I am not a CS grad student, but I play one on TV.
Hmm, better LJ-cut this one too. Another long day, another ton of crap to say...
Ok. Despite not getting to sleep until 4am, I got up at 10am or so and showered and got dressed and packed for the day and headed off to Phantom to meet up with![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mrpeck and tesposit at 11. We looked at some figurine stuff and some D&D stuff, and Mike bought a wizard figurine. Then we went to Lulu's for lunch. I made some random recommendations. The Pho was a good idea for Mike, but he didn't like the cilantro or whatever they put on it, so it was a lose. I had my usual, of course.
Afterwards we walked to Mike's. It's like a mile or so, maybe a bit more, actually. I noticed at that point that my legs were feeling kind of sore. Like I-Ran-Through-Wean-And-Doherty-At-Top-Speed sore. Hm. We got to Mike's. His dog isn't currently in town, so I didn't have quite as many precautions about hiding my bookbag somewhere. Of course, his cat is still in town, and the cat decided to try to eat all of my Hello Kitty plushies that are hanging off my bookbag. plplpl. So I had to hide those. Whee.
We waited around for a while. Gaming was supposed to start at 1pm, but nobody showed up until 1:30. Tim and I discussed stats for Grundar for a while and agreed on some, and Tal decided to use Tim's stats, because, hey, it's Tim's character and all. Food was obtained for some people from PDC, and then we started playing. Basically, we continued the battle from last time. We retreated out of the broken orc camp, to the fort we were breaking the siege on. We found that the wall had been broken, and that most of the people still in the fort had been killed (lots of corpses all over). Ugh... and just as we were getting ready to group up and rest and all, we see tons of those overlarge ogres and trolls coming towards the fort again. Except unlike last time, they aren't an illusion. So, basically, for about 4 hours of real life time, we sat there rolling dice and fighting these gigantic ogres and trolls. There were so many people involved that Tal eventually divided up the NPC's and let us control them. I controlled a group of clerics. Whee. Anyway, eventually we lucked out and after taking down a whole bunch of the ogres and the two trolls, the ogres decided to flee. So we regrouped and rested and levelled and all. If I knew this campaign was going to last more than another month or two I would have considered multiclassing into paladin or something, but instead I'm just going to level cleric. So, Pod's character had some spell cast on him that basically made it impossible for him to get any gain out of sleeping. Around the time we finished levelling and worrying about Pod's character, though, Eli called to tell me he'd be picking me up shortly. So I have no idea how that worked out and I hope to find out from someone. I don't actually know how or when the D&D session ended, to be honest.
So I changed into my white-with-lace shirt and black shiny pants and Eli got me and we went to Newell-Simon, where we met up with Mahim, Mukesh, Rajesh, jcl, Brian, and two asian women I never caught the names of (but I think they are 2nd-year CS PhD students). Then we went to the hotel that the CS grad student prospectives were staying at, and picked up the 5 that were in our group. One was a girl that I was originally told to drag to swing dancing, but she was like "Eh? I just mentioned that I would go swinging if dragged... also, I think I've decided to drive back home tonight." (She's going to school in eastern PA.) Another was a girl who, after talking to her for a bit at dinner, I realized that I'd read about her because she's like 17 years old and is some total genius or something. (She doesn't look 17. She looks about the same age as the other students who were there, but when it clicked in the back of my head that I'd read about her, I did a double-take.) Another was an indian girl from Stanford. She was pretty cool - she talked really quickly like I do and was very excited about the work she does. Then there was this one guy I barely talked to, but who was pretty nice, and this other guy who was from Romania and was... bizarre, to say the least. He kept asking questions about cars and beer and drinking and clubbing and all... but we were definitely the wrong group to ask about it. Anyway. So we headed to Station Square, and got on the clipper ship.
Now, I'd only been on a clipper ship once before, in the Fall of 1994, on like the fourth day of Orientation or whatever at CMU. I think that was actually the day I met Ryan and Norm and all - I rememberchanson introduced me to them... I can't remember if I already had met bn29 at that point or not. I definitely already knew fraterrisus since he was the first friend I made at CMU - he lived on my floor. And I remember hanging out with both Bens on that ship.
