What an interesting four months it has been!

The first 8 weeks of the semester were quite challenging. I had a normal class schedule, but on top of that, I had an 8 week class that required a 15-20 page report on strength of materials due every week, it was hell. Overall, it was an interesting class and I got through it with an A, but my favorite class was BADM 375 (Business Process Management). The topics on queuing theory and process improvement were highly interesting as was understanding how throughput, flow time, and inventory affect the bottom line.

An example of a page from one of my strength
of material reports (such tedious work)

I usually work on a side project every year and this semester I worked on building an automated bar. I am lucky enough to have an awesome room mate, Neal, that knows how to do all sorts of coding. Together with our knowledge, we built a working prototype of the auto-bar from such things as fish tank pumps, an Arduino board, and a shoe box. We are currently refining the components and program so that it works seamlessly. In the end, the bar’s software will output all of the drinks possible with whatever bottles of alcohol the user plugs into the bar. The user can then choose one of those drinks and the drink will automatically pour in about 10 seconds.

A screenshot of part of the software Neal
built for the automated bar

On top of all of the stuff I do every year I always manage to have some sort of “incident” happen to me. This semester I had an interesting one that will stay in my mind forever (or rather my face). The short story goes like this.

Preface: My bike was stolen... flash forward to the weekend.

My friends and I are out getting food and I see a kid push over a bicycle and he walks towards another to do the same to it. I try to intervene because I was fed up with people’s bike’s getting stolen or their tires getting kicked in. The situation escalates, and the kid and his friend won’t leave the bike. I end up calling the police and while I’m on the phone with them, I get punched in the face by one of the kids.

Lucky for me, I had a lot of friends with me and the two kids left about 20 seconds later, but not after hitting my other friend in the face. Two minutes later, they were both arrested. A couple weeks later, I had to have surgery on my face because I had two eye socket fractures, and a broken cheek bone. Sixteen screws and four metal plates were put in to hold everything together. I am extremely fortunate that there was little pain involved in all of this considering what happened, and I had a fantastic surgeon that fixed me up perfectly. You literally can’t even tell I was punched.

A pretty cool x-ray of the screws/plates that
were put into my face during surgery
(They are phillips head screws, just
in case you were wondering)

I’m definitely looking forward to starting next semester. My face is perfectly fine now, my girlfriend is back from Scotland (where she studied abroad at this fall), and the automated bar is close to complete. I think it will be an enjoyable yet busy semester, and I will have to soak up all of the fun I can with my friends considering this is the final semester of school for some of them. I still have an extra semester because I’m graduating in December 2012 which just gives me an excuse to have some more interesting college stories and learn a lot more!