Out of Beta, Releasing On Time

At last, another one of the moments for which we have all been waiting has arrived (I suppose I could just use the normal past tense here since it arrived on Friday, but where's the fun in that?). For those of you who have not shared our (or at least my, for I cannot fully speak for my teammates in this regard) eager anticipation of, or have even dreaded the coming of this day, I am speaking of the arrival of Beta Test Day. On this day, we took what our considered-to-be-complete device down to the practice room on the first floor of Engineering Hall for evaluation. However, after close examination by Rick and Sandy, it turned out that we were almost right. Our device had nearly no problems, with the exception of the wheels. In an irritating-but-somewhat-ironic continuation of the saga of the uneven motors, one wheel was still not pulling its weight. But this time it was not the fault of the motor. The wheel was turning properly, but found it difficult to convert its rotational momentum into forward momentum the device due to a lack of contact with the ground. After a few discussions with Rick, we pinpointed the source of this problems and were able to fix it, moving the wheels as far inward as possible and placing cardboard shims underneath the working motor so as to raise it to the same level as the nonfunctional wheel. We also were advised to change the course which our antenna followed from the receiver to the vertical tube holding it aloft, so as to avoid pinching and breaking that thin wire which is the only communication link between our device and the rest of the outside word (at least that part of the outside world which consists of our remote control). But all in all, I would consider it to be a successful Beta test (although as I have pointed out to a few people, if we are going with the software release cycle a better analogy might be the Release Candidate. This would be something which is supposed to have no errors and be ready for production, but which you are examining one more time to ensure error free operation - which appears to be the suggested state of a device at "beta test" But I digress into semantic discussions (and if I engaging in such a discussion about computer security products it would be a symantec discussion - hilarious I know) and nested parentheses) - we were able to move five sandbags into our endzone in one pass. We had a little difficulty gaining enough traction to push them, but between the improvements to the wheels and the additional grip associated with a floor not covered in millions of minute particles, we should not have such difficulties on competition day. We also have another part to our device which was not present at beta test, but upon which we have been working tirelessly (or should I say worked tirelessly, for we have basically completed said labor) over the weekend to create for the second time (version 1.0 was found unacceptable for reasons which I am not at liberty to discuss at the present moment). We will unveil this portion on Tuesday at 3:10 when we present our device to a panel of unbiased judges in competition for the prestigious award of "most ingenious device". We know not what will be our chances of victory in this or any of the four categories, but this is certain: they will be dramatically improved simply by virtue of our and failure to give up before the competition commences - which perhaps is not a failure at all.