Anyway, that was a huge tangent. So, that clipper ship experience was all "wow, 600 people I should go talk to!" This time it was more like "Ack, 200 freaky people that I don't know who are dressed up and dancing to songs like YMCA, the Macarena, Electric Slide, Hot Hot Hot, and all of the other really silly songs you only hear at proms or Bar Mitzvahs." The 14 of us in the CS group sat at a table and had food, and I talked a lot to Mukesh and Eli and every now and then to other people nearby during dinner, but mostly I just ate and shut up. (Prospectives would be like "hi, who are you anyway?" I'd say something like "I was a CS undergrad at CMU... I'm here with Eli." "Oh. What do you do now?" "I'm unemployed. Until two months ago I was working at WhizBang Labs, but then I was laid off." "WhizBang laid people off? Wow, I didn't know they were having problems...") Eventually a bunch of us went outside to escape the really bad music. That was nice, except that it was REALLY COLD OUT, so after about 10-15 minutes I had to go back inside to warm up. So it was basically like "What time is it now... sigh... a 3 hour tour..." I'm sure a lot of people on that boat were having a really great time, but we were just sort of having a mediocre time. Actually, it really wasn't that bad. The view of the stars was really nice, and at times there were some really nice views of Pittsburgh. But, I didn't really talk extensively to the prospective students much except the Stanford girl and the Romanian guy (who mostly was trying to get me to go downstairs and dance with him). I did talk to Mukesh quite a bit and to Brian quite a bit, so that was cool. I like CS grad students, especially this year's first-year class. :)
Eh, so it was an interesting experience, anyway. There is certainly a lot of river around Pittsburgh, at least. And the CSC and stuff look really cool when they are lit up. After the boat docked again, we regrouped, and Eli and I dropped off the girl who was driving home tonight at the hotel so she could check out. Then Eli dropped me off at Wightman so I could go swing dancing.
I met up with Benoit and Dave there around 10:30. Sadly, they had not succeeded in dragging any of their prospective students there either. I was like "The one girl is driving home now, and the only other person who was remotely interested was this guy who wanted to go 'dancing somewhere with MTV music'." Benoit was like "Well, I had five students in my group, and four of them gave me looks like 'You can't seriously drag me dancing,' and one guy said 'FUCK no!'" Heh.
Well, so I actually danced the hour and a half I was there in sneakers. I mostly danced with Benoit and Dave because they are awesome people and tons of fun to dance with. I danced with Paul Harada a bit. He's... hmm, he's a pretty good dancer, but his style reminds me sort of how Haefele was when Haefele was in his prime of Wightman-hopping. At least Paul was nice enough to dance with me - I remember Haefele wouldn't even dance with me when he began thinking of himself as "the king of swing" or whatever. Ok, so I'm exaggerating. It's just frustrating when someone thinks they need to teach you to dance when you've been dancing for at least 2-3 years longer than they have. But, I did have fun dancing wiith him, don't get me wrong. I also danced with random other people. Every time it was basically me going "Eh, I'm bored" and asking someone random to dance. It mostly worked. I also made Dave dance Viennese Waltz with me, which was mean since he doesn't really know it. But we also danced two cha-chas in a row, and that was a lot of fun since we sort of half cha'ed, half swinged to them. I also led him swinging for one song towards the end. He later told Benoit that he thinks I'm a better leader than Benoit is. Heh. Anyway, I had a pretty good time. It would have kind of been a better evening in general if I'd had someone like Trey with me the whole time though, because damn, I could have really owned the dance floor on the clipper ship with the idiots who were there, and at Wightman it would have been nice to have a ballroom person to dance the ballroom dances with... oh well.
Benoit gave me and Dave rides home afterwards, which was very cool of him. We were spending most of the time in the car making jokes about D&D for some reason. Oh yeah. Because they were discussing climbing up the Cathedral of Learning, and Benoit was talking about wearing protective climbing stuff, which prevents you from going splat, and I was like "no, it just gives you a bonus for your saving throw so you take 10d6 damage instead of 20d6..." and since Dave and I had been chatting about D&D last night, he chimed in with some silly comment too, and off we went... anyway, it was amusing. Sigh.
It's funny, it really was a good day, although my legs hurt like hell now. I guess it also makes me a little sad to be becoming better friends with some random people - it's like, shouldn't I be trying not to make any new friends if I think I'll be leaving soon? But instead I'm just gathering up more hordes of people to miss when I leave? Blah!
