Lodie and Angel kicked butt at the Web Design competition and got gold.

Hannah competed in the pin design competition with her Champ pin and won silver.

Kody and Chace competed in the 3D competition and brought back gold medals.

Allie and Trono competed in the 3D competition and got bronze.

Shelby and Lizzie teamed up last minute due to an absence and would have totally made silver if they didn’t get disqualified.

Quizbowl took gold again this year but it wasn’t so easy. The rules have changed since last year, but luckily Gonzo was there to fix everything.

Trolol working hard on his 3D advertisement.

Overall this was a great and memorable competition for CAWD and everyone is looking forward to going to Kansas City.

Here are the top 15 pins, in no specific order, for CAWD. All of these pins were created entirely by students. This means none of this work was clipart or stock photography.

7 of these pins were created by CAWD I students, and the remaining 8 were created by CAWD II students.

Note: Open first image with lightbox, then use arrows on keyboard to navigated between previous and next pins.

Let us know which one you like best, give us some feedback, or even how you would vote in the comments.

TJ took silver in pin design and Goodie and Grizzles took bronze in web design. Along with our web and pin team we had a quizbowl team that consisted of Angel, Dwatts, CTall, Rathburn and myself.

After a long layover and playing Mario Kart for the DS on the plane ride we arrived at the hotel.

It had 14 floors, a pool, glass elevators, free breakfast and was perfectly setup for dropping things on the unsuspecting people below. We attended only the mandatory meetings and ceremonies and spent the rest of our time doing things like visiting the Apple Store, going to GameStop, and playing Smash.

Cronin ‘Leroy-ed’ it across a street and almost got us hit by a car on our way to PF Changs for lunch. We watched the Futurama premier and attempted to throw together a poker game and then waited until 2am for our pizza that never got delivered.

We had lunch at a hipster restaurant called Blanc Burgers and Bottles where we ate 100$ burgers and fries served in mini shopping carts then shoved into a van that was NOT meant to fit all 10 of us.

We made a trip to the grocery store where TJ and Cronin split a case of Mountain Dew and TJ ended up carrying it all the way back to the hotel in the 90+ degree heat. And somehow while all of us were sweating and whining about the heat Waters managed to never take off his sweatshirt. We ate the worst pizza any of us had ever tasted, and during the competitions we walked around the booths and got Autodesk bandanas and attempted to trade pins with other states.

We chugged cherry limeade and TJ turned a big pillow into Goodie.

We visited Coldstone Creamery and got some ice cream that melted as soon as we stepped outside and overall we had a great trip, had a lot of fun and did well at nationals then almost missed our flight home because everybody slept through their alarms. And somehow by the end of the trip I had no silly bandz left. Goodie, if you’re reading this I want my pink hippo back!

View all of the photos from the trip here in a flash gallery.

~Nikki

Pictures and more tomorrow.

Every CAWD student that went to states came home with a medal.

Congratulations to all that competed.

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/3517/skills-usa-kansas-city-update/ http://www.cawdvt.org/3517/skills-usa-kansas-city-update/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:36:50 +0000 sherr http://www.cawdvt.org/?p=3517 Check out the flickr photostream for updates.

Also check out this motocross video from the SkillsUSA conference enterance.

… Read the rest »

Quizbowl playing hacky sack after their Quizbowl win. Video in HD from the new Flip HD.

Yeah they weren’t that good, it’s becuase I’m running the camera rather than playing.

Quizbowl Gold being announced for Cawd. They weren’t that excited because they had known that they had won for about 8 hours already and they were coming down from the sugar high.

Here is the GOLD winning website from Mandrake and Muir.

The design was by mandrake, and the coding was done by Muir. The team was provided only with a couple of videos, pictures and text files; and then asked to create a fully functioning and valid website in 4 1/2 hours. They were provided with 2 logos to chose from but decided that neither fit their design, so Mandrake designed a new cleaner logo for the grind. The website also used flash to embed videos into the site validly and lightbox2 to display images.

So this year cawd will be taking 8 kids (9 if you count Trayah, 10 if you count Cronin as well) to the National SkillsUSA Competition in Kansas city this June.

Congratulations to Stowe, Goodie, Shannon, Sagen, Waters, Griggs, Billings, Williams, Muir and Mandrake for representing Cawd at the Vermont SkillsUSA competition and bringing home 9 medals in total.

~Dr. Herr