Checksum Arcanius

Robots queued up in my house to be taken back to the school.

After feeling like crap for most of the day, the 55 minute drive home (the longest its ever taken me from work) actually worked wonders on my spirit. The 3.5 hour TRC meeting with interested adults also helped. Now it is late.

Recieved via IM while I was away:

Ok, wtf is up with TRC? I checked the webpage and they announced the Thursday interest meeting on… wait for it… Thursday. Isn’t this basically what happened last time, when nobody showed? I am really interested in participating, but I am finding it really difficult to figure out what is happening and when…

Yeah, that is exactly what happened last time. I just hope this meeting went a little more smoothly.

Intentionally confusing to protect the disenfranchized.

Since I’m not really saying anything of substance, its pretty hard to not be talking about both at the same time

The Category, the Title, and The Substance; two of three have something in common.

At the Seattle Robotics Society‘s Robothon 2004, I bought 50 raffle tickets to help support the cause, and to get a t-shirt along with it (a $20 additional value!). I stayed through the prize drawing, and was disappointed, but not unexpectedly, when I didn’t win anything. About a week later, I was very surprised to get a call from the SRS saying that, in fact, I had won three prizes. It turns out that they had read the “M” on the tickets as a “W” – the three-prize-winner who wasn’t there turned out to be me. So I recieved the package with the three prizes in it today. There are a good number of motors, controllers, and a 6-axis robotic arm kit from Lynxmotion. The kits should provide ample things to do at upcoming hack sessions.

This evening was the Titan Robotics Club’s high school interest meeting. Chief among the plethora or failures was the anemic attendence. Causes of this are that the people who signed up to be contacted about the interest meeting were never contacted and that the flyers informing students of the meeting were only posted around the school today. Not so hot, guys. Especially considering the number of warnings that the leaders got that this was going to happen. Other failures included outdated and plain wrong information in the presentation (which, coincidentally hadn’t undergone any review), promises made that had not been discussed or even mentioned to any others, and general confusion and unpreparedness.
Unfortunately, exactly what we expected, so lets move along.

Some people apologize too much. When I say “Some people”, I mean people like Bobby and Angela. Bobby is funny, because when I mention that he really doesn’t need to apologize so much, he apologizes for apologizing so much. Angela, well, she just pretends to apologize for apologizing too much, because she knows I find it funny when Bobby does it, because, well, I told her so.

In other news, Austin made a pretty good apology at each of the last TRC leadership meetings, but his lack of action after each one is disconcerting. Maybe his should therefore be termed “under apologies” or “premature apologies”, because, for goodness’ sake, finish screwing off before you spend the energy apologizing. Actually, I don’t know if I mean that last sentence, but it was fun to write, and for that I make no apology.