1. We all went to the Dean's List Dinner, which is only for students who have achieved a 3.4 in the previous quarter, which I definitely did not manage to do, but by virtue of showing up and looking and behaving foreign, I was invited. It was fun - the food was free and good, and I tried calamari, even though I generally don't eat seafood. We, the computer science entourage, stood around in a pack and contemplated how difficult we most likely are to approach as a group. I keep imagining a well-meaning native approaching us, overhearing some snippet of conversation about hash tables, and turning to flee.
There was an interesting conversation regarding our status as a separate class of ACMT students, and the problem is that they don't understand that we're public, and as Brad pointed out, "You can access our methods!" Further discussion ended with a change in visibility, and Kyle proclaiming, "It's okay guys! We're protected!"
2. Today we went to Ston, which is pronounced like Stone, which confused me, because in my head stone = rock, which is a string, which is obviously immutable. Every time I try to readjust my understand of stone to a town, I get a core dump, and then I forget what I'm doing.
Anyway, the town has a lot of walls and salt flats. We spent the entire day there, which was too much time for me, but because it's Good Friday, the church had a special mass and then all along the main streets of the town were little piles of sawdust doused in petrol, which were set on fire as a procession descended from the church into the town at the end of mass. We had an interesting discussion about how that practice of lighting stuff on fire in the street would not fly anywhere in the US.
On this trip, I was finally forced to admit just how impractically I packed while trying desperately to pack practically. (I need to buy a coat, because it's colder than I expected, and it'll cost twice what it would at home.) I spent a lot of time huddling on part of the wall with Stacy, Ian, Chris, Axel, Mrs. Axel, and Brad while waiting for everything to go up in flames.
I exercised the creative part of my brain today by identifying cloud formations, and I saw a corpus callosum, a tetrahedron, and a human heart. Ian and Stacy saw dragons, and somehow this sparked a conversation about raptors and xkcd.
3. I've been hanging out with some pretty productive people. Aside from the excessive output of photos they produce, there is a new cooking show online, Cooking with Teo, which is sure to be just as a successful as the original Drawing with Teo. I have taken it upon myself to assist Teo in developing more recipes. He's working on a tagline, perhaps something along the line of "reinventing simple food." Suggestions?
I'm going to add links on the side menu thing to more photo galleries and blogs.
In further praise of the people I'm living with, there is laughter almost all the time, except for times like now, when we're all sitting still, with the whir of laptops filling the otherwise silent room.
4. As a personal goal, I've decided to lighten up just a little bit. Things like "coffee" here entail sitting for at least an hour whilst consuming lukewarm beverages and chain smoking have been very difficult for me, because I am slightly frenetic at the best of times, and spending an entire hour, yes, an hour in one place doing nothing but conversation has been somewhat stressful. Also, in the soon-to-be-mentioned rush of meeting new people, I'm afraid the impression I give is not what I'd like to be impressing. If I were meeting me for the first time, I'd probably think I was some sort of asocial, uninteresting weirdo, possibly due to my ridiculously dry sense of humor, inability to not relate everything to math (inclusive) or (see what I mean! I distinguish inclusive and exclusive or) programming and my overarching belief that the foreigners I meet are so much cooler than me that if I opened my mouth, they'd realize how little they wanted to talk to me. I've spotted several flaws in this pattern of my behavior, so I'm working on modifying my model of making friends.
Speaking of making friends, I have met so many people in bars and dinners and classes that the hash table in my mind that connects names to faces is broken, also due in part to the unusualness of these names, relative to my understanding and experience. Earlier this week, I was in ACMT and two girls on the stairs gave me a really warm hello and asked who I was, and I had NO IDEA who they were. I returned the warmth and enthusiasm, and then started worrying about how I was going to eventually have to ask them how I knew them.
As a final note, I sincerely apologize to the people who read this and aren't programmers. I promise a lot of it is funny.
