What do you want to share this week? Anything awesome happen? Just get out of bed every day? Cute puppy pictures?
Went and saw the pacific the other day. That was fun. Cold. But fun. Very pretty drive. Also got to spend the other day with my other half’s brother here in Portland. That was fun.
Edit - I missed it last week, but last week was one year of these threads. I hope folks are enjoying them and that they’ve helped you focus finding something good each week. I’ve personally found the activity of finding good in each week to be extremely helpful even if some weeks it was real hard.
How much of a win is yet to be seen, but I introduced a brand new (to me) project to my Principles of Engineering classes - Battlebots!
Well, sort of.
We don’t quite have the budget for hammers and saws and flames and hammersaws and flaming hammersaws and …
So the game I developed is more of a control - flip your opponent - push or lift your opponent out of the field type of contest.
So far the students have had a lot of interest and seem really engaged with the builds.
We’re using the VEX V5 platform, on a modified VEX IQ field.
Hurt a bit removing all the old, out-of-date, resources, and discovering the dead links for so many documents that teams had put so much time into back in the day, but it was clutter at this point, making the document less useful.
I had my residence permit interview this week, which was as always a painful process, but I looked today, and they approved my permit renewal, so I get to live in Turkey legally for another year!
Ever since they kicked me out with no reason in 2017, this permit process causes me insane amounts of anxiety, so while to most people it’s just a formality and paperwork, to me, everytime they actually renew it, It’s a big deal Also, every year people say “oh they’re not processing tourist permits anymore, blah blah blah” And even they say things like that officially, so I always wonder if they’ll process my application, it’s never clear to anyone what’s going on.
I saw (some of) my 1923 students for the first time since March of 2020. We finally got to come back in the shop and the leadership was there to clean, organize, and prep for our off-season (for us, and a pre-rookie we’re lending the practice bot to!)
Truly the highlight of my week, my month, my year. I’ve missed them so much.
Trained just under a half dozen of our new student workers today on intensive machine stuff and got them as up to speed as I could, wore a new old dress to work, and had an interaction about inclusivity and accessibility that definitively showed me that our ED&I efforts were working.
Saw many of my coworkers for the first time in 18+ months as we had a nice outdoor celebration for the first day of our new research institute (or actually, renamed and expanded version of the old of one 43 years. Yay tornado research!) Not being around these folks in person for so long made me realize that I’ve probably taken for granted how incredibly lucky I am to work at such a cool place with such brilliant people.
Church celebrates 50 years as a congregation this weekend. As part of the tech crew…
… getting out of tonight’s concert relatively unscathed is a definite win. We had all kinds of issues hit us over the prep period. Lights didn’t work (my problem), then when everything was working and we fired up additional equipment we started tripping breakers. Got that fixed and then realized that there were other issues… which we now know how to fix.
Concert went well, too. Now to get through the rest of the weekend.
Did a corn maze. My brother and niece flew up from Texas for a retirement of one of our teachers/football coach, so saw several people there, including another FRC alum and former mentor.
But the nieces led us through the maze. For me it was a little bit of reconnaissance because we do our zombie fundraiser in a few weeks there. The corn was tall and the maze was actually pretty challenging this year, so should be a good night of frights. They let local school kids design the maze this year.
Dear daughter and I spent the morning helping Prairie Rivers of Iowa cleanup Ioway Creek. Tires, mattresses, chairs, lots of glass, a sex toy, and most interesting to my daughter, a catfish skeleton.
