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January 29, 2004
Atlantic Engineering Competition
Just a small thread regarding my travels to New Brunswick for the Atlantic Engineering Competition. As stuff happens to me in the competition I will attempt to post it here. Well, I'll try my best.
Well myself, Curtis Jennings, Steve Thistle and Sheldon Andrews have put a team into the Atlantic Engineering Compeition in New Brunswick. We entered into the senior design competition this year. Let's hope we can win it and make it to the nationals in Hamilton.
::Information
In this competition, the participants work on project given on the day of the event. The
time allowed for the system creation is 10 to 15 hours, depending on the level of
difficulty. The time has to be determined by the organizing committee. The material and
the tools required for the project are provided by the organization. Ideally, reference
books, Internet, programming and design software access are also provided. Judging
criteria are based on the oral presentation, the quality of the report, the originality, the
respect of the constraints, the efficiency and the feasibility of the system. The judging
criteria can be found in the Appendix A.
::Information Pre-Trip/Day 1 ----------------- Well after we had a meeting about what to bring it came to my attention that I needed to bring a suit for the presentations and the other evetns we will be attending. Seeing that I never had a suit I had to go out in a mad rush and buy one last night, 350 dollars later I was well dressed! Because Steve and Curtis slept at my house my roomate came home from a pub crawl thinking that we have all been out drinking and we are passed out. Being drunk himself he decided to wake us up at 3:00 in the morning, after an hour sleep, and our alarms set for 4:30. He apologized and went to bed but it was funny all the same. It was strange when he started to page the cordless phone and I jolted out of bed and was about to break my alarm clock because I thought it was going off and I coudlnt' figure out how to stop it, the phone was next to it you see. Anyway...insane ramblings here!
First day here has been pretty uneventfull. We went out for a meal, releaxed, and all of us fell asleep. We would go out drinking tonight or something but because of the competition tomorrow mornign we think it would be best if we didn't go to that hung over eh? Anyway not much to report on so i'll just stop here now. I'll post something in a day or two talking about the competition and hopefully the results.
Pre-Trip/Day 2
-----------------
Well now...Itès currently 2:45 here in Fredriction and I am feeling quite loaded because of the 40 oz of rum we started to drink straight out of the bottle. Well I got to say it is very easy to prime up when you drink half a flask of rum in 5 minutes. ANYWAY!! The design competiton went really well today I must say. We had to design a catapult to throw a 500 gram object 15-30 meters. Maybe it is the liquor speaking but I think we did a great job in designing this son of a bitch. I got to say it worked out well and we did end up using every minute of the 10 hours we were given to us. Nuts huhÉ
Well we went with a sling shot design so hopefully that will pay off. The career fair is tomorrow so I got to pull myselef together, at a reasonable hour, and head up htere to track down a job. Letès just hope i am not hung over!! Lord dyin!! Anyway as far as updates go this is pretty boring. I will fire a link up soon to all the informatin that we submitted in our reprot, but keep in mind we only had 10 hours to design and write a report!!! The link will be here soon!!!
Anyway...time to pass out in a state of drunk!!!! Tommorrow night is the pubcrasl!!! YAY!!!! hah
Judging/Day 3
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Just arrived back in Newfoundland a short while ago from NB so I figure I would post a little here to get some stuff out. We had some great pictures taken of the event so I will post them as soon as I can get my hands on them in my Gallery under AEC. We had to take our catapault and demonstrate it to the panel of judges and the audience. The first time we loaded the object, a hockey puck of ducttape full of sand, and launched it I swear to god it went about 1 foot, if that. Everyone laughed and we almost died laughign too but luckly that was one of our two calabration shots. So for the second calabration shot we got like 2-3 meters or so once we loaded it properly. The presentation we had to give went pretty poorly, relative to the others, because we did it off the seat of our pants and we never used any visual aids. Because of that we finished third place over all, which is nothing to be ashamed of. I will be posting movies of our design in action along with the report we wrote/submitted somewhere on this page when I get a chance.
Later on that night we had a hard night of drinking. After 5 beer and a few swigs from the 40ozer of rum I was primed up to go on the pub crawl with all the other engineering students. Well things were pretty straight forward at the first bar..just having a good time drinking it up with everyone else. I had another 4 beer there, then onto the next bar. This is where the arse fell out of her! Everyone loved the MUN team so we ended up drinking for free or something, it's all a blur. I just remember hearing, "your from mun right, you should be double fisting all night with beer!" and then they gave me a second glass. I swear to god, everytime I turned around they filled it up on me. Anyway...coutless beer was drank and the night went downhill. We were all loaded at this point. Everything from that point on is a haze and I ended up passing out in the hotel after all the bars closed.
With everything said the trip was a great time of team work and drinking, maybe a bit to much drinking. Anyway I'll fill in the blanks with this over time with documents and more information. I highly recommend going to anyone!! Good bunch but well...be warned there are a lot of weiners up there!
l8r
Posted by Daryl Martin at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)