25 December 2010

Visiting the Academies

As a good crvft (MIT speak for alumnus), I visited BCA this past Tuesday and Thursday =D Tuesday was for general lols and Thursday was for the Alum breakfast.

Since I don't live in Bergen County anymore, I had to take the NJ Transit bus to school, while everyone else could take the school bus or drive. This sucked because I paid $3 each way for a long and uncomfortable ride, while the same $3 could pay for a gallon of premium gas and the trivial wear and tear on a car. An easy 10-minute trip turned into a 40-minute bus ride + 0.8 mile hike along Hackensack Ave was not fun.

Unfortunately, when I stepped in the building, the deskworker recognized me, so I couldn't slip by without an ID tag. I then went to the former math team room and talked with Nevard, Abramson, Pinyan, and Ben Yang for an hour and also met the new interim math team coach, Jeff Worcjak. After an hour, I went to troll Mr. Sam and saw Alex Lam along the way. Mr. Sam insisted that our poor performance at MIT caused all the early applicants to get deferred/rejected. Then I had lunch at Boston Market, which is now really darn classy for a fast food restaurant.

The afternoon was when all the fun began. When we were done eating lunch, I realized that we were half an hour late for Data Structures, so we rushed there. We then barged in the class, to everyone's amusement, and then I settled down and beta-tested pongmegrenades (still vanilla pong at this point). Topics was right after Data Structures, but we had to leave not long after to prepare for the troll.

What is this troll, you ask? If you recall from last year, the section of AP Physics C that I was in gave Galitskiy hell. Nightmares. Migraines. So as the kind people we are, we decided to replicate that experience by sneaking into his class and taking our usual seats. So at 14:00, about eighteen crvft (people from my section, people not from my section, people who didn't take AP Physics C, and older alum) gathered in the second floor hallway to prepare to invade his class. Luckily for us, Galitskiy didn't have class this hour so we wouldn't disrupt anything important, but he was in his classroom prepping. When he left for lunch at around 14:15, we snuck in the classroom.

Galitskiy then returned and was shocked that he had a full class before class started. Treating the situation as a regular class, he rolled his n-die, which landed on 18, so Scott Lee (who never took AP Physics C) had to present. Luckily for Scott, Fahmid took the stage and started explaining us the dolphin, which we established last year that it could not do physics. A bit before 14:25, the real AP Physics class came in and was shocked that all the chairs had been occupied, so they just took the lab tables as Galitskiy shooed us out. Never have we heard him eagerly say "Guys, get out, it is two twenty-five and I have to teach a class!"

The last item in my agenda was computer team. It was great seeing familiar faces and new faces in the club :3 I decided to give a guest lecture about practical advice (totally not computer science related) as a gift. Unfortunately, setting up the presentation took a bit of work because Keynote complained that my DisplayLink USB to VGA adapter had "not enough VRAM". I tried rebooting the computer with the adapter attached (the internet indicated that this could work), but to my dismay, it didn't. During the reboot process, one of the csteamers asked, "How long will the reboot take?" and I said, "Oh, probably 5 seconds." He began to count out loud, and when he reached "THREE," the Mac OS X desktop loaded. Everyone was blown away.

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Thursday was the Alumni Breakfast, so I didn't expect to have much trolling time. Nothing much was going on before the breakfast, so I said hi to some teachers again and hung out with crvft and some seniors. During the breakfast I saw some crvft (Julia-san and George Hotz, in particular) I didn't get to see earlier during the day or on Tuesday. George still seemed the same pwnage person he always was (unfortunately I forgot to ask him about USACO). Apparently I'm the first MIT-er that he talked to at the breakfast, after asking approx 10 other people if they "were at MIT." I also talked to Eric Zhang (AAST '00 and MIT '04), one of the freshman biology teachers. He was surprised that I took 6.172 ("the new 6.170") as a frosh xD After about an hour of jabbering, I left to go home.

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