Fry me a River

I Also decided to throw together an all-new robot, which I decided to name Pretty Fry for a White Guy (which didn’t actually end up competing). It was a series of bad things that happened Saturday night, and I kept Joe up really late to build it (sorry). Primarily, the problem was my machining abilities, or rather, lack thereof. On top of that, I was having receiver issues, brushless motor controller problems, and brushed motor controller issues. I borrowed a new brushless controller at the event, and decided to run it with only one wheel working. However, as soon as it got in the arena the receiver freaked out and the weapon motor got stuck on and it was out of control in the arena. It ended up losing one of the brushless motor screws, and overheating the motor a little bit (I think it’s fine though), so I didn’t end up getting to compete with it. The robot wasn’t very competitive, anyway.

Frypants & Trophie

Joe decided that, since he rebuilt it, he got to drive it. Normally I would disagree, but I figured why not, so he ended up driving it. In an unlucky first round matchup, Frypants ended up facing what I thought was the robot to beat at the event, Rector. After a minute or so, Rector was mostly disabled: the parts of the robot that were supposed to be inside weren’t inside anymore. However, he was still able to move a little bit, and Frypants knocked himself into the edge of the pit on the final hit, and was unable to recover. Joe drove valiantly through the remainder of the losers bracket and ended up winning the event. Driving Frypants isn’t the most difficult thing to do, I mean, point the dangerous bits at the other robot, and drive towards them; however, there are definitely hazards of driving in the Sacramento State arena with a weaponed robot (namely don’t knock yourself into the pit), and he did a good job of driving, so I commend him for that.

You can read Joe’s report of the event at his web site.

I don’t mean to keep posting funny videos, but check out this trailer for a Norweigan zombie movie. One question I have though is why do the zombies run so fast. I’m calling zombie bull on that!

Finished with the robot late on Friday, I attempted to get a bunch of hours of sleep in before driving out on Saturday to attempt to be there by 10ish. I was helping run the insect weight divisions of the tournament (the 150 gram, 1 pound, and 3 pound) in the smaller arena, so I needed to be there early to sign everyone up that wanted to go. Things went pretty smoothly aside from me accidentally clicking on the delete button instead of the edit button to change someone’s name since I made a typo. I fixed that up and things ran pretty smoothly. The arena was much better than at the last event in San Francisco which was nice.

The actual competition part for my robot wasn’t until later in the day, so I watched a bunch of the bigger robots compete, and it was a lot of fun. Lots of robots got destroyed, and that’s pretty much what I came to see, so I was happy. It came time for me to fight, and I got a bit nervous like I always do in my first fight. I went against a VDD clone (vertical disk.. like a sawblade) and one good weapon to weapon hit knocked him into the air and disabled him. The fight ended pretty fast, and I wanted to get a bit more action for the crowd, but alas, a win is a win.

My second fight in the night was against Steve (from sac state too) and his robot Fusible Link. Steve’s robot is similar to my old one in that it is pretty much indestructable, but with the difference that his is pretty fast too. My drum isn’t quite as powerful as I’d like it to be, so he outdrove me and I wasn’t able to do any real damage to him so he won. This kind of bummed me out, but oh well.

The drive home was fairly amusing because I was a bit tired and over-hyper like I am when I get that tired, so things that weren’t really funny became incredibly funny. For example, there was a sign that said “Cummings Blvd – 4 miles” or something similar, and all I could do was point at it and laugh. Joe laughed too, which made it all the funnier. However, the traffic was horrible for the first little bit. I guess there was some accident, and it caused the trip to take an hour longer than I wanted it to. We stopped at In-n-out on the way, had some food, and got some gas while the traffic got a bit better, and I finally got home around midnight after dropping Joe off.

The next day, the antweight fights were supposed to start at 10. It takes around 2 hours to get to the event in San Francisco, so I left around 8. This left me with getting much less sleep than I wanted to, especially for a weekend. Anyways, I found my other friend Zach’s place with a little bit of help and we went. Joe couldn’t come because he was having his birthday dinner or something with his parents, so Zach came with me instead. I got there a bit before the matches started and set up my computer for the brackets so people could look at them, then went into the pit area and put my stuff away (thanks Andy for letting me use part of your table). When I came back, I ran the fights for a while and then got to go myself. I went against another fast wedge named Kato, and lost as I usually do against him, with any of my robots. I had followed advice from Steve and trimmed down the supports on the front, but this caused the drum to hit the ground and it made it impossible to drive, and Kato to get an easy win.

With two losses, I was out of the tournament, so I proceded to run the brackets and enjoy the rest of the event since I didn’t have any stress of having to compete. There were a bunch of good fights in the bigger weight class, namely where a 220 pound robot got thrown over the I-beam, bounced off of it, then hit the robot that threw it and broke the major piece off of it. It’s kind of scary in a way since the robot that hit the wall is capable of ripping pieces of other robots and throwing the pieces into the wall with enough force to put a hole in the arena walls.. and it actually directly hit. Luckily it didn’t do too much damage to the wall and fights continued. I didn’t take any pictures of the event unfortunately, so I can’t post any.

On Monday I went to school and work and got back later in the day and the guy on my team for the game programming class I’m in at Sac State told me the assignment was due Tuesday. This kind of sucked since I thought it was due on Thursday. I sent a message to the other guy on the team and told him to finish his part up, and I finished up my part that night and went to sleep. The next day it wasn’t completely finished, so I stayed at the lab at school and worked on the project with the other guys. We finally figured out the retarded problem the code had and submitted it just before the time it was due. I’ll let it be known I hate Java. Java is the devil .

I got some really good sleep Tuesday night since everything is pretty much done so I can relax. Wednesday was a normal Wednesday.. went to school and work, then school again and went to Chipotle with Zach and Joe. Mmmmm.. Chipotles is sooo good. When I got home, I watched this weeks episode of Lost. Wow. That show is so good as well. Chipotles and Lost, a really good combination

Today, my dad got back in town, and he got me an embroidered shit with my website on it, which was really cool. He also brought back this CD which is a swing/jazz CD with covers of a bunch of songs and I’m listening to it as I type this up. It’s pretty awesome so far, so I’ll have to finish listening to it in the car tomorrow on the way to my statistics test. Maybe it’ll make me smarter and make me get an A on it.. well, I can hope at least

I am currently playing World of Warcraft. Talk to you in a few years.

Sincerely,
Kevin

Also I went down to DMV got my personalized license plates today before going to work, so now my car is no longer 4xxxxxx and instead something cool

Thankfully the books I ordered myself for my birthday from Amazon got here yesterday, so I’ll have something to do while my new drive formats and all my programs get installed.

Of course, I love google. Don’t let the title of this entry fool you. I’d work there in a heartbeat if I lived in the Bay Area, I was finished with College, and they would hire me. Hopefully in another few years that will be a possibility.

View Poker Saver Alpha Screenshot

As you can see, I’ve got the money and icon columns working to display the proper kind of information for their column. There is still a bit of work to do on this screen though. Currently the data is still from the SQLite database imported from the php script. I should be working on the C# importer tomorrow if I get the chance.