Thursday, March 22, 2012

Bob, the spider who watches me

So, 5 hours of work after roughly 3 hours of school gets to be a little bit stressful for a high school teen. So the minute I walk in the front door naturally SHOULD become the best minute of my life, right? Am I right?

Wrong.

Normally, I will come home and casually set down my stuff before beginning my afternoon order. What changed you may ask? I finally noticed the large spider in the corner of my bathroom was staring at me.

How long had he been sitting there? How long had he been living in that corner? How had I not noticed him before? And why was he staring at me!?!?

So thinking very hard (very difficult for a teenager to do) I tried to remember when the last time he wasn't there was. Then I had an epiphany, he had been living there since the end of "the epidemic" (more on that in a different blog). Instead of listening to the reasonable side of my brain, he is now a resident of the bathroom, which oddly enough is plastered with poison dart frog wallpaper. In spite of my serious arachnophobia (I would rather drink toilet water than touch a spider with a 10 foot long pole), I tolerate the spider in the corner and have named him Bob.

And that is how I got a spider for a pet.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Why So Convoluting?

So as I write this blog I come off my busiest week yet. Ask any high school or college student how difficult it is to complete 2 projects in the span of 1-2 weeks and you will get the same answer 7 times out of 10, "extremely". That having been said, if someone approached you and said "Hi, I would like you to build a machine to perform an otherwise simple or menial task but the catch is you have to do it in over 20 steps and it has to be convoluting or otherwise over complicating. Oh and you only have 1 week to do it. Good luck!" most of us would either: 1) stare blankly at the person; 2) ask the age old question, "WHY!?!?"; or 3) say "ok" and get to work. My response to this question when posed by my physics teacher was a combination of 2 & 3.
The conversation went a little like this:
Teacher: "Connor, I would like you to build a machine to perform a simple task and you have to have 6 or more steps. Oh and you only have 1 week to do it."
Me: "Why?!? Don't get me wrong, I will do it, but why?"
"Because, I am the teacher and I told you to do it."
"But, what is the purpose in doing this? How does me building this machine benefit society?"
"It doesn't. It is simply funny for everyone else."
And that is how I got stuck building a Rube Goldberg machine.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Half-Vast Ideas?

Half-Vast Ideas is a blog my dad originally had the idea for that I am continuing. I plan to blog about questions and observations that I continually have about life and it's funny little quirks. I plan to cover just about everything from Christmas trees to drunken people.
I am a senior in high school that works in an IT Department for 5 hours a day. As a result of this, I have seen things that simply boggle the mind. This is my first blog ever so this should prove a little interesting.