Someone please save us, us college kids!
What my parents told me is what I did
They said go to school and be a college kid
But in the end i question why I did

I’m poor, I’m starving, I’m flat broke, I’ve got no cash to spend
Sell all my books for front row tickets to Dave Matthews band
My girlfriend’s at another school, I know this year will test her
I called, found out she had three other boyfriends last semester

And that’s why I say
Oh no! not for me, not for me
Call it torture, call it university
No! arts and crafts is all I need
I’ll take calligraphy and then I’ll make a fake degree

80 grand later I found out that all that I had learned
Is that you should show up to take your finals and your midterms
The party scene is kinda mean, I think it’s sick and twisted
The navy showed up at my dorm and claimed that I enlisted..

– Relient K — College Kids

This song has been the theme of the past month for me. But don’t worry, I haven’t failed my midterms. In fact, I’m not quite sure of what my grades are at this point…

The floor hasn’t been nearly as exciting as the first week during initiation, but there’s still at least one random SOMETHING per week. For example, a guy on the floor (Paco) decided I needed a shower. He grabbed my roommate and together they tackled me and started dragging me to the bathroom. It was an epic struggle against good and evil. The fight went on for about ten minutes, two minutes of which I had managed to escape with my only exit being locking myself in the bathroom. They quickly undid the lock, but I still managed to crawl away for a distance before they managed to shove me in. It’s all in good fun of course, and it’s a story that will undoubtedly get more and more epic with each retelling.

Pictured below is another random floor doing. Center is Anvil, who decided to slide up and down the hall while sitting in a box. The box broke, but he didn’t give up there! He had us duct tape the box to his arms. I’m sure you can guess how that turned out…

If I haven’t made it clear enough… I really, really like this floor and campus. Somehow I don’t think that any other campus would be quite like this. Mixing a floor of Christian guys who are all engineers is just bound to have interesting results I suppose. I even made this nifty 41 logo when I was bored one day. It’s probably my first photoshop work with an actual, real-life picture (even though it doesn’t look like a real-life photo anymore). This is actually a picture of the symbol off the wall in the floor lobby. I really like how it turned out to look like an egg with the symbol imprinted on it.

We’ve had a couple birthday pondings since my last bloggery as well. Picture below is Copper, our first ponding. We really overwhelmed the poor guy, he didn’t even bother putting up a fight.

Of course, I should mention that I have actually been getting some work done here. For my fundamentals of engineering class (aka fundamentals of wasting time), we had to build a “cool” robot. Our team of three decided to do a maze solver. Unfortunately, LabVIEW is a truly awful platform to develop the NXT from, so we ended up doing a simpler line-branch follower. It would always follow branches in the line to the right, and would keep doing so forever. Pictured below is an early phase of the robot in which it could only follow linear paths (it did that figure eight just fine too though!). Our next project is a window washer. Mmm, fun.

I’ve also had some time to pursue some personal interests. ULX got a much needed update. I’m really proud with this update; we had our largest-ever changelog, we squashed ~99% of the bugs in the code, and we added some key things that makes ULX more user-friendly than ever before. Truly we have come closer than ever before in realizing the perfect balance of what an admin mod should be.

Shameless plugging aside, check out this gecko! He was chilling outside my window and just sat there while I took quite a few pictures. I love getting nature pictures like this, and this is probably the coolest set I’ve had to date.

I have some more to talk about, but it’s getting late. Hopefully I’ll get to it next time!

This post is written in loving memory of Chicken. He had a short life, but it was well lived!

Chicken was adopted by Zoot from General Mills on Wednesday while they were visiting LeTourneau’s cafeteria, handing out various products to sample. Chicken was given up under the condition the he be thrown at someone.

In order to honor and exceed the terms of the contract, it was decided that Chicken would be thrown at anyone attempting to walk through Zoot’s dorm room door, yelling “CHICKEN!” while he zipped through the air. This led to great unhappiness of one of Zoot’s suite mate, Synk. Synk testified to wearing a baseball mitt all day Thursday in preparation of random Chicken attacks.

Unfortunately, when one 41er who will go unnamed got hit with Chicken, he threw Chicken into the first toilet he came to and flushed, thinking that it would be too big to fit down the hole but forgetting that the toilets here are high-powered flesh eating machines.

Chicken’s final act in this world was to clog the toilet for a good while before the unhappy residents could fetch maintenance. Forever shall you be loved, Chicken. ALL HAIL CHICKEN!

I’m getting all settled here at LeTourneau. So far, it’s been a blast!

The upper classmen really take care to make sure all the freshmen are welcomed and feel welcomed. They have us all doing crazy tasks for them for the first week of school. For example, I had to wear a trashbag outfit to dinner tonight and we all have to wear a shirt that says “Property of 41” for the entire week. It’s all in fun, but it’s really quite awesome because it helps you bond with the other freshman because they mostly share the same fates, and helps you bond with the upper classmen due to the love-hate situation. 🙂

We were all assigned names last night in our “secret dorm meeting”. I can’t tell you all the details, but it involved holding a table for two hours and “ponding” (throwing in a nasty, awful pond) our resident assistant, Slurpee. My floor name is now zoot! My roomie’s name is Apple, and there’s other crazy/random names other people have like Play-Dough, Sync, and Dent. These names are what we’ll be referred to by everyone else (except the professors) on campus.

Here’s some fun imagery!

Our dorm insignia:

I made this and hung it on my door to get into the spirit:

Here’s Slurpee after being ponded. I was told he liked to pose for pics… guess I should have taken the tip more seriously.

Shortly after our secret meeting, greeting each other by our new names and telling our birthday to Paco (center) so they can pond us on the special day. Whoopie!

Me enduring the garbage bag torture: