Rolls weren’t to be this weekend, but the BAA had a good homecoming weekend anyhow.

The weather report for Saturday morning was pretty bad – temps just above freezing, and a rain / snow mix forecast above 50%. It was also the last day of rolls before daylight savings was to end, so there was only 1 hour scheduled. Given how many days of rolls they’ve had, it was an easy call and sweepstakes called it off by 9:30pm Friday night. As it turned out the precipitation never really materialized, but what are you gonna do about that.

Sunday was supposed to be much better with two full hours of warmer drier weather. Somehow, all of the other factors conspired to cancel rolls anyhow. First, there were multiple cars left in critical spots around the course, one of which was booted making it tough (impossible?) to tow away. Second, none of the hired cops showed up to close the roads. It’s still unclear why that happened, but it’s not the first time. As if that wasn’t enough, some large portion of the hay bales somehow went missing. I don’t know how you could make off with more than a couple of hay bales, but apparently someone did. With all of that together, things were called off before the pushers and alumni woke up, but not early enough to save the mechanics from carrying everything out and then back to the garages.

Not all was lost from the weekend though, because we had the best table in the UC of all of the alumni-oriented operations. We borrowed Bachi (’99) from Fringe for the day to add some variety and give my Blackjack a break and Tom Wood brought out T-2 and White Lightning to accompany his History of Buggy presentation. From the table, we met quite a few alumni from the 60’s through last year, many of whom didn’t know about us but walked away as dues-paying-members. We also introduced the strange concept of buggy to some prospective student tours and the line of people waiting to get into Rocky Horror Picture Show in McConomy. To finish things off in pan-organization alumni fashion, former PiKA driver Melissa Lee got almost all the way into Bachi for a photo-op.

Thanks to Tom, Shafeeq, Carsen, and Aiton for helping man the table, and for everyone that stopped by and became members!

Hi everyone!

This weekend is Homecoming, and I hope if you’re in town, you’ll all be out at rolls this weekend!  Here’s the full list of other exciting things the BAA has planned.  Please join us for the fun or just stop by and say hello.  Leave a comment on this post if you’ll be around this weekend!

Note: don’t forget about daylight savings this weekend.  We get an extra hour of rolls on Sunday!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6

Freerolls
8:00-9:00 a.m.
Tech and Frew Streets

Buggy Alumni Association Welcome Table
11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m.
Wean Commons, University Center

The History of Buggy, presented by Tom Wood (E’74)
2:00-3:30 p.m.
Activities Room, University Center

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7

Daylight Savings Day!
Freerolls
7:00-9:00 a.m.
Tech and Frew Streets

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 Continue reading →

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

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:
Continue reading →

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 Continue reading →

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