House of Shadows

Okay, first let me complain a little. I feel like I'm doing a lot of that lately. *sigh*

This last Friday I told my lab partners in Engineering that I would handle all of the documentation for this week (I've been doing it all anyway) and all I wanted them to do is come up with individual sketches for our final concept (a powered wagon with a scissor lift) and we'd compare on Tuesday and I could get ideas from it, write about it, and then we'd have some drawings for the report in the Appendix.

Come Tuesday I had made some drawings in AutoCAD (after all, that's part of this course) and was ready to show them. One team member had just quickly sketched out in pen a quick concept (which looked like he had done it five minutes previous to the meeting) another partner hadn't done anything, and the third didn't show up, he e-mailed about an hour before the meeting and said he had some tests the next day and he needed to do well on them in order to pass the classes and keep his scholarship (what scholarship that is, I don't know). Now first off, he should have taken that into consideration before committing to a team meeting. I'm sure he just waited until the last minute and decided to leave the team on high ground because of his own lack of studying.

So anyway, I had my drawings on AutoCAD, the two members who were present liked my drawing and they both said that they would work on the final version of it, going off of my drawing that I had and would turn it in later to me for the report. I said okay, but I really needed it by Thursday, when we were going to meet again (I had assigned them the drawing a while back). Thursday came around and all of us were present but one of the two who said he'd work on the drawing, hadn't done anything, and the other said that he just needed more time, it was too complicated and he didn't do it. He said he had a Calculus test the next day that he really needed to study for so he couldn't work on it.So guess who stayed up late and went to campus early the next day to finish the drawings? Yours truly. In addition to the report which I had worked on for a couple of hours to prepare and finalize, I had to pick up the part that I'd assigned to them because they didn't do it.

Every minute of today until about 5:00 was taken up with schoolwork, running around from building to building, finishing the drawings, working on my own program, and printing out and finalizing the report because I was waiting for those drawings to add! *sigh*

Oh, but it gets better!
We were initially supposed to submit documentation for Digital Logic Design on last Friday but the TA moved the due date a week later, to this Friday. As of last Friday I had a very basic, minimal report from one of my lab partners, you may recall that I had been doing all of the programming and had assigned the other guy on my team to work on the case to house the project and circuit board and the two ladies I had assigned to documentation. The little report was a page long and was totally in error, they didn't understand the project at all. So Tuesday I spent two hours with them going over various parts of the project and what I had done and laying out what they should have in their documentation. I could have done it myself in those two hours (easily) but I wanted them to do their share. I said I wanted to do our presentation on Thursday so could they have it done by then? Sure!

I had wanted to do the presentation Tuesday but all of our team wasn't there at once and the TA said that he would prefer all the team members be there.

So Thursday comes, one team member didn't show up for class but that was okay, we did our presentation anyway. The documentation wasn't done though. I talked to one of the TAs and he said sadly, that's one of the things about being on the team. I don't get graded for the work that I put into the project, our entire team falls or succeeds based on the outcome. So I can have done everything myself except for one part and still get a lousy grade along with everyone else in the team. I asked him if I should do a backup documentation just in case and he said if I was concerned about it, then yes. So in addition to my own personal things, I had to write up some documentation, and then later in the evening I find out I had to do the drawing for the other team project myself as well. How do these people survive college? By getting placed with team members like me I guess!

I saw a professor this evening that I'd had the previous semester (and really, really liked, he put a lot of effort into it) and he was asking about my project and I was telling him and mentioned the situation and he asked who the members were and I explained and he recognized one of them and said he had her last semester in the same class (DLD, which means this is her second time) and if she put as much effort into it this semester as she did last semester then he didn't wonder I was suffering. She apparently thought he was trying to withold something from her or "had it out" for her and wrote a nasty letter to the department about him.

And today the documentation was NOT turned in so it's good I had the backup, though I didn't tell anyone. One of my partners asked if Shannin had contacted me and when I said no, she told me that Shannin had said she talked to Fritz and her son had to go to the hospital for some infection and so Fritz had apparently said she could turn it in later. Well, Fritz (the TA) was right there and he said he'd heard nothing. If her son really has an infection then fine, but (this may sound harsh) I want to see a doctor's report or something because I kind of am doubting it. I give them the easiest job (two of them) and what do I get? Nothing. Good thing I did it myself. I mean, I've put in over 25 hours on the project easily and how much time have they spent on their job? Less than an hour I imagine. I feel like I'm being forced not only to do above and beyond my share of the work, but also to do what little I've assigned to my partners. I'm sick of it frankly. I am not going to give good peer evaluations.

Now that I've got all that off my chest, hopefully I'll stop complaining, because honestly, I don't always do that.

Oh! Hey! Look, as I write this (10:40 at night) I just got a notification that the documentation has been submitted electronically! Talk about waiting until the last minute.

Okay, so on with the show (literally).

Tonight I competed in the Electrical Engineer's yearly Double Dare challenge, the team I was on was with a student from Germany that appeared to be very smart, another gamer guy, and Dr Latino, who was the professor I mentioned above. He's just brilliant :)

There were 8 teams of roughly four or five people each and they divided the teams in half, teams 1,3,5,7 went on the right, teams 2,4,6,8 went on the left. The left, massive team was Team B, and the right massive team was Team A. Then they would ask a question between Team 1 and Team 2 and whoever got it right, scored points for the "mega team." Then they'd go to Team 3 vs. Team 4 and so on. We were Team 1 but teams 3,5,7 didn't do too well. Our team answered correctly every question we got, but overall, our mega team flunked pretty badly so that entire half of the room was eliminated, us with it sadly (though we were the best of the lot in my opinion of course). Just the luck of the draw in that situation. We could not have done any better as a team but it wasn't enough to compensate for the rest of the mega group. I stayed around and watched the rest of it. I liked a lot of the questions. Just simple things like
"how many milliliters is in 1 cubic centimeter of water?"
or
"If you had a rope that went around the earth's equator along ground level and your raised the rope to one foot above ground level, how much longer would the rope need to be?"
or
"What does the "V" in the acronymn "DVD" stand for?
or
"Name the man for whom the unit for capacitance is named after"
or
"how many picoFarads are in one microFarad?
or
"what is the weight of an electron?"
or
"Why did Beethoven get rid of his chickens" (which was a silly one)
or
"What is the SI unit for luminescence?"
or
"What is the temperature in Kelvin when it is 10 degress Celsius?"
or
"What is the output, in decimal of 1010 and 1100 when OR-ed together?"
or
"What does the acronymn RISC stand for?"
or
"what is the temperature at which Farenheit and Celsius units are equal?"
And other such great questions. I don't remember them all. I do love trivia though!

So that was a fun night. Some Calculus tomorrow and hopefully I'll be able to take a bit of the day off to read some. Now that I've finished my ranting, I'm good for another week. I just had to vent a little, sorry about that, I don't mean to complain all the time. So good night!