Worth the Wait

After an excruciating 3 months our new VW Passat is finally here. She's a beaut and has all sorts of features like rain-detecting wipers, liftgate that opens on its own and closes with one push of a button, and tiptronic controls on the steering wheel so I can pretend I'm in an F1 racing car... Thank you to everyone involved in making this happen. I needed some prodding and some rides and some more prodding, but I am finally the proud owner of a made-in-Europe car.

Working For Norhing

In order to combat the feeling of utter uselessness that being unemployed can throw at ya' now and again when you're least expecting it, I volunteered to do some freelance (and by that I just mean for free) graphics work for my friend. His website has been getting super-mega-hits because he's the bomb (or, his web domain has survived 5 years of web time-wear; we presume this is a feat the search engine overlords are impressed with). So, I used the 3ds Max software to create a glitzier logo for his front page. Here is one of the first cuts that was thrown away:

Modern Dance Dance Revolution

This weekend our friends Marissa & Scott, soon to be the McNamaras, visited us from Boston for a weekend of feasting, culture, and gaming fun. We started with late-night DDR (sorry, 11C) and Wits and Wagers, a game of guessing and betting kind of like The Price is Right meets a roulette (except about trivial world knowledge rather than trivial consumer knowledge, and no random luck involved, really - so nothing like those two!). We (barely) woke up next morning to catch a quick breakfast before a short car trip to the Joyce for an afternoon of David Parsons Dance Company - I just can't resist seeing them again for the sheer pleasure of witnessing Caught again...
We interluded ourselves into St. Marks and the Belgian Fries hole-in-the-wall place around the corner on 2nd Ave - Mango Chutney Mayo won first place sauce, followed by Roasted Eggplant Mayo. Amuse-bouche well tucked, we headed over to Artisanal for appetizers, wine and cheese - lots of cheese. Winners here were widely contested depending on the party's different tastes - I personally liked the Robiola du latte, part of the Sinful trio of cheeses on offer as a "flight."
We basically needed a lot of down time for digestion after that, so headed back home for a more reserved night of couch-vegging and game-playing.
It's always too short of a visit with these two, so Sunday was depressing at best... Connie and I had some errands to run around town. I spent a long part of the afternoon animating my robot model in a virtual arena:

Jammin' With the JeffTech Crew

Today, the Robotics team settled on a robot design that is inventive and may also be realistic in terms of construction and functionality. I worked with a small set of the students (Dillon and Ayutunde) on programming a simple LEGO robot with an NXT programmable brick, making it perform race laps. I demonstrated the difference between 3-wheel designs vs. 4-wheel designs. I also worked with the sketch artist Danny to take the design to a slightly higher level of detail. We will be working on capturing and rendering that design in Autodesk 3ds Max to wow the ConEd design panel next week. Alejandro thought about an approach to RoboCoaching, while the ROTC gals Natoya and Nicoda captured the creative juices on tape, so to speak (there were no actual juices, and they used a digital camcorder).

Roll up your sleeves, it's Robot Time!

I went down to what used to be Thomas Jefferson High School (and is now 4 different vocational-like high schools) to meet the Robotics team - JeffTech - for a discussion on strategy and tactics. We had a fairly fruitful meeting. A bit unfocused and disorganized, but we hit all the important points I wanted to talk about. Some of the students are very psyched about the competition, but some seem to be there because someone is making them. It's hard to engage those kids, but I will try my best to make a positive impact on all of them. The group decided together on a strategy for a robot that could drive around the track fast, but secure one of the huge balls as well for bonus points. Oh, and a mechanism to drop one of the balls from the top overpass onto the field. So, basically, as complex as one can get really; lots of moving parts... We'll see where tomorrow and next week take us. The kids got pretty creative with design sketches and ideas towards the end of the day, so I hope they come back with some great designs tomorrow.

Day on Museum Mile

I checked out the exhibitions at the Guggenheim and Cooper Hewitt museums today. I really enjoyed the Cooper Hewitt's exhibit on Ingo Maurer. He does lighting design. Really cool stuff. Unfortunately a simple table lamp costs ~$1000. The exhibit on Richard Prince at the Guggenheim was less interesting but I did like his Nurses series. The material was a bit raunchy in general.

C-H-A-N-G-E is a 6-letter word...

OK. Someone hold me back or "there will be blood tonight!"
First off, I want to see Change-counters on-screen for every speech a presidential candidate makes on TV. I'm so tired of this over-used rhetoric. CHANGE we can believe in, Ready for CHANGE, Stand for CHANGE... The only thing that changed tonight was the lead in the Democratic primary campaign - Clinton bagged a surprise win! Was it the underdog phenomenon? The tears? Clinton organization rigging voting machines? Who cares?!? The point is that New Hampshire put the kabash on all this CHANGE...
I hope now that Obama is not the inevitable nominee ("you keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means"), the candidates can stop riding the waves of CHANGE and go back to talking issues. Because this nomination is not about CHANGE. It's about who is right for the job and who has the best platform to offer.
Remember candidates, we're watching and we're listening...