Lasers Are Dangerous

Out of the two courses, I was most excited about this one - laser training. Sadly, the lase is only used once a week when Space is held in the Octagon. The main reason for this is that the room is many times higher than in the Foundry and so the risk is significantly reduced. The downside to being laser trained is that I will no doubt be asked to work more at Space which is doubly bad because you have to actually sit in the main area when operating the laser and subject yourself to the awful noise made by the resident DJ.

The initial excitement soon wore off after being bored to tears during the first half of the day. A very enthusiastic teacher who kept rambling on about things totally irrelevant to what we were doing. Apparently his team have spent over ten years devising a BTEC course in laser operations and the industry hasn't really taken it on board. Surely if it was any good then they would have listened to his ideas - which begs the question, what was actually in this course?

The afternoon session was much better and we actually got to use our laser for about five minutes each. We had to programme a 'safe' shape by working out what would happen under single component failure. By this I mean considering what the pattern would look like if either the x or y mirrors failed. A circle for example would turn into a vertical or horizontal line moving either up and down or left and right. Shape manipulation is really quite difficult to get your head around and can really sap your energy.

Tonight's Junior Apprentice was cringe worthy to say the least. I have no idea what was going through Adam's mind when he came up with the idea for the cardboard thing. Am I the only one who has already heard of and seem multifunction board games? So much so in fact that I designed and built one for my GCSE graphics course so I know quite a bit about this subject. I also agree with the comment that board games are not appealing to children any more - the traditional ones that it. I think the new incarnations of games such as cranium are much better than draughts and backgammon. How many children d you know that understand the rules of backgammon? I certainly don't. As for making it out of cardboard, well that was inexcusable and I'm amazed that Adam didn't bring whoever was responsible for that idea back to the board room.

As for the other team, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter how the team performs in tasks like this because as long as they have a half decent product, they are going to win. The idea to send Tim and Arjun out on the photoshoot when they were supposed to be preparing for the sales pitch is shocking. Even if Hannah and Rhys had actually written a speech for them rather than a series of obvious bullet points, you need time to practice a speech and memorise it so that you can cope with unexpected interruptions and questions. If they had lost, I wouldn't have minded seeing either of those two go - in fact I'm not sure Rhys has actually done anything in these past two weeks. It will be very interesting to see what happens when he eventually becomes project manager.