Can't Blog to Save My Life

Maker Faire

Yesterday was the Maker Faire!

I went to the Exploratorium at 9 to maintain exhibits. Afterwards, we went to San Mateo for the Maker Faire and let me tell you, the traffic was hell. You would not be able to find a parking space unless you telepathically moved other cars so that you could park. I was in Meg’s car along with Leslie, Jiawei and Lucy. We were short a wristband so only a few of us were able to enter the Faire as Meg tried to find parking. We were a bit lost looking for the Expo hall where the Exploratorium’s booth was but we got there eventually. I was able to see the Lick-Wilmerding’s booth which was pretty cool. When we got there, we relieved the first group from their shift and waited for people to come to us to tinker. We had a good amount of people come. Jiawei and I were helping these two people tinker and we were able to strike up a conversation about other topics which was really cool. Marjorie and Kathleen came up to Jiawei and I and tried to tell us that they had seen the Tesla Coil but it was too amazing for words. The next show was at 1:30 so we had a while to go until we could see it.

After our shift was over, Jiawei and I went to go check out the Bazarre Bizarre. EVERYTHING WAS SO COOL. BUT SO EXPENSIVE. I really wanted to go buy some things but I wasn’t willing to spend a lot of money. Jiawei and I met this one artist and we talked a bit about Fanime and Legend of Korra. That was awesome. Afterwards, Jiawei and I went to see the Tesla Coil where we met up with Kathleen and Marjorie. IT WAS SO COOL. OMG. THE TESLA COIL PLAYED MUSIC. IT WAS AMAZING. Kathleen and Marjorie brought us to this one booth selling old books that ranged as far back from 1895! I wanted to buy one but none of the books there were about subjects that I was really interested in :( I stayed at that booth for a while so Kathleen, Marjorie and Jiawei walked away. I spent the rest of the day alone looking at some jewelry booths. I wanted to buy some things to make in Jewelry class but many of the sellers didn’t pay attention to me and my money so I just walked away without buying anything. The only thing I bought yesterday was a poem. Yes. That is correct. I bought a poem for $5. It is a beautiful poem. I also bought a terriyaki chicken bowl for $9…..ripped off. :( 

We left at around 5 and I was dropped off at Lick. Overall, it was an awesome day and I can’t wait to go to the Maker Faire next year!

4/21/12

So yesterday was an epically fun day. 

There was a wonderful open make downstairs and Denny told us to pair up with a middle school-er to explore the open make. I teamed up with Sherry and we toured through the entire open make looking for something that she wanted to do. Eventually we ended up in the sewing portion of the open make where we rummaged through old fabrics and old clothing to make things with. Sherry found this lovely slightly floral black and white fleece to cut into a scarf with a fringe. I found this nice little fabric scrap that I turned into a small purse thingy with a zipper. I had never used a sewing machine before so that was a new experience for me. Fortunately, Sherry attends a sewing club after school and she was a great help to me while I was making my purse thingy. I felt that we had a really good time and that we bonded a bit :) I found out that she attends Marina Middle School and is in 6th grade and has some of the teachers that I had when I attended Marina. Overall I really enjoyed the open make. I’m really sad that this will be the last open make though :(

I’ll upload a photo one day when I learn how to use the webcam on the laptop.

3/17/12

So…it’s been like a month since I blogged. And there’s not much to talk about seeing how in the last 2 weeks, I’ve only worked like 1 hour. 

So if you didn’t know, March 10, 2012 was an SAT Test Day. And I took it. So I didn’t come to work. Allow me to tell you about my experience taking the SAT. I got to my testing room on time and what not and was as prepared as I was going to be to take the test. My room had to wait 20 minutes for this one kid who never showed up. That’s just frustrating right there. And so the test flies by pretty much until the last 3 sections. ALL OF THEM WERE BORING READING SECTIONS. Please don’t argue that they aren’t boring reading sections because it’s a fact that SAT reading passages are meant to be boring. And then I started having all the symptoms of ADHD and dear lord I despise that test so much.

Anyways, let’s get on with today.

