Please excuse me from all of my grammar and spelling mistakes. I was pretty tired when I wrote this.
4/10/03 – Thursday 11:00 AM (Central Time)
I am writing at the Robotics practice rounds now in the Reliant Stadium. I woke up at 6:15AM (Central) today, ate a Robotics “team” breakfast at 7:10AM, and left for the stadium around 8AM. Last night, we all went to sleep around 2:50AM (Eastern). Euge and Franco got the bends for the night while Jeff and I took the floor. We decided to switch who gets the beds each day. So I get the bed today.
This morning, while I was waiting around for people to get ready, I fired up Euge’s laptop and programmed a random dot screensaver. So I figured out the use of the rand() function with modulus (which limits the returned value to a certain range). Too bad he didn’t have wireless net access on his computer, but I don’t think that would have helped much since there were no wireless access points around the stadium.
Breakfast was next to nothing. Just like a spoonful of scrambled eggs, a biscuit, and a glass of OJ.
After that, we started to load our equipment into a tour bus. I grabbed a pretty heavy tool box and a heavy tool suitcase. Everything was still fine. The bus got to the stadium and we had to wait like 15 minutes before we could get off. There was a high line to the entrance and we dragged our stuff to the end of the line. Everything was till fine. I carried the two heavy tool boxes. What killed me was this: 1. It took 15 minutes to get to the entrance and I held the tools for like the whole time. I passed it off to Euge for like 5 minutes before he dumped it back on me because he couldn’t hold it either. So I had to take it again. Inside the stadium, I had to find my team’s pit among, like 200 other teams there. I followed Ms. Hale but I had to put down the stuff and rest because my muscles were fatiguing. So I walked all around the stadium looking for my team. I had to put the stuff down every 30 seconds because my muscles couldn’t take such prolonged strain. It was painful and difficult but finally, I found the pit and my muscles were all shot. I was a bit pissed off there. Everyone else took easy rolling things they could just drag along and I got stuck with the heavy carry stuff.
There was a lull after that where I didn’t do much at all. I just wandered around. There was team 151, the sister team to 166 blueprints. Two of the members on that team are active on my message board and site. It would have been cool to meet them, but I couldn’t find any trace of team 166. So Franco, Euge, and I decided to sit in the stands. Gee, not it’s 12:00PM. Just about 30 minutes ago there was this AWESOME animation playing on the big screen. They were playing every team’s animation without sound. The only thing I remembered from the animation was an awesome super-realistic NASA space shuttle and star wars II grade dunes background. I was awed by their stunning realism. It was a good as Blizzard’s Warcraft III animations. It had Star Wars II realism. Yes, it was that good. I was like: “Crap-DOS!” They also played our team’s animation. It was pretty good in our own sense. The cool thing was that they forgot to remove our credits in the end, so everyone had to watch it. 
The robot didn’t perform too well in our practice rounds. At least it moved though. The first round, the robot tried to pick up an existing stack of crates, but it knocked it over instead. The moving was jerky and inaccurate. It’s like this: Imagine you are holding a 10 stack of English textbooks or paperback novels. You start running full force at something and suddenly stop. The books will keep moving and will tip. Same thing happened with the Robot. Since it was pretty tall, the top tips a bit when we move. Autonomous mode was very poor. It barely works. I don’t know why, but in the beginning, the robot takes like 30 seconds before it can move after autonomous mode. It is also pretty fragile.
Well, Euge was pestering me to eat lunch and I told him to go on ahead while I finish this up. Therefore, I must part.
Continued….
4/10/03 – Thursday 9:49 PM (Central Time)
Leaving off from when I was going to get lunch, I walked to the pit stadium. (There were two stadiums. One was the astrodome and the other was the stadium). We got these tags this morning that everyone had to wear on their wrists. They had these tabs on them that you had to rip off to get lunch. The pain about those tags was that once they were on, it wasn’t coming off again. It also scratched at times.
I was standing in this long line and the food options were Pizza or Chicken. I waited a bit and the line advanced a little. Then, some kids started to say that there were more lines further down. So a bunch of people including me broke off from the line and walked down. Then everyone turned back because it was all a bluff or something. I got back in my spot in the original line. It started to move again when everyone started to break off again. I was like: “Ha, I’m not falling for this again.” So I stayed in the line. Plus, everyone in front of me left so the line was much shorter. When it was almost my time to get food, they ran out of Pizzas. I was like: “Crap!” and left the line too in order to search for Pizzas. I walked a bit, saw the long pizza lines and gave up :). I got back in the original line and steeled for two small pieces of chicken, chips, and bottled water. I took this back to the stands and ate there. Eating chicken is messy.
