The Bipolar Otaku

So, yeah, I'm home. I slept 9 hours. It was a long week, but certainly not long enough. I still have to go to work tomorrow, and I'm not looking forward to it. Plus I'm coming down with a cold, and it might even bronchitis.

While I was down at the FIRST National Championships, I did a lot of different roles: realtime score keeper, (unofficial) official score keeper, field resetter, queuer, radio signal watcher, announcer's assistant... But it was definitely worth driving down there. Now I plan on volunteering at more events, like the Great Lakes and Detroit Regionals. Maybe they'll let me be the official scorer or a ref next year. I think I'd make a good ref. I've already talked to some of the Ford mentors, and they might put me in charge of scoring at Sweet Repeat this October; if they don't need me there, I'll be a ref.

But long before that, I want to come up with a plan to make my team self-sufficient as far as engineering, deisgn, and manufacturing goes. We'll be ditching our current lead engineeer because he simply couldn't work with the team... he designed the robot pretty much ignoring input from the team, he built the robot pretty much by himself with as little help from the students (he even kicked some students out of the build team because a student "filed a piece wrong"), he refused to listen to anyone about how to make things work correctly, he got pissy and angry when there were too many people helping out on the robot, and he was pissed at the teachers because they gave him too many restrictions when they told him to let the students do more. In other words, he has pissed off everyone and he has been voted off the island. We might be keeping some of his engineers, though.

For now, I've pointed my brother in the direction of a number of companies that might be able to sponsor the team. I've had a couple of ideas for simple tasks that I think might help the students solidify a design team. I'm pushing to have them build a FIRST Lego League team at their middle school. I might even donate a Lego Mindstorms kit to help them get started. But first, I have to get out of vacation mode, I have to get into house shopping mode, and I have to get my act together in general.