Journal Update #12 - 11/14/19
This was it. All my research, planning, and participation was finally transforming into a tangible product. I already contacted my friend who is one of the shop workers of the Brown Basement Senior Design Lab that houses two laser engravers. It was Monday night on November 10. The space closed at 5 pm that day, but he had granted my “behind the scenes” access to work on my project. We had 15 wooden planks and a dream. With no more than my list of quotes, we got to work.
Starting the process was no challenge for us as we were simply vectorizing letters; compared to engraving pictures, this task would prove to be much simpler. As I decided to print two quotes per board, we would make a vector image of two of the phrases separated by a line. One would think using an image software such as Corel to type out a couple sentences was easy, but whether it was the late night or my carelessness, all of the night’s problems stemmed from this particular process. Missing quotes, typos, incorrect spelling—most of the boards exhibited a human flaw at one point. However, correcting these mistakes were no challenge as we just had to do an extra pass to correct the mistake. To those reading this blog post, here is a secret: you can actually find these mistakes on the boards. If one looks very closely at the letters, darker or more burnt letters indicate spots of error and correction. Hopefully this secrets stay within this digital realm as the boards seem practically flawless despite this. We started with laser printing the student quotes followed by the general quotes that I collected. The faculty mantras/prayers appeared to be a race against time since I had to wait for two quotes from the last minute. I guess this week wasn’t just stressful and loaded for students because most of the faculty I spoke to had barely any time to participate in my piece. Nonetheless, I managed to secure the last two quotes from two professors, so I was able to reach my target margin. Each laser engraving session lasted roughly 20 minutes, so the entirety of the work spanned roughly 6 hours. Of course I was not about to stay in the shop and inhale wood particles until 3 AM, so I made the executive decision to continue the woodwork at 8am the next (same) morning. After the relatively clockwork procedure of creating the vector image, placing the board on the machine, calibrating the laser, and then waiting twenty minutes, all of the boards were complete. I finished just in time for an electrical engineering class to request to use my machine. My dream had now come to life—all that’s left is to display it.
Despite the many hours allocated to the woodworking, I still made sure to attend the regular Wednesday EveryOredigger meeting for the campus culture-change subcommittee. This session was the most unique of any in the past due to having just four attendees present. Professor Snieder, a grad student, staff member, and I proceeded to dicsuss about the plans for next year programming. This involved redefining the M-Climb, going over campus mission statements, and general advertising. I particularly excelled during this meeting in terms of talking points, feedback, and comments. I believe it had to do with a mixture of both the number of people as well as my comfortability among these people, and it seemed that us four completed more work than when it would have been thirteen. Furthermore, Professor Snieder granted my time in the end to present my wooden boards as well as my intentions for the overall display. As this is something he has never done in past meetings, I was very eager to receive critiques even though there were only two people in attendance. Honestly, the workload of printing the boards made me feel ‘burnout’ In regards to my current work in my practicum, but this meeting gave me the lasting motivation I needed to finish the semester.