RFL Nationals

I've recently got over a bit of business I had recently, so I have time to write one of these things now. My last week, I procrastinated and finally finished my robot for the RFL Nationals in San Francisco, which I qualified for a while back. I planned on making a new frame for it, and using the new drum that Joe is making me, but since I procrastinated that didn't happen. Instead, we replaced the lid and the supports to keep the drum from hitting the ground.

Finished with the robot late on Friday, I attempted to get a bunch of hours of sleep in before driving out on Saturday to attempt to be there by 10ish. I was helping run the insect weight divisions of the tournament (the 150 gram, 1 pound, and 3 pound) in the smaller arena, so I needed to be there early to sign everyone up that wanted to go. Things went pretty smoothly aside from me accidentally clicking on the delete button instead of the edit button to change someone's name since I made a typo. I fixed that up and things ran pretty smoothly. The arena was much better than at the last event in San Francisco which was nice.

The actual competition part for my robot wasn't until later in the day, so I watched a bunch of the bigger robots compete, and it was a lot of fun. Lots of robots got destroyed, and that's pretty much what I came to see, so I was happy. It came time for me to fight, and I got a bit nervous like I always do in my first fight. I went against a VDD clone (vertical disk.. like a sawblade) and one good weapon to weapon hit knocked him into the air and disabled him. The fight ended pretty fast, and I wanted to get a bit more action for the crowd, but alas, a win is a win.

My second fight in the night was against Steve (from sac state too) and his robot Fusible Link. Steve's robot is similar to my old one in that it is pretty much indestructable, but with the difference that his is pretty fast too. My drum isn't quite as powerful as I'd like it to be, so he outdrove me and I wasn't able to do any real damage to him so he won. This kind of bummed me out, but oh well.

The drive home was fairly amusing because I was a bit tired and over-hyper like I am when I get that tired, so things that weren't really funny became incredibly funny. For example, there was a sign that said "Cummings Blvd - 4 miles" or something similar, and all I could do was point at it and laugh. Joe laughed too, which made it all the funnier. However, the traffic was horrible for the first little bit. I guess there was some accident, and it caused the trip to take an hour longer than I wanted it to. We stopped at In-n-out on the way, had some food, and got some gas while the traffic got a bit better, and I finally got home around midnight after dropping Joe off.

The next day, the antweight fights were supposed to start at 10. It takes around 2 hours to get to the event in San Francisco, so I left around 8. This left me with getting much less sleep than I wanted to, especially for a weekend. Anyways, I found my other friend Zach's place with a little bit of help and we went. Joe couldn't come because he was having his birthday dinner or something with his parents, so Zach came with me instead. I got there a bit before the matches started and set up my computer for the brackets so people could look at them, then went into the pit area and put my stuff away (thanks Andy for letting me use part of your table). When I came back, I ran the fights for a while and then got to go myself. I went against another fast wedge named Kato, and lost as I usually do against him, with any of my robots. I had followed advice from Steve and trimmed down the supports on the front, but this caused the drum to hit the ground and it made it impossible to drive, and Kato to get an easy win.

With two losses, I was out of the tournament, so I proceded to run the brackets and enjoy the rest of the event since I didn't have any stress of having to compete. There were a bunch of good fights in the bigger weight class, namely where a 220 pound robot got thrown over the I-beam, bounced off of it, then hit the robot that threw it and broke the major piece off of it. It's kind of scary in a way since the robot that hit the wall is capable of ripping pieces of other robots and throwing the pieces into the wall with enough force to put a hole in the arena walls.. and it actually directly hit. Luckily it didn't do too much damage to the wall and fights continued. I didn't take any pictures of the event unfortunately, so I can't post any.

On Monday I went to school and work and got back later in the day and the guy on my team for the game programming class I'm in at Sac State told me the assignment was due Tuesday. This kind of sucked since I thought it was due on Thursday. I sent a message to the other guy on the team and told him to finish his part up, and I finished up my part that night and went to sleep. The next day it wasn't completely finished, so I stayed at the lab at school and worked on the project with the other guys. We finally figured out the retarded problem the code had and submitted it just before the time it was due. I'll let it be known I hate Java. Java is the devil :(.

I got some really good sleep Tuesday night since everything is pretty much done so I can relax. Wednesday was a normal Wednesday.. went to school and work, then school again and went to Chipotle with Zach and Joe. Mmmmm.. Chipotles is sooo good. When I got home, I watched this weeks episode of Lost. Wow. That show is so good as well. Chipotles and Lost, a really good combination :D

Today, my dad got back in town, and he got me an embroidered shit with my website on it, which was really cool. He also brought back this CD which is a swing/jazz CD with covers of a bunch of songs and I'm listening to it as I type this up. It's pretty awesome so far, so I'll have to finish listening to it in the car tomorrow on the way to my statistics test. Maybe it'll make me smarter and make me get an A on it.. well, I can hope at least :)