Everyone says CPdubs is a blast if you're a prefrosh, but does the fun wilt when one becomes a student at MIT?
Thursday:
Since we're students and the rigorous MIT calendar does not allow for ``holidays,'' I dutifully went to my classes, 6.046 (Algorithms), 6.004 (Computational Structures), and 15.053 (Optimization Methods). At the end of 15.053, I talked with Professor Orlin for a bit regarding these ``hard problems'' he mentioned in class. We got into a little bit of complexity theory talk, which was pretty cool. I might end up taking some TCS classes after all…
After class, I scootered around a bit and ran into two BCA prefrosh. This makes three as I had run into one during lunch. Then I chilled at the MITERS booth in Lobby 10 to help show off EE talent (and be obnoxious, of course). Since there was only an hour left before we had to clean up, I did not bring my case mod and hacked displays. Instead, we blasted (contemporary) dance-pop music (Friday included) using LOLriokart's 100W sound system. That sure got a lot of attention!
Friday was the big day. After 15.401 recitation (which only had 4 people show up), I went back to my room and slowly disassembled my desktop setup to carry to Lobby 10. I managed to haul my Power Mac G4 Quad and my two Apple Studio Displays after half an hour of hard work and assistance. At the booth, I plugged everything in and fired up unholyballs (for lack of a demo) and then switched to xlock since it looked flashier. Too bad I didn't have a newer graphics card to do real time ray tracing. I wasn't quite expecting my casemod and displays to get much attention since MITERS really isn't the place for these types of projects (or is it?), but to my delight a good number of people asked me about my setup. I even had someone ask me about my overclock!
Meanwhile, we continued blasting pop music from LOLriokart. Charles was not happy when we played Friday (for the $$n^{th}$$ time), but he approved of the cycling theme from Pokemon Red/Blue. I suggested to him to drive around LOLriokart while playing the song, which he did. He gave some prefrosh rides on LOLriokart and even taught one to ride SegFault! I still am deathly afraid of that thing, most likely because the person stands above the axle.
Later that evening was the MITERS build party. Quite a lot of prefrosh went and they got to see the facilities and us in our native habitat. They were all amazed by our Make-a-bot, a handmade 3D printer, printing a white naked woman (I say white not only to be factually correct, but also to emphasize the contrast with the black naked woman sitting atop the Make-a-bot). After a while, all the prefrosh left to attend other events. We then did the usual: drinking soda, winding hubmötters, and burning vegetables with Bayley's incomplete and probably defective SLR.
I went back to MITERS on Saturday to finish winding my hubmötter. I was surprised and happy to see a prefrosh building a circuit! He was working on a little thing that had a POT to change the frequency with which an LED blinked (controlled by a 555, of course). After getting distracted by many things, I finished winding my hubmötter! Time to buy magnets and finish my electric scooter =)
