The roof is on fire…
Quite a lot has happened over the past couple of weeks … in fact, so much that I haven’t had time to do anything important, let alone update this site.
So the Senior Design robotics competition at UH was on Friday March 27th. It turned out to be nothing short of a complete disaster. I tried my best to hold off ranting about it, but I was not a little peeved at the circumstances. Till this moment it perplexes me how a whole ECE department cannot spend approximately $400 or so to build a simple track out of wood and black paint. Instead, the task was delegated to one of the teams, who used a felt-tip marker to paint a track on paper. Even the team that built the track failed to make their robot work on it. There’s a lot more to say on that topic, but I’d rather just try to forget the whole episode.
What’s new is that there will be a new “demonstration” on Tuesday that will be used to determine our grades, and rules have been laid out. We are well on track to complete readiness for that demonstration. At least we were, until this afternoon when we discovered that someone had taken our connector. I am totally perplexed at this point…that connector is a special RS-232 to RJ-11 converter that only works on Rug Warrior boards (doesn’t even work with the regular handyboard, which requires a converter!). So unless someone’s trying to be mischievous or playing a practical joke, I can’t possibly think of any reason why anyone would want to take it. The robot wasn’t stolen (in fact, there were three robots in the lab at the time), neither was the computer or any of the electrical equipment in there. My teammates have gone searching for a new one, but I am still perplexed.
Went to see Chris Rock’s new movie “Head of State” a few days ago with Waqar and Jamal. It wasn’t bad, actually quite funny, even though the premises presented in the movie were quite ridiculous. I just wish Bernie Mac had been given more lines to say…that guy can make you laugh at just about anything. 
