Boredom

Derek and I got into town, bought our books, unpacked, organized, and still had several days until anything was expected to actually happen. What to do...Derek's computer was acting weird, and mine had nothing on it. There was no Resnet, so that ruled out movies and network games and the like. We said to ourselves, "Jason has a TV in his room- let's go watch it. Unfortunately, Jason had deadbolted his bathroom door before leaving town.

It didn't take long for us to get past that, though. We designed a tool for opening it. Practiced a couple of times on our own door ("Move the hook left! Now pull!") Then, we went after Jason's. We nailed it on the second try. Hoo-ah.

Once we got in his room, we watched TV for a while. Then we got bored. Our next idea was to booby-trap his room so that the first person to walk in the door would get a big, essentially harmless surprise. Unless they had a heart condition, in which case they would die.

We promptly decided that a rubber lobster should swing down from the ceiling and fly into whoever opens the door. We went through several triggering mechanisms and more than a few counterweights, and finally settled on the tire/slip knot approach. <happyengineers.jpg>

The plan was not a complete success; Jason was hit by the lobster, but only after manually triggering the lobster release. We misjudged the pull of the door on the trigger; understandable, since we had put about three consecutive hours in on it, and were sick and tired of calibrating things. After one succesful run, we set things back up and snuck out through the window.