grabbing a bottle

It had to follow a path that we programmed and then grab a bottle. We are still working on ours, but one out of the three groups, only at the STRIKE of end of class, decided they should try theirs, one last time, after much debugging.
We waited...we all anticipated. And you can hear the result at the end!

hahah robots!

yayy

We're building robots!
This one is going to have a claw and be able to hold a bottle. We're going to have a bottle grabbing contest with other teams :) When it's done, I will post more pics. Still have to add claw, gear belt, power pack and board so that we can programme it. We're using C for programming. Yeahhh!
This class is AMAZEBALLS!!!!!!

Artists and the "worker bee" mentality

I've been reading a book a week, which is partially what inspired me to write this post. Also, I saw a friend of mine boasting that there were more "jobs" in a field and that they were hiring like crazy, citing contracts worth a lot of money to complete those "jobs". It's funny, because just a few years ago I would have felt similarly. My first thought, however, was "I'd like to be the person who not only negotiates the contract for the company, but the person who also hires the worker bee artists/ designers or manages them". In my mind today, it would be more worthwhile (and a better use of one's time) to be a direct link or entity between the person who HAS the money and the contract itself, rather than an end worker.
I feel that artists in general, though, are trained to think with a "worker bee" mentality. We want to believe that working harder for longer hours would mean benefit direct. Paint more, draw more, make more money. But is it really the best use of a person's time, if time is truly money? On top of that, a lack of financial success is often seen as "not being good enough", rather than perhaps a result of having a lack of talent but no business/finance skills. From reading I've been discovering that it is often the person who manages or the company that holds the contract for an artist or several artists (or artistes) who usually benefits the most.
The owner of the company doesn't physically have to be in one place at a given time; they can set the pace with a day to day or weekly meeting of six to ten teams and still benefit directly from six to ten different contracts. So who then, is getting the raw end of the deal? Do artists have to be perpetually satisfied with just the trickle down result of a business or contractual deal?
So what I'd like to propose is that instead of artists always hoping to land "that gig" or work for "X dream company", that they'd gain the necessary experience to eventually just do their own thing. I think that artists in general have horrible horrible financial and economic/business skills. Does the average artist know how to do basic accounting? Or even have anything set aside over time (or will they work until death)? It's part of what I wish more people in the Arts would speak about in general.
Perhaps it's intentional; people with no art background whatsoever can benefit off of those with talent. There has actually been a long history of that; no surprise there.
Carry on!