Oh Hey MSSM....

So, I was informed like two days before it happened that the entirety of the MSSM student body was coming to do a tour on Saturday of the college of engineering at Umaine. Cool! I was asked to hang out and show the kids cool stuff and do a silly solar panel lab with them. The activities began around 10AM .... now let's think about this for a few minutes. If the activities begin at 10AM in Orono.... which is a three hourish ride from Limestone, factor in time for farting around, maybe one pitstop, etc, etc and you begin to realize that they made everyone wake up at like 6AM, cram onto 2 buses and ride for 3 hours on a Saturday morning....... Oh, I'm sure that went over well. I assumed many of the kids, in true MSSMer fashion, would simply forgo sleep entirely. The next morning, my suspicions were confirmed.

Oh, hello entire MSSM.

After a rousing speech by our fearless leader of the college of engineering with about half of the public speaking talent of Walt Warner, the kids were even more pumped to be here! Feeling their pain... but not really cause I had slept like 9 hours that night, I tried to be extra friendly and keep my eye out for awesome people. Recognized a couple of old campers, saw Kiri's brother and Renee's brother too which made me feel kind of old.

Gave our group a tour of the lab I work in and found out that almost no one knows anything about brushless motors. Actually generally lacking some electrical knowledge but I guess that is to be expected. Also a bunch of freshmen, apparently there are 20 freshmen there now.... eeeeks! Anyways, I did have a couple of good groups of kids that asked good questions and stuff. Met the new physics teacher who was the man and was totally into my tour, asked awesome questions and made star wars jokes. Solid dude.

Also totally introduced myself to a large group and asked them vote for Pika in the Launchpad competition. They were all on board and enthusiast about voting and talking to another MSSMer. One discussion went something like this.
Excited MSSM kid "What year did you graduate?"
Me: "Class of 2009."
Excited MSSM kid: "Wait, so were you there when the McCartney bot was there?
Me: "..... Bitch*, I built the McCartney bot, it's in pieces in my attic."

*Note I didn't actually call the kid a bitch, I just added that for dramatic effect....
Made me feel cool. Wouldn't it be cool to make a McCartney Bot Reloaded for some sort of alumni event sometime? Some day. Maybe.

Anyways, the day went pretty well I had to bail a little early but I got to talk to a couple of kids about college and how they should just continue to be a boss where ever they go. Heart-warming stuff.

Also, for the record Sam claims that recent senior videos are using things from our senior video. I can't confirm or deny this.... anybody?

Picture Stream: (I'm a lazy son of a bitch that doesn't post enough)

I read the Wheel of Time starting in 5th grade.  This is the last book, I read it over the course of 16 hours on Saturday/Sunday morning.  It was glorious.

"No Accumulation" the Weatherman said...

Rowboat Dorks.

#art

Emils

Ddubs, AlPal, Tonton, Me

A dog and a big stick from our bromantic beach walk.

PS1 games and beer... a combination 15 years in the making

Robot Picture

CNC'd penguin

CNC'd Pokeball

Nasty ass weld holding our rowboat together...

At the beginning of build we had the kids build towers out of forks and q-tips.

High School kids can eat a lot of Pizza.

Delayed Seattle Post

While trying to come up with an excuse for why this post is so post-poned (pun intended), the best thing I could thing of was.... jetlag? JET....LAG. 

Here is the part where I recap the trip and dump some photos. 

Tried to sleep the night before but it didn't really work out... Got up at 2AM to drive to portland to catch a 3:00AM bus to Boston to catch a 6AM plane to Chicago. Blasted out on time to Chicago where I caught my connecting flight to Sea-tac airport where I landed at about 11:00AM west coast time (longest morning ever). Took a train that looked slightly like an orca whale to meet up with the one and only Allie Holcombe. Hooray! 

It was nice to see Allie even if I was dead tired and kind of loopy. Ended up seeing where she works and I even got a business card, a legitimate Allie Holcombe business card. I was impressed. Anyways, met up with Ian later that evening after a dinner at red robin in the mall. 

Ian had to work part of the next day but then we went out plane hunting at this place called Future of Flight across from the Boeing factory. We also went on a tour of the factory which was SUPER cool but we were not allowed to take pictures because factory secrets and stuff.... Anyways. 

Above is Antonov-124 which is a huge russian plane for lifting heavy things! This was chilling next to this runway for some reason next to the future of flight place. Also off in the distance in the upper left is where all those grounded Boeing 787's are chilling out because of that battery thing..... Lots of planes on the other side of the runway in various states of repair.

That night I got to meet Ian's other windmill buddy, Brian who now works at Boeing and does space arduino stuff, cool guy. We hung out at this Brewry until they kicked us out. The next day we got up and went out to drive around the city and do more cool stuff. 

Yes Ian, we can all see the Space Needle, it's right there.

 Walked around at this place called gasworks park which had beautiful views of the city skyline as well as lake union. Lots of house boat visible from the park too, next time I go visit hopefully I will be loaded and can rent one. It would be amazing to rent one for a week and hang out with a bunch of buddies while being tourists there. Some day guys, some day.

Kicking off the theme of Ian and I doing romantic things together, we enjoyed a long walk on the beach. We also took pictures of each other with our eyes closed.

Actually I have more pictures with Ian's eyes closed than open from the trip.

Hey looks it's almost sorta kinda the pacific ocean. Note: Looks warmer out then it actually was.

