Weekends

So, this past weekend was most interesting. We had the CS dep't end-of-year party, Bonzai, in Rekhi, as well as the semiannual event run by HARO, DDR Club, PFRC, and a bunch of others, Nanocon.

Some interesting highlights from the weekend's festivities:
BonzAI Brawl--write a game AI in eight hours to destroy the competition in a pirate-themed treasure-finding game.
LUG LAN Party--Enemy Territory on all the computers in one of the cushy CS labs.
Gran Turismo 4 Tourney--a mini-LAN set up in Fisher to race or crash a lot.
Rock Band Tourney
Anime Showings
DDR Dance-Off
PFRC Parallel Projection Project--four projectors and speaker set-ups running four B-movie/science lecture/anime/kung-fu films at once in one room.
Apple Detonation--what happens when you take an apple and short a 3uF, 17 200V capacitor across it? The apple detonates, that's what happens!
Tesla Coil Fun--turns out that the ozone generated by a tesla coil running for two or three minutes straight is enough to clear a room!
LN₂ Ice Cream--always a crowd favorite, custom-made ice cream with liquid nitrogen as coolant.
Magic: The Gathering Tourney

And, the top highlight, at least for me, was the unofficial, after-hours, PFRC expedition to the dumpster behind the M&M; to reclaim several hundred feet of stainless-steel tubing and fittings formerly used for nitrogen, as well as a few other interesting goodies...

You ask what the PFRC could do with that much small-diameter stainless-steel tubing? Well, I'll tell you--make liquid oxygen! Yes, or a number of other interesting things, such as triglycerol and nitrous oxide, just to name a few.

I also have found a most interesting and useful little utility online called Back|Track, which is used for a number of security-related things. It should prove a most valuable tool in my collection of software.

It is also altogether time enough for the semester to end. I mean, c'mon, dammit!