Oh well, time for sleep and stuff now.
Ok. Despite not getting to sleep until 4am, I got up at 10am or so and showered and got dressed and packed for the day and headed off to Phantom to meet up with
mrpeck and tesposit at 11. We looked at some figurine stuff and some D&D stuff, and Mike bought a wizard figurine. Then we went to Lulu's for lunch. I made some random recommendations. The Pho was a good idea for Mike, but he didn't like the cilantro or whatever they put on it, so it was a lose. I had my usual, of course.Afterwards we walked to Mike's. It's like a mile or so, maybe a bit more, actually. I noticed at that point that my legs were feeling kind of sore. Like I-Ran-Through-Wean-And-Doherty-At-Top-Speed sore. Hm. We got to Mike's. His dog isn't currently in town, so I didn't have quite as many precautions about hiding my bookbag somewhere. Of course, his cat is still in town, and the cat decided to try to eat all of my Hello Kitty plushies that are hanging off my bookbag. plplpl. So I had to hide those. Whee.
We waited around for a while. Gaming was supposed to start at 1pm, but nobody showed up until 1:30. Tim and I discussed stats for Grundar for a while and agreed on some, and Tal decided to use Tim's stats, because, hey, it's Tim's character and all. Food was obtained for some people from PDC, and then we started playing. Basically, we continued the battle from last time. We retreated out of the broken orc camp, to the fort we were breaking the siege on. We found that the wall had been broken, and that most of the people still in the fort had been killed (lots of corpses all over). Ugh... and just as we were getting ready to group up and rest and all, we see tons of those overlarge ogres and trolls coming towards the fort again. Except unlike last time, they aren't an illusion. So, basically, for about 4 hours of real life time, we sat there rolling dice and fighting these gigantic ogres and trolls. There were so many people involved that Tal eventually divided up the NPC's and let us control them. I controlled a group of clerics. Whee. Anyway, eventually we lucked out and after taking down a whole bunch of the ogres and the two trolls, the ogres decided to flee. So we regrouped and rested and levelled and all. If I knew this campaign was going to last more than another month or two I would have considered multiclassing into paladin or something, but instead I'm just going to level cleric. So, Pod's character had some spell cast on him that basically made it impossible for him to get any gain out of sleeping. Around the time we finished levelling and worrying about Pod's character, though, Eli called to tell me he'd be picking me up shortly. So I have no idea how that worked out and I hope to find out from someone. I don't actually know how or when the D&D session ended, to be honest.
So I changed into my white-with-lace shirt and black shiny pants and Eli got me and we went to Newell-Simon, where we met up with Mahim, Mukesh, Rajesh, jcl, Brian, and two asian women I never caught the names of (but I think they are 2nd-year CS PhD students). Then we went to the hotel that the CS grad student prospectives were staying at, and picked up the 5 that were in our group. One was a girl that I was originally told to drag to swing dancing, but she was like "Eh? I just mentioned that I would go swinging if dragged... also, I think I've decided to drive back home tonight." (She's going to school in eastern PA.) Another was a girl who, after talking to her for a bit at dinner, I realized that I'd read about her because she's like 17 years old and is some total genius or something. (She doesn't look 17. She looks about the same age as the other students who were there, but when it clicked in the back of my head that I'd read about her, I did a double-take.) Another was an indian girl from Stanford. She was pretty cool - she talked really quickly like I do and was very excited about the work she does. Then there was this one guy I barely talked to, but who was pretty nice, and this other guy who was from Romania and was... bizarre, to say the least. He kept asking questions about cars and beer and drinking and clubbing and all... but we were definitely the wrong group to ask about it. Anyway. So we headed to Station Square, and got on the clipper ship.