So today, I caught an early bus to the Explo and was like 25 mins early. This doesn’t happen often. And so I waited outside the museum with Leslie and Julian. A kind lady let us in. We settled down and started maintenance. We finished like a good quarter of the exhibits before 9 AM. We were done by 9:30 and Denny sat us down to discuss the day. I told Denny that I would not be spending the day with them because I was going to spend time with my friend who just had some personal issues and needed some cheering up. Long story short, she had to go to the hospital to ensure her own personal safety. So I had a good excuse of missing out on work. Denny told the gang that they were going to CalAcademy and that there was going to be a scavenger hunt. I personally think that it was also a good thing that I didn’t go on this field trip because the issues my friend had been having was with a member of CIS who was actually working today. Therefore a professional (well…as professional as it gets) environment was kept (hopefully) by me not being there and making things very personal if I saw that person. I hope the kids had fun but I really don’t have anymore of an idea of what had happened today. 

Career Night at CalAcademy

Today, I did not make it to maintenance because I had to attend a SAT Diagnostic Test at First Graduate for SAT Prep Classes. It was SO long. And made me very mentally tired. I was glad to rush to work.

I was hoping to be able to interview Pablo for my psychology project but it turned out that he went home. And so i was disappointed that I couldn’t do my homework. But then Lucy helped me with that issue by responding to my interview questions with replies as in what her father would say. In other words, I was pretending to interview her father due to desperation to get my project done. After going through a good majority of the questions, Jiawei, Kathleen, Marjorie and I took the 28 bus to CalAcademy. We got there very early and explored a bit. I went into the humid rainforest for the very first time. Let’s just say I sweated a lot and was glad to have fresh air. 

When the time came to go upstairs for the event itself, we were guided by two CIS Interns to the waiting/eating room. There, we mingled among ourselves and got to converse with people for the other program. Hors d’oeuvres were being passed around by the caterers. It was a very fanciful evening to me. After a good hour of mingling and hors d’oeuvres, we were sent to the theater next door to listen to a guest speaker who is a professor from the University of Kansas. We listened to a bit of his life story and how he arrived at where he was today. It was interesting to listen to what he had to say and what advice he had to offer but it was a long talk. Dinner came after that and we had some pretty amazing food. After dinner, we separated into our panel groups. I was in the group with the speaker named Kevin who worked as an engineer at the University of California Berkeley. He showed us two really cool robots and how he came to design them after biological features. One of the robots could fly…or hover, I guess you can say. After that panel, I attended the panel where the guest speaker, Julio, was a veterinarian. He told us about his road to college and told us about the road to becoming a veterinarian. 

After this presentation, I hurt my finger and had to be escorted to security in order to receive first aid care. That was an interesting experience all in it’s own.

After getting a bandaid and some disinfectant cream, I returned to the eating room where we had dessert, took MULTIPLE LARGE GROUP PHOTOS, and received goody bags that had a 4 GB flashdrive with all the videos of our adventures together preloaded on it, a 3 oz bar of Organic Dark Chocolate (70% Cocoa), and a deck of Aviator Poker Size playing cards. I have all of these in front of me, therefore it is easy for me to list instead of having to recall. We were able to leave after that and that’s when I decided to take part of the centerpieces home. Pretty flowers make me happy.

Overall, it was a fun day. It was a good way to wrap up 6 months of collaboration. 

Backtrack Blog: 1/7/12 & 1/14/12

January 7, 2012:

This day, we set about doing maintenance before heading off to the LC to brainstorm ideas for what we wanted to do with the kids as well as other things. Pablo wanted to make sure all of us knew how to assess our emails and how to use etime. We came up with ideas such as making a bio-terrarium and watching an egg shell slowing dissolve in vinegar. We were also assigned to give ourselves personal projects. I have not come up with a personal project yet. 

