|
Do you have buggy news we should know about? Email news@cmubuggy.org!
|
||
on May 20th, 2010
Last night, a historic 2 hour conference call marked the peaceful transition of power from the founding committee of the Buggy Alumni Association to the 50% newly elected committee that will lead us forward into 2011.
We covered administrative details of course, but we wanted to take this moment to step back and appraise our progress towards advancing the five goals stated in our mission. The questions we asked ourselves were, “How have we done in our first two years?” and “What ideas do we have to keep things moving forward?”
Preserve and make accessible the history of the sport
Grade so far : B+
Efforts so far
- Created a database of buggy history, solicited data, and put it on the web
- Created an online gallery of pictures and solicited pictures from the university and alumni
- Helped to promote and facilitate the now-perennial History of Buggy presentations
Ideas for 2011
- Improve the integration between media and history [enable tagging of people / buggies]
- Create a data entry back-end so that new data can be quickly included and not sit in a queue
- Make it easier to contribute pictures and video
- Offer to help digitizing analog pictures and video
- Look into a physical space to archive buggy memorabilia Read the rest of this entry »
on May 20th, 2010
Both of these elections actually happened a few weeks ago, but they deserve to be officially announced and introduced.
The 2011 Sweepstakes Committee is
- Chairman – Chris Shellhamer (Jr., 2010 Assistant Chair, PiKA)
- Assistant Chairman – Janice Chen (Sr., Head Driver, AEPi)
- Safety Chair – Fritz Langford (Sr., Chairman, SigEp)
and the 2011 Buggy Alumni Association committee, decided by a hotly contested online election is
- Chairman – Janice Golenbock
- Assistant Chairman – Shafeeq Sinnamohideen
- Head Mechanic – Sam Swift
- Treasurer – Chris Stengel
Good luck to both teams next year!
on May 4th, 2010
If you’re reading cmubuggy.org and you’ll be on campus on wednesday, you shouldn’t miss the world premier of “1 year for 2 minutes,” a student filmed and produced documentary about buggy.
The film is the result of a year-long SURG-funded effort by David Kinskey-Lebeda and Erin Gantz that explores the addictive craziness that is buggy with interviews and buggy footage. The main players on screen are largely CIA folks, but the questions they ask and answer are definitely relevant to the entire buggy world. We, the BAA committee were even interviewed at length, and haven’t seen how that turned out yet. Should be interesting.
When and Where
PREMIERING
Wed, May 5th at 10am
UC McConomy Auditorium
EXTENDED Screening
Sat, May 8th at 8pm
Breed Hall (Margaret Morrison 103)
Facebook event
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=121978317814884
Trailer Read the rest of this entry »
on May 3rd, 2010
After collecting nominations and doing a little discussion of the nominees in the forum, it’s time to vote. Just to review, the two positions up for election this year are Chairman and Assistant Chairman. The other two positions, Head Mechanic (currently: me) and Treasurer (currently: Chris Stengel) will be elected next year. The idea is to maintain some continuity by staggering things.
We’ve only got one accepted nomination for Assistant Chair, so Shafeeq will be stepping right into that role. Janice and Carl have both bravely stepped up to lead us around the course next year, and they’d both do a great job I’m sure. It’s up to you to pick who gets the job!
Chairman
- Janice Golenbock: Fringe driver/head driver ‘98-’02, Sweepstakes Chair ‘03 & ‘04, Design Chair ‘03 & ‘04, Head Judge ‘05 (forum posts)
- Carl Nott: SDC pusher ‘95, Spirit mechanic ‘96-’98, Spirit MFIC ‘98, Head Judge ‘01 (forum posts)
Assistant Chairman
- Shafeeq Sinnamohideen: CIA mechanic/head mechanic ‘98-’00, Race Starter ‘10
Click through to vote or see results: Read the rest of this entry »
on April 28th, 2010
Seniors, sign up between now and graduation to get a year’s worth of members-only benefits for free! Congrats on graduating, and congrats on making it 4 years without seeing a single day of races rained out, and congrats on joining the exciting world of being a buggy alum.
We need to prepare you for something difficult now: you’ll have to make it through next year without buggy. It’s going to be tough. Take our word from it, we’ve been there. Let us help by offering you a year of Dues-Paying-Member benefits for free (a $10 value!). Those benefits include:
- Fall 2010 Report – get in depth details about the fall semester
- Spring 2011 Raceday Preview – get the comprehensive coverage of each and every team so that you’re in the loop when you come back to your first raceday as an alum
- Raceday 2011 Reception – mingle with other alumni after the races
- Raceday 2011 Wrap-up – a look back on everything that happened
All you have to do is sign up before graduation:
http://cmubuggy.org/seniors
on April 27th, 2010
Two exec committee positions are up for election, and we’re looking for candidates NOW. This is a call to action for serious volunteers who want to see the BAA through the next couple years of growth. The two positions open this spring are President and Vice President. (Treasurer and Secretary will be filled in the fall so that we have some transitional overlap.)