Now, I'd only been on a clipper ship once before, in the Fall of 1994, on like the fourth day of Orientation or whatever at CMU. I think that was actually the day I met Ryan and Norm and all - I remember
chanson introduced me to them... I can't remember if I already had met bn29 at that point or not. I definitely already knew fraterrisus since he was the first friend I made at CMU - he lived on my floor. And I remember hanging out with both Bens on that ship.Anyway, that was a huge tangent. So, that clipper ship experience was all "wow, 600 people I should go talk to!" This time it was more like "Ack, 200 freaky people that I don't know who are dressed up and dancing to songs like YMCA, the Macarena, Electric Slide, Hot Hot Hot, and all of the other really silly songs you only hear at proms or Bar Mitzvahs." The 14 of us in the CS group sat at a table and had food, and I talked a lot to Mukesh and Eli and every now and then to other people nearby during dinner, but mostly I just ate and shut up. (Prospectives would be like "hi, who are you anyway?" I'd say something like "I was a CS undergrad at CMU... I'm here with Eli." "Oh. What do you do now?" "I'm unemployed. Until two months ago I was working at WhizBang Labs, but then I was laid off." "WhizBang laid people off? Wow, I didn't know they were having problems...") Eventually a bunch of us went outside to escape the really bad music. That was nice, except that it was REALLY COLD OUT, so after about 10-15 minutes I had to go back inside to warm up. So it was basically like "What time is it now... sigh... a 3 hour tour..." I'm sure a lot of people on that boat were having a really great time, but we were just sort of having a mediocre time. Actually, it really wasn't that bad. The view of the stars was really nice, and at times there were some really nice views of Pittsburgh. But, I didn't really talk extensively to the prospective students much except the Stanford girl and the Romanian guy (who mostly was trying to get me to go downstairs and dance with him). I did talk to Mukesh quite a bit and to Brian quite a bit, so that was cool. I like CS grad students, especially this year's first-year class. :)
Eh, so it was an interesting experience, anyway. There is certainly a lot of river around Pittsburgh, at least. And the CSC and stuff look really cool when they are lit up. After the boat docked again, we regrouped, and Eli and I dropped off the girl who was driving home tonight at the hotel so she could check out. Then Eli dropped me off at Wightman so I could go swing dancing.
I met up with Benoit and Dave there around 10:30. Sadly, they had not succeeded in dragging any of their prospective students there either. I was like "The one girl is driving home now, and the only other person who was remotely interested was this guy who wanted to go 'dancing somewhere with MTV music'." Benoit was like "Well, I had five students in my group, and four of them gave me looks like 'You can't seriously drag me dancing,' and one guy said 'FUCK no!'" Heh.
Well, so I actually danced the hour and a half I was there in sneakers. I mostly danced with Benoit and Dave because they are awesome people and tons of fun to dance with. I danced with Paul Harada a bit. He's... hmm, he's a pretty good dancer, but his style reminds me sort of how Haefele was when Haefele was in his prime of Wightman-hopping. At least Paul was nice enough to dance with me - I remember Haefele wouldn't even dance with me when he began thinking of himself as "the king of swing" or whatever. Ok, so I'm exaggerating. It's just frustrating when someone thinks they need to teach you to dance when you've been dancing for at least 2-3 years longer than they have. But, I did have fun dancing wiith him, don't get me wrong. I also danced with random other people. Every time it was basically me going "Eh, I'm bored" and asking someone random to dance. It mostly worked. I also made Dave dance Viennese Waltz with me, which was mean since he doesn't really know it. But we also danced two cha-chas in a row, and that was a lot of fun since we sort of half cha'ed, half swinged to them. I also led him swinging for one song towards the end. He later told Benoit that he thinks I'm a better leader than Benoit is. Heh. Anyway, I had a pretty good time. It would have kind of been a better evening in general if I'd had someone like Trey with me the whole time though, because damn, I could have really owned the dance floor on the clipper ship with the idiots who were there, and at Wightman it would have been nice to have a ballroom person to dance the ballroom dances with... oh well.
Benoit gave me and Dave rides home afterwards, which was very cool of him. We were spending most of the time in the car making jokes about D&D for some reason. Oh yeah. Because they were discussing climbing up the Cathedral of Learning, and Benoit was talking about wearing protective climbing stuff, which prevents you from going splat, and I was like "no, it just gives you a bonus for your saving throw so you take 10d6 damage instead of 20d6..." and since Dave and I had been chatting about D&D last night, he chimed in with some silly comment too, and off we went... anyway, it was amusing. Sigh.
It's funny, it really was a good day, although my legs hurt like hell now. I guess it also makes me a little sad to be becoming better friends with some random people - it's like, shouldn't I be trying not to make any new friends if I think I'll be leaving soon? But instead I'm just gathering up more hordes of people to miss when I leave? Blah!
Oh well, time for sleep and stuff now.
Dance dance dance
Re: Dance dance dance
Re: Dance dance dance