza," as we ended up titling it. It was an ingenious design, and despite a few design flaws, worked pretty damn well. With a crispy crust pizza on the tray, the blade chopped and chopped well.

Frankly, I'm still a little tired- 2 hours of sleep in the past 36 hours isn't really going to do much. Time to relax tonight, then get ready for finals. Fun fun.

Consumed

Between Habitat, Streets, Baja, school, and the rest of my life, I've had no time to sit back and relax. Two more weeks to go, and instead of studying more for tomorrow's Circuits lab final, I'm taking a break and updating this stupid thing.

Not much has happened in the past three weeks. This semester has flown by; Thanksgiving was nice, but a little strange given the fact that it was about 30 degrees above the average temperature. Classes have been just about what I've expected them to be- some hard, some less hard. My Design class has been taking up a lot of my time lately. Our final project is to design a mechanism that accomplishes some kind of task, which in our case, is cutting a pizza. It should be really interesting to see how it turns out, especially given the fact that we started building last week, and Design Day is this Friday. I'm very excited about the chance to finally do some hands on work- I feel it's the best way to learn.

Next week is Finals week, which means zero sleep and far too much studying. I've got Dynamics on Wednesday, Circuits and Math on Thursday, and Design on Friday. You'd think I might give myself a chance to relax on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday, but I can't afford to. Too much hinges on my grades for this semester, and I need to make them as good as possible.

Can't wait for Christmas break. Then I can start stressing about next semester.