Moving Right Along

Now that my Quest for Graduation series of post titles is over, I have to express my disappointment in you, my faithful readers. You've had five weeks to tell me where that series came from and on one posted so much as a guess. For those who didn't know, the titles of the last five posts have been variations off the titles of the five games in Sierra's Quest for Glory series. These point-and-click, RPG-ish adventure games were some of the best I've ever played, despite their numerous bugs. Sierra, in its heyday, produced some of the most fun games I've ever played (circa 1990's). They are also some of the buggiest games I've ever played. The bugs were rarely showstopping*, but they certainly were noticeable.

In other news, I have acquired all the components for my Halloween costume and just need to put the finishing touches on a few parts before I'm ready. One of those parts is a capacitor about 2/3's the size of a AA battery. It scares the crap out of me, so I'm not doing anything with that component of the costume until I can get down to the electronics lab on Tuesday. Hopefully I can get all the soldering I need to do done then and just finish with the assembly and spray painting at my leisure. Now that I have tantalized you thoroughly, I take great pleasure in saying that you have to wait until Halloween to see it, like everyone else. Nyah nyah. Don't worry. I'm taking pictures as I go and I'll have plenty from the parties.

Speaking of the electronics lab, there's something cool going on this semester (and hopefully continuing on afterwards). A pair of students who are excited about learning more electrical engineering and getting an intuitive feel for electronic systems set up an informal lab period for interested students to come and play with the electronics lab. We do a little bit of instruction and mostly tinkering on projects of our own. I'm hoping they can help me with the bits of my costume that I don't have the knowledge to do safely.

Speaking of student-driven interest groups, I've got updates on the Barnstormers! Claire and I (co-presidents of the Barnstormers Aeronautics Club here at Mudd, if you'll recall) have been working with Iris Critchell to get the soaring trip going. We flew to Hemet and Crystalaire, where there are glider schools in operation, to see what was available and decide where we wanted to go. Larry Howell, the man in charge of "Sail Plane Enterprises" at Hemet really impressed us and offered us a great deal on pricing. He can only take 12 students a day, and only on the weekends, which is lower than the "Great Western Soaring School" at Crystalaire, but we liked the feel of his operation much more than the Crystalaire one, so we called him up and scheduled two trips. At least two of Claire, Iris, and I will be on each trip, so I'll make sure we'll get plenty of pictures and we'll have some wonderful stories.

See you after Halloween,

~KMarsh

*A glaring exception was Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness. This game had a glitch that made it impossible to progress beyond a certain point no matter what. Instead of releasing a patch or an update, Sierra provided a save file with the character located past this point so that players could see the end of the game, albeit with a different character than the one they had built up along the way.