For those of you that have not heard, we placed 9th in web design out of a possible 45. Our previous best was 13th by Moultroup and Suzanne, so congratulations to Mandrake and Muir. Our web design team was also the only team selected to be interviewed by the judge / founder of the World Organization of Webmasters for a podcast that should be uploaded to webdesigncontest.org any day now. We also competed in Quiz bowl at nationals and placed a number.

Here are the scores for Mandrake / Muir:

You will notice that our team placed above average in every category.

Now onto Graduation night, I believe that every one showed up and that some people won scholarships, but that was in the beginning of June and I don’t remember what I had for breakfast let alone what happened in June. So if you remember who won what, let us know in the comments so that those who deserve credit get it, although I guess they got money so they could probably care less about recognition. So with out anymore babbling here are the pictures from graduation.

Trayah doing his best Randy Johnson impression. I’m betting that reference was lost on anyone that reads this blog. I’m trying to say your all nerds.

Cawd class of 2009 (those that showed up on time)

A bunch of goofing off photos before the ceremony.

Now onto the things that will affect those of you attending Cawd next year, whether you be new or returning to become second years (I guess this will most likely include Gordon). Some of you may have already heard but at the end of last year we were able to acquire some funding and we were able to purchase Wacom tablet for each Cawd Student. So next year a lot of our hand drawings will take place on the computer in photoshop rather than with pencil and paper.

Dr. Herr got bored this summer and decided to make a cube of tablets.

Also those of your returning next year will be working on new computers that have been arriving all week.

Sorry about the high ISO on these in class picutes, I don’t have my DSLR today and some of our light bulbs have burnt out, so it’s even more dark in here than usually. These computers are similar to a Porsche Cayenne, Incredibly fast but hit every branch of the ugly tree on the way down. They come with the Intel Nehalem based Xeon 2.66 ghz Quad Core processor, 6 gb ram, AMD ATI 512mb video card and 24 inch monitors. The only reason we were able to afford these is we got them at a deep discount, actually I’m pretty sure they were sold to us after falling of the back of some truck, that’s the only explanation for how much of a deal we got.

Now onto much more important matters, my computer got here Wednesday.

Yeah, your jealous, that’s all I have to say about this desk and accompanying 24″ iMac / 24″ LED Cinema Display. The only thing not shown in the picture is my new friend I made this summer. I have gotten more work done in the last 2 days than the rest of the summer combined, mainly because I couldn’t copy and paste in Dreamweaver on my Winblows Dell I had before without crashing. As you can see I have a ton of toys on my desk right now because I’m moving to my new house and have no room right now at in my office at home. With all these toys on my desk I’m starting to feel like Herbert from Family Guy (“Where’s the paper boy? Mmmhhh”).

Onto more news from the Kansas City field trip. I’m going to keep this brief because I have already spent an hour and a half on this blog post and post production on the pictures for said post. We had a lot of fun handing out around KC when we had down time and Muir wasn’t Spartan kicking things. A quick break down of the weeks temperatures with the heat index: Monday 104f, Tuesday 114f, Wednesday 116f, Thursday 100f, Friday 104f. So it was hot, especially in the SkillsUSA garb. Monday we hung out and went to dinner. Tuesday we went to contest meetings and the opening ceremonies. Wednesday night Sagen decided to run in the 5k fun run in 116f degree weather, that he promptly almost vomited on me at the end of the run. After the run we witnessed the craziest thunderstorm I have ever seen and got drenched trying to get back to the hotel. Thursday they competed and we went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. Friday we went to the Plaza, saw the apple store, and watched Transformers 2 which is in the top 5 of the worst movies I have ever seen. To get an idea of how bad it was, watch a video of Shia LaBeouf acting depth:

So besides the weather, KC was a fun trip, you can ask anyone that went. Here are some pictures of receipts from our lunch at Panera, we all decided to use fake geeky names for our orders that would be called out on the loud speaker when ready.

I went as ‘Leroy’ and Mandrake order after me as ‘Jenkins’.

Goodie went as Lando.

I believe Waters was ‘Leonidas’ and Sagen went as ‘Duke’. I can’t remember the rest and the receipts were misplaced.

I believe that’s everything I have been procrastinating on posting for this summer… Let me know if I have forgotten something from the longest blog post ever. I will post all of the pictures from KC later this summer, I just don’t have the time for it now.

Peace.

~Dr. Herr

]]> http://www.cawdvt.org/3538/very-belated-summer-updates/feed/ 18 http://www.cawdvt.org/2858/skillsusa-vermont-2009/ http://www.cawdvt.org/2858/skillsusa-vermont-2009/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:46:10 +0000 sherr http://www.cawdvt.org/?p=2858 Here are some pictures from the Vermont SkillsUSA day on April 9th, 2009.

Quizbowl playing hacky sack after their Quizbowl win. Video in HD from … Read the rest »

We found out that students can do a portfolio review once accepted where their CAWD work can potentially get them out of classes at Lyndon. You get the college credit, but you don’t need to pay, or take the classes if you can demonstrate you already have the knowledge. Seems good to me.

We had lunch with the students / faculty, and all agreed that the french fries were pretty much amazing. The fish sticks….big disappointment.

We also got to see Markus (CAWD ’08) Alex’s brother, randomly in the cafe. The head of the Digital Media program said that “Just last week Markus had done work which blew him away“. So yeah, Markus appears to be doing pretty well. For those that don’t know Markus, he is the one giving the hug to Brian…or here.

….Brian doesn’t look too thrilled……

So yeah….

~ The Cronin

Goodman – 5th

See you in the fall!

The presentation showed us all the different job positions available to the students after they leave school. After the presentation, we toured the rest of the studio which spans 3 floors. From the half pipe, we went to the in house screen printing studio. In there we viewed custom t shirts and bills for concerts at the Higher Ground. Once we left the screen printing room we headed upstairs past a 6ft tall florescent sign.

Once we got to the second floor we were shown the design process for Burton Snowboards, from the hand art to the finished snowboard. After that we viewed a wall painted by the former bassist from Weezer on our way to the mailroom/printing room. Once leaving the printing room on our way to the IT section of JDK we passed the breakroom equiped with a fooseball table.

While in the IT section of the tour we saw this cool piece of artwork made from outdated floppy disks. It’s an anlien from the 80′s arcade game, Space invaders.

After leaving the IT section of JDK we headed to the top floor of the studio where most of the design work is done. Up there we saw he design process on all sorts of projects like websites, flash movies, 3d art, concept art and game cover art. While up there we also got to see the JDK meeting room, and it has all of the requirements of a good meeting room. The room consisted of a wall, a plasma screen tv and a 360.

We would just like to thank JDK for allowing us to view their studio and accommodating 30 students in their busy work flow. We can’t wait to visit them again next year. For more on the JDK field trip, visit the set on Flickr.