The next like 3 hours were boring as heck. It was so boring; I don’t even remember what I was doing. I was just sitting around watching stuff. Then I went back to the pit and started to help out with the maintenance of the robot. I got to cut electrical tape. Then some people showed up and I talked to them about the animation. The engineers turned the robot on to test it but something went wrong and the tilting mechanism went out of control (just when I happened to be there). Later on, it was diagnosed that a switch was left on when it should have been disabled. So I just stood around and slowly slinked away.
Before that, I think I was hanging around the put and Mr. Delaney suggested that I speak to the Autodesk guys who were guru’s at the CAD and animation programs used for competition. I went over and this guy was an old bearded man who, as I pictured him, looked like one of those old sages who lived in solitude in a mountain for his whole life. He was the MAN of animation. When I arrived at his booth, there were these kids from team 74. They were a really good animation team who had more than 3 years of experience with 4 really experienced members at animation. They like crowded the whole place. I had to beat them all up to make them move. So after they left, I was the only person there. I had a small chat with the animation guy and I asked him about achieving realism in animation and he responded that first, to achieve realism one must fake it. One should study movies and paintings. Lighting is the most important part because it gives realism. He stressed lighting. The contrast of light and dark matters a lot. He pointed out how the seats in the stadium were shaded differently and such. Then I asked him about mapping. He said something like it is good to use UVW unwrap. I said why wasn’t it good to just break the object into different sections and map them separately without determining the coordinates of the map. He said for speed. Every time an object is broken into sub-objects, a new node is formed (whatever that is). Each new node slows down the animation. That is why professionals use the UVW unwrap. We talked more about lighting, about global lighting and such. Then I said bye, thanked him, and left. He was going to hold this presentation later in the day from 6-7PM. Prizes and stuff will be given out. It sounded like fun so I decided that I was going to go.
I did practically nothing for the next hour or so, but I got some buttons. Then everyone left except the adult leaders, Euge, and me. We accompanied them to get the Robot inspected. I had to carry the control box the whole time and towards the end of the 20 minute carry, I was getting a bit fatigued.
After inspection, Euge and I rushed over to the arena for the presentation by the old man of the mountain. First, it was this Scottish guy who talked about Inventor. He started to crack some not-so-funny jokes. Then it was the old man and he talked about photometric lights and stuff. He gave out 3dstudio max books for answering questions correctly. However, he only had 15. I was just about to answer a question right when Eugene beat me to the hand raise. He was called and answered it wrong! I knew the correct answer and could have won a book, but I didn’t. Neither did Euge though. T-shirts were “thrown” out to people in the end, but they didn’t have enough at all. They couldn’t throw either. Euge and I sat in the 4th row so the t-shirts didn’t even reach up here. Finally, a t-shirt was thrown in our direction and Euge and I caught it at the same time. It was a medium so I got it without complaints. Euge and I left the meeting kind of perturbed.
To add on to our problems, the adults left us and went back to the hotel or something. A call came for Euge. It was Delaney. After the call I asked for details but Euge told me that they were waiting for us in the front parking lot. So I walked there and then Euge said that he was just joking and Delaney told us to talk back to the hotel. I was like, “Geez, why didn’t you tell me this like 10 minutes ago when we could have walked directly to the hotel?!” But hey, it’s just Eugene so it’s understandable.
We didn’t have a good sense of direction so we were going to walk along the path that passed a Burger king. We called Delaney and then found out that we were going in the wrong direction! We looked behind us and our hotel was like right there! We were like, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” (add anime sweatdrop) and then tried to find our exit. The whole place was enclosed in fences and there was only like one exit that we found in due time. We got to the hotel 10 minutes later when everyone had already finished eating. Mr. Wilson paid for the meal and I thought it was very kind of him to do so. Euge and I made tacos to each and they were pretty darned good.
Wow, it is not 12:18 AM, and I am in my room. I took a shower and brushed my teeth already. About 2 hours ago we were watching TV (Shriek) when Steve Ma brought in this girl who was from a team in Texas. Everyone in the room had a good chat with her. She never saw a Tastycake® before! She doesn’t know what a Wawa® is! She keeps saying y’all but that’s all fine and good. She’s a true Texan!
(It was kind of funny since Steve Ma brought this girl into this other room and his friend’s were like: “Hey Steve, is she the California girl? Or the one from Maryland?” They made it seem like he had tons of girlfriends and he was like tying a noose around his neck J.)
Then Franco and Steve wrestled. Franco lifted me into the air and Jeff snapped a picture. Delaney and Hale came and had a good talk with us. Euge is watching some crazy French movie where this guy was struck and vaporized by lightning.
Around 9:30 PM, I called my sister who told me that NASA called back and gave me a number to call to get it fixed. So I guess I’ll have to call them tomorrow and get this stuff worked out!
So that ended my day! Gotta get some sleep for tomorrow.
~mikeXstudios