The cafeteria is the place to be

Yost displays his unique ice cream eating habits.

Jeff has some serious tableware stacking ability.

The cafeteria is clearly a place of great creativity, particulary when it involves making tall stacks of things. Engineers hard at work.

Not only that, but the cafeteria has become a great place of constant waffles, now that we got a brand new waffle iron. Waffles are my new official favorite dinner food.

I’m from the internet: R|P 2007

I didn’t really realize beforehand that I would actually be playing Mario Kart with Randall Munroe last weekend.

To backtrack — last weekend, ACM (the group that has taken over my life) held its annual Reflections|Projections conference. Taking over Siebel and DCL, the weekend involved tons of computer science related talks, presentations, a job fair, workshops, competitions, plus more free food than I could even hope to eat, and most importantly, Randall Munroe.

Two months ago when I was told that “the xkcd guy” was coming, I flipped out. (Still flipping).

The weekend, in chronological order:

Thursday at noon, the Yahoo Hack Day competition started. Ford, Boyce, Jessa (a CompE girl Ford knows from her dorm), and myself, decided to form a team. After Boyce and I attempted to finish puzzlecrack, another contest going on last week — though we never actually solved any past Monday… it was kind of consuming.

We stayed up all night, trailing between the basement of Siebel, my dorm, and Siebel again. By 9 am on Friday, Ford and Boyce had gone to class, and Jessa and I managed to debug things. But I was tired, had class to go to, a tour to give, and no chance to nap before that evening’s events (lots of caffeine). But conference had begun. I missed the job fair due to class/giving my tour, but I was around the office in the afternoon, went to the Hack Day presentations (some people came up with some interesting, and some pretty ridiculous stuff, among them name my job…)

And then suddenly, I’m at the front of 1404 in a group of people having a conversation with Randall Munroe about velociraptors. It was pretty unexpected. He gave an awesome talk, which you can watch here if you haven’t already.

It was a sizable crowd — there were enough people to pack the place and they had to actually keep people out — who just watched the talk on the giant screen(s) out in the hallway.

A couple of shots from the talk:

Randall Munroe explains the Ballmer Peak:

1337ness

Reduced gravity light-saber battles:

This is how the internet works:

Enlightened audience:

Onslaught of fans afterwards:

Computers getting signed:

And my laptop is pictured in my previous post, which is what was happening in the picture on the Wikipedia Article for Randall Munroe.

And a little celebratory animation + Jurassic Park theme music:

Saturday I went to a bunch of talks, recorded one, and after events were over for the night, Siebel transformed into a bit of guitar hero + mario kart (on gamecube), which only continued at the after-party for conference.

Sunday morning, I ended up recording like four hours of talks, sitting alone in the tech room, which was nice:

xkcd is so wildly popular, and yet at the same time such a specialized audience reads it, that pretty much anyone I mentioned this to who wasn’t directly involved with conference was like, “who? what?” Of course at this point I completely disregard them and just say “go read xkcd”.

On the flip side of that, everyone in the loop was pretty thrilled. The fact that he was hanging around the ACM office all weekend too, playing pinball, going to talks, etc. was kind of ridiculous. Imagine a celebrity sighting, except that after the initial freak-out stage, it just continues. For two days. And you play a bunch of games, walk around your campus, and go to parties with said celebrity. Kind of weird.

The fact that we, as a group, were so uniformly excited, hit me on Sunday morning while perusing facebook — when almost all of my friends’ facebook status is either directly or indirectly referencing Randall Munroe, you know you have some sort of phenomenon on your hands.

<3

My laptop has now been signed by Randall Munroe!!

He was amazing. More later. Sleep now. Goodnight.

Engineering builing in trouble!

Fire trucks on the way back from CS class — where was the fire?

let’s have bizarre celebrations!

Last night was Of Montreal… which was really excellent! I went with Nathan, Ariana, Drew, (and some of their friends were also there, but we didn’t see them)

There were two opening bands, so it was definitely about 11 before Of Montreal actually started playing… but worth the wait.

During the wait, I also got two phone calls from two different people about homework, and I actually managed to help both of them (I think)…

They were a little different from how they sound recorded, which is good I suppose, because their recorded sound doesn’t seem like it would make for as exciting of a concert as this was.

Tonight, however, was the Ryan Adams show, and though I was in the group bringing him here, I decided I was really not up for two concerts two nights in a row, so I decided to go with my meeting for engineering campus tours and chem homework instead. I think it was a good choice, and apparently no one cares whether you work a particular show or not. Either way, next up on the local concert scene is Bright Eyes in a couple of weekends — this fall is kind of amazing in terms of bands I like ending up in this town!