January 14, 2012:

Yesterday, we performed maintenance as usual. Afterwards, we met upstairs, ate a few bagels and had a short meeting addressing some issues we’ve been having about maintenance. We came up with the conclusion of introducing ourselves to the rest of the maintenance crew in hopes of clearing up these issues. During the meeting, I was in charge of taking attendance of the kids so I kept wavering by the door waiting for them and listening in on the meeting. After the meeting ended, Kathleen and I took Anthony, Wilson, Haoron/Haoran, and Andy on a tour of the exhibits that we maintain. They weren’t as interested in what we had to say as they were with playing with the exhibits but hey, this is the EXPLORAtorium. It’s a bit frustrating but I can understand their excitement. At noon, everyone was sent home because of the excitement about the kickoff game with the 49er’s. 

12/31/11

Today…is the last day of 2011. Time to reminiscence.

Possibly the largest events that I have been a part of most would be the Live Broadcast, Yosemite Camping Trip, X-Prize and Flight Squad. I’m pretty lazy to write about them right now, so please click the links and enjoy older posts about these specific events.

During this year with X-Tech, one time can be for sure: I MET A WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE. From the CalAcademy people to the explainers in our own exploratorium, I feel like I made more connections. IT’S HARD FOR ME FOR REMINISCENCE. WAIT 4 MONTHS FOR A REAL REMINISCENCE POST.

The classes I have next semester include: Wood 2, Spanish 3, English 3H, PreCalculus, Dance 2, Brain & Behavior and U.S. History Honors. I wanted to get into Jewelry 2 but I didn’t get into that class; I’m hoping to get in during the add/drop period. 

As of senior year…I have no idea what classes I want to have. I mean, if I don’t get into Jewelry 2, I’ll definitely try again but aside from the mandatory English 4 class and History class, I have no idea what I want to do. I’m so bad at Spanish that I’m discouraged to go on to my fourth year in Spanish. I would like to take it, but I’d fail and it’d bring my GPA down so badly :( I would most likely take Calculus and possibly double in sciences. I’m not planning on dancing for the first semester but I’m not entirely sure about the second semester yet >.< 

As for what colleges I want to go to, I plan on applying to a handful of UC’s. I plan on applying to UC Davis and Irvine and possibly San Diego. I really don’t know where I want to go. I am so unprepared for college. Cara is unsure where she wants to go, what she wants to major in, how she will afford college and if she can get in at all.

Winter Break

Winter Break work consisted of 5 days working with the young XTech-ers:

Saturday, December 10, 2011:

This day, we came into work and performed maintenance as usual. After that, the kids arrived. We divided the kids into two groups to learn sketchup and light painting. I was appointed to teach Sketchup and so I gave them a few informational videos to watch. I had watched these videos when I started to use sketchup and I found them to be very helpful. The kids weren’t as excited to watch videos though. That made me a bit sad. After watching the videos, the kids had to play around with sketchup after getting some basic knowledge of the tools from watching the videos. After a while, we switched and I gave the same videos for the second group of kids to watch again. 

Saturday, December 17, 2011

This day, we also came at 9 and performed maintenance. This day, we made lanterns! :D (Remember the cardboard latterns? Here’s an example from my coworker Lucy!) Since we used the laser machine to cut out the cardboard to make the lanterns, the kids had to use photoshop to print out picture to put behind the frames. I basically helped with resizing pictures they found online as well as printing the images onto vellum.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

This day, we made parols! (click the hyperlink if you’re not sure what that is!). We spent the day building and decorating them! Instead of using bamboo barbecue skewers this time, we used bamboo sticks actually made for making parols! We basically assembled the bamboo sticks into a 2 separate star shape, tied the ends/points together and glued them together with sticks in between to made them pop a bit more. I can’t really describe it but they looked like this in the end! We also had lights in them to make them more festive :)

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

I was not at work this day but I am aware that the kids went to iFly. Hopefully they had some fun :)

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Today, we made Christmas Tree ornaments (in the shape of the star) through sandblasting! We basically had star-shaped plexiglass pre-cut and had the kids draw on them. Afterwards, we gave them box cutter knives and xacto knives to cut out their designs with. I facilitated the use of xacto knives :D After 2 star shaped ornaments, we gave them a large piece of rectangular plexiglass where the kids were able to draw/sandblast something more intricate and have it light up :) There were a lot of interesting designs.