Spotted a bunch of VW buses parked and on the road, also saw a pretty rare VW single cab in semi-rough shape. We ate like champions the entire trip sampling eggs benedict, drinking hipster coffee and feasting on mongolian food (Tyler you would love it). On this particular day we ate at this fish and chips place where an old school Volvo that had been converted to electric was parked out front. Apparently it was the same restaurant where they filmed After The Catch, then we drove around toward the tallest point in the city.

This thing!

 Before scaling the beast that is the space needle, we explored some of the finer things. There is this sweet place called the Chihuly Gardens which was amazing and totally beautiful. Before going in we were berated by a bunch of protestors, apparently upset about some "promises" that the garden wasn't fulfilling. They tried to tell us it wasn't worth the money.... They were wrong.

That is probably the best picture I took but my camera honestly couldn't do the stuff justice. The place featured enormous pieces of colorful hand blow glass, that was jaw droppingly cool. Ian and I had fun trying to figure out how some of them even stayed together. Definitely a must-see place if you are being a tourist in Seattle. Not to mention, you get a "deal" if you go to the garden and the space needle all in one day. 

Hey, no one's eyes are closed!

Got a picture from atop the space needle. It was a beautiful day and you could see the mountains on all sides as well as lake union and the city. Picked a prime time to visit as I was told it was probably the best day they'd had in a long long time. 

At some point along the trip I pointed out that I'd never been to a Jack in the Box so of course we HAD to go. Have to say I was not really impressed with Jack in the Box at all, it was so middle of the road I don't even know what to say about it. It was fast food, plain and simple. A secondary objective of my trip became to assist Ian in making his apartment not look like a..... uh well.... to make it look less like his side of the room from junior year. He didn't have much on the walls, so in an effort to add some more flavor to the place we made a one of a kind piece of art.

That's right, we framed the nutrition facts from Jack in the Box. Hey, we signed it. It is legit art. 

We also went to Ikea, which was a first to me. It was pretty sweet and has a restaurant in the middle of it. It's huge and we got lost and bought good shit. There was also an electric car charging station.

Oh and we went sailing with DW!

Saw Bill Gate's yacht too. It has a helicopter pad, just in case.

 Also spotted this sweet ride outside the center for wooden boats. Like a boss.

That basically concluded my adventures in seattle. Had a good time just hanging with Ian and eating like a goddamned king. Had a pretty rough ride home as I was pretty sick and had a runny nose and pretty terrible sinus pressure. Would not recommend riding across country with a cold. 

Solid trip, next time maybe I'll get to bring some more friends and we can rock out in a house boat. 

The end!

Jeepin'

Hey guys, where is that whole you were both west coasting blog post? Jeebus. Also sorry I couldn't video chat on the highway, I didn't get back until 2 AM and then I had to set up my desktop and then I fell asleep and then I was sick the rest of the week for whatever reason. So yeah.

Anyway I had a good day today. Here's the bullet points.

• Woke the fuck up.
• Was poopin' for too long so didn't make it to my first class.
• #senioryear
• LUNCH
• Went to my afternoon class.
• A buddy with a Subaru Impreza and I decide to go hooning in the state forest.
• Find some Honda in a ditch.
• Push that guy the fuck out.
• Receive copious thanks from Marc Antonio.
• Drive into the damn forest.
• Go twice as fast as the Impreza up the damn mountain while making a point to drift every damned corner.
• He may or may not have questioned my Jeeps abilities before we left.
• Get to the top.
• Watch Elliot immediately get the Subaru in a ditch. (not his car)
• Try and push it out.
• Succeed in pushing it into another god damned ditch.
• This ditch is much deeper.
• Get in the Jeep, start driving to Lowes.
• Drive the Jeep right off a god damned cliff.
• Drive the Jeep right the fuck back out, zero fucks given.
• Buy a chain at Lowes.
• Pull that fuckin' Subaru out.
• Go get some cheeseburgers to celebrate.

On the drive to the celebratory cheeseburgers I rolled the meter over in the Jeep. 

Happy Birthday buddy, I fuckin' love you.

So I might have taken a picture at 50 MPH, what you gonna do.

Musings

Got back at 4 AM from seeing a Muse concert in Cleveland. Hence the punny title. Appreciate what I have done. I hope you found it a-muse-ing.

PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN

Guess that means it happened.

It was a great trip, left at 1 PM yesterday, got their early, found our seats, had some expensive as hell stadium beers. Asked the lady at the bar there what the difference was between a Single Cocktail ($7.50) and a Super Premium Cocktail ($10.75). She said Patron. Most straightforward answer I've ever heard.

The show ruled with the lasers and the explosions and the leds and what have you. Muse is keeping a large number of electrical engineers employed. Everything is covered in leds, fucking everything. Like all the god damned things. At one point even Bellamy's eyes had monitors on them. Not to mention the pyramid of monitor thing you see there, which inverts itself and even covers the drummer over entirely. The amount of things that could go wrong that didn't is really kind of astounding to me. Their bloody road crew has gone ahead and made a rock show about as technically complicated as some NASA endeavors. Just because.

Then after the show we had to move with the mob back out into the streets of Cleveland to find our cars. This one group started pushing through everyone screaming "LARRY!" over and over again. Within a minute, the several thousand people in stuck in the hallways were all screaming for Larry. Where the hell is that guy? Fuckin' Larry.

Then we drove home. Now I'm back at Alfred and I've been handed a take home test, so yeah.

Also on an unrelated note, I'm enjoying the fact that Elliot's mom is Neil's unofficial StarTalk photographer. We just got handed some of her photos and were told to leak them to Reddit, to which I replied, "I can karma".