If you’re interested, please comment on this news post with the position you want and, if you like, a campaign spiel. You can also send email to admin@cmubuggy.org if you’re too modest to speak out here.
Elections will be via an online poll early next week!
Here are some example criteria:
* Someone who has been vocal on the forum with good ideas and creative input.
* Someone who likes what we do and wants to be more involved.
* Someone who has plenty of time in the Spring to work on BAA stuff.
* Nominees do NOT have to be Pittsburgh locals.
* You can nominate someone else if he/she agrees.
Here’s a slice of what we do:
Read the rest of this entry »
on April 15th, 2010
This post was written in advance and scheduled to get posted this morning automatically, because we don’t have time to be writing posts anymore … It’s RACEDAY!! Well, the purists would say raceday is tomorrow, but us BAA folks are at design comp passing out stickers and tshirts. Come on down and see us if you’re in town.
For the past 10 weeks, we’ve been polling the audience to see what the readers of cmubuggy.org think about the pressing issues of the day. 1,300+ votes later, we thank everyone for weighing in and arguing their case on some pretty entertaining topics.
So, what have we learned? Read the rest of this entry »
on April 14th, 2010
Classes are out (which implies people had been going recently), tents and trucks are accumulating around campus, and cmubuggy.org has just switched on a bunch of new features. It must be raceday!
Our front page has been updated with links to and descriptions of all of our raceday specific amenities, but I’ll recap some of the new exciting one here
- Ask the Broadcasters – Our team of buggy alumni, WRCT sportscasters, and cmuTV producers have been preparing for a long time now to deliver another high-quality broadcast. One thing they’ve wished for in the past was that viewers were able to “call in” with questions about the races as they’re going. Now you can. Just hit up the link above and throw out a conversation starter (it probably makes more sense to wait until the broadcast starts).
- cmubuggy.org mobile – Buggy has always been ahead of the times when it came to composites and rubber compounds, but lately buggy fans on the move have been wishing they could follow the races from their phones. Hit up cmubuggy.org/m from your web-enabled phone and you’ll get an assortment of raceday necessities in phone-friendly format. It’s a bit bare bones on the aesthetics at the moment, but that way it’ll work on more phones. Read the rest of this entry »
on April 13th, 2010
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone that participated in the second annual lead truck auction this year. Thank you x2000 to the anonymous buggy lover that matched the first $2000 in bids. The BAA committee was betting mid-day on Monday whether or not we would be able to reach our $2,000 goal, and only our confident treasurer, Chris Stengel put his money on making it all the way there. He cooked the books a bit by being an active bidder himself, but there’s nothing wrong with that. By lunch time, the total was around $1300, but the pace was quick from there on out, averaging about $100/hr. Hope everyone had fun and got the heats that they wanted. We’ll be contacting the winners shortly.
- Number of bids : 365
- Number of bidders : 38
- Total raised for the BAA and for buggy: $2,092 + $2000 in matching funds = $4,092!
- Most expensive heat : 1st pick for Men’s finals at $161 won by Abby
- Number of heats won by folks from each org Read the rest of this entry »
on April 12th, 2010
We sent out one of our favorite members-only perks last night around midnight: our Raceday Preview. This year’s 11-page publication covers each team in depth with pictures, stats, and narratives. If you haven’t followed along all year, we hope that it gets you up to speed for raceday. If you’re a regular cmubuggy.org junkie, we know your hunger to consume buggy material this time of year in insatiable, but that you’ll like this pdf especially.
If you’re not a member yet, follow the big “Join” button from this page:
http://cmubuggy.org/join/
It’s only $10, you get a whole list of members-only benefits, and you’re helping to support our efforts to make buggy better than ever. If you can keep the option, “Display my name in the list of attendees for this event” checked when paying your dues on the AH site, that lets us quickly confirm that you’re paid up. Send us an e-mail at admin@cmubuggy.org, and you’ll have your pdf in no time.
If you have already paid your dues but didn’t get the email overnight, send us an e-mail at admin@cmubuggy.org. We don’t always have the most up-to-date data from alumni house, or we may have just screwed up. We’ll remedy things quickly.
This is the one weekend per year that we don’t publish a rolls-report, so I apologize if you were checking eagerly this morning for that. You’ve got to chip in to get your fix this week. There are plenty of pictures from the weekend (here and here).
Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, compubookie’s annual post is available online here at thetartan.org