Ah, design comp.  How many competitions can you think of that some people respond to by wearing suits while others … well … do not make the same effort to make a good impression.

The list of buggies entering design comp hasn’t been announced by Sweepstakes yet this year, but I hope that it will be long and that it will include all of the exciting new buggies and those we expect to challenge for the win this year.  I fear, however, that it will be similar to last year — a competition that less than half of the field chose to enter.

Of course, this topic has already been covered at length on this site so I won’t rehash the pro and con arguments, but feel free to review

• Op-Ed from last March
• Forum discussion #1 from last March
• Forum discussion #2 from this January

Both of those discussions were fairly constructive and I think it was useful to have all of those opinions aired publicly, but true to the alumni tradition it was mostly just talk with no steps towards doing anything.  It’s too late to do anything this year either, but for this week’s poll I want to know which design comp fix is the most popular among the cmubuggy.org crowd.

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We probably should have run this one about a month ago to be timely, but this topic came up in the forums, and I’m in no position to turn down a decent poll idea at this point.

The topic this week is “buggy vs. relationships” or “relationships via buggy” depending on your perspective.  Out in the real world, if you say you’re regularly hanging out with someone before the sun rises, it would be fair to assume you’ve got something cooking.   At CMU, it’s probably safer to assume that your extracurricular activity of choice is buggy.  Whether it’s the hours you spent with people at buggy, or the hours you gave up when other people were making their moves, it seems that buggy and romance do not operate independently.  How did it work out for you? (or how is it working out currently?)

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The kids are on spring break this week, and it’s been breaking 60 degrees here in Pittsburgh all of a sudden. With warm weather finally on the scene, we’re close to rolls, and with rolls, we’re close to new buggies. Back in my day as a head mechanic, building buggies was challenging, but finding a good name for them was next to impossible. It’s tough to sum up all those efforts and all those ambitions. It’s easy to end up with something that is so random that it doesn’t mean anything to anyone. Maybe even worse though are names that are so obvious that they’ve already been used. Are there some names that are good enough to use more than once?
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First, let me apologize for letting the regulars down on the Thursday poll this week, and thank you for letting me know that you noticed.  You’d be surprised how quickly Thursdays come around when it comes to dreaming up poll questions.  In exchange for your patience, I have generated a neat graph.

This one goes out to the pushers.  There’s no doubt you need all 5 to get this race done, but depending on who you ask, not all hills are created equal.  Which hill do you think really captures the spirit of our crazy sport?  Which hill is the key to victory?  Which hill can you screw up on enough to sink your whole team?  For which hill is it the hardest to find the perfect athlete?  Wrap all of those together and pick the hill that you think best represents the glory of a buggy race.

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