Thursday, September 25, 2008

Do You Remember...

the 21st night of September?

No?

Me neither. I just thought that the first line of September by Earth, Wind, and Fire would make an awesome blog title. The 21st night of September was quite uneventful. For some reason, I didn't sleep the night before, but I got delicious Chex Mix and a Monster in the morning, went to work and sold stuff, played an awesome round of Rock Band during my break, sold more stuff, left, went home, and went to sleep. That's it. But it was the last day of summer, thank goodness, even though seasons mean nothing in South Florida.

I can actually say that I enjoyed school today. In Visual Computer Modeling (VCM) we're working on our mobile device projects, in which we are supposed to design a multipurpose cell phone thing in Rhinoceros. I absolutely loathe Rhino and I have a hard time adjusting to the lack of design features from using Solidworks all summer, but I did manage to come up with something that looks okay. It didn't exactly come out the way I wanted it to, but that's life...and it still looks okay.

But that's not the good part. Sure it looks cool and everything rendered in a fancy 3D modeling program, but what about in real life? Oh yeah! Today we tested out the new rapid prototyping machine with the faceplate of my phone, the Boomerang. I've gotten lots of interesting feedback about it. Some people understand how it looks like a boomerang, some think it looks like a sideways Xbox 360 controller, and others ask "how the heck do you hold that thing?!" The prototyped model actually came out tiny since I wasn't drawing life-sized when we first started the project, but it'll make a cool keychain and my full-scale version will look even cooler. It only took 30 minutes to print the miniature sized faceplate and it was a completely effortless process. Machines are cool! We have so much new equipment in the new robotics lab that I can build almost anything that I want. I definitely have plans for more stuff to make and pictures will be coming soon. The next step of the project is to make an advertisment, but I'm going to take it a step further and make a real commercial. 

I want to stay up all night and do stuff, but I can't. I have to sleep so that I can wake up in time to go to school. At least tomorrow is early release. Sleep is so paradoxical. I feel like I'm wasting time, but it feels so good.