Day 1: Today we arrived at the Adams Mark Hotel in Dallas, and now must sit in a booth and hand out info and lanyards and stuff to everyone that is from Texas.

The irony is that we had to show up in sllacks and a polo shirt, and when we got there to run the table, they gave us a t-shirt to wear.

Anyway, my competition entries that made it to nationals are SciVis and TechBowl.

SciVis is scientific visualization, which means anything from charts and graphs on posterboard to computer animations. I made a 3d animation about motion and related energy, with a billiards theme. The animation itself is great, but the presentation needs work, so I am going to practice. I did the animation and a couple of friends tagged along.

Now, TechBowl is my main thing. My SciVis got 4th in state due to my notebook being out of order, but in TechBowl our team got 1at in state. Which is awesome. The same couple of friends are on the team, and together we make a great team.

TechBowl is basically you answer questions about technology. The questions can range from what is a common name for IEEE 1394 (easy, firewire) to what is the support a bridge rests on land (abutments) to who invented the cotton gin (Eli Whitney) - only most of the questions are much, much harder.

Plus for nationals, they keep it secret what the questions are over, and what exactly they are doing. So basically there is no way to prepare for nationals - you just have to know it, which gives me a very good advantage, since I have practically memorized more than 200 pages of State-contest material, which covers a lot. about 5 questions a page means more than 1000 questions.

I'm using a friend's laptop with a firefox browser, and an ultra high resolution. My friend check out my Pixelword game, and lets just say that it was really small.