Whoosh! I'm coming off of four straight days (and four late nights) of KGB happenings, so I guess I should write up something about them, especially after what I wrote last time about linguistics midterms and other serious work.
This week actually illustrates the key points that everything will always happen at once. Last week, up until the weekend, was positively boring, but this week events starting stacking themselves up and fighting for space on my calendar. The original plan was to work on MEMT stuff Wednesday morning, do all the pre-requisite work for the IBM tutorial Wednesday afternoon, and then study for the G&L test Wednesday night. That orderly procession got derailed when someone posted to the KGB bulletin board that the group wanted to try to take the fence to advertise the Capture the Flag With Stuff game going on Friday night.
(Some background about the CMU fence for those who need it: it's a random fence in the middle of the Cut, with six vertical posts and two rows of horizontal cross-pieces, primarily known for being painted more times than can possibly be imagined. If a group wants to paint the fence, they have to take it first by finding it unoccupied. Then they can hold it by keeping at least two people on the gravel area surrounding the fence at all times — nights and weekends included. Painting can only be done by hand with brushes between midnight and, I believe, 6 a.m. And if the group leaves less than two people on the gravel at any time, someone else can take the fence and the cycle begins again.)
So when KGB did get the fence on Wednesday afternoon, there was no way I was going to miss a chance to be a part of one of the biggest and quirkiest CMU traditions. I did some studying that night at my apartment, but hopped on my bike around 11:45 to show up just when painting was set to begin. There were at least 10 or 15 KGB people already in attendance, but by being one of the more enthusiastic (or adamant) painters I managed to secure one of the five or so brushes and started slapping black paint all over the place. The base coat was done in around a half an hour, probably; then we all engaged in an activity that was about as fun as watching paint dry, because that's exactly what we were doing. Around 1:30 the estimate was that it would take another hour before we could start the lettering, so I decided to give up and go home in the interest of being able to make it to Newell-Simon alive at 8:30 the next morning for the IBM training.
Which I barely did. The IBM class and my regular class kept me occupied continuously until 5:30, at which point the part of my brain in charge of extracting meaning of sentences was starting to take intermittent vacations. So it was to home and to dinner, and then to studying for my midterm. Eventually, though, I felt that a change of scenery would be nice, so I packed up all my materials, went running at the UC, and then went over to the fence to study there. It worked, actually: I read over my notes for over two hours before getting interested in a discussion on programming languages that was being carried on next to me. When it was midnight, we broke out the black paint to get rid of some stuff from the night before, then spent almost two hours talking while the new coat dried. The fact that I'd brought my camping headlamp with me was a nice entrée into a better acquaintence with the CS major who'd previously been discussing programming languages: it turns out he's a backpacker as well. Then it was finally time for the lettering, and due either to a lack of interest, or a desire to laugh at the weird new kid, on the part of the other members, I was able to paint more than half of the replacement lettering. The three of us working completed the job around 3 a.m., with my own block capitals appearing on seven of the 10 horizontal crossbars, and a dashed fine sight it was in the end!
Sleep until 10:30, breakfast until 11:15, messing around on my computer until 1:30, and a bike ride to campus on a lovely afternoon got me to Newell-Simon nicely on time for the 2:00 midterm. It went very well, actually, despite the fact that the test packet ran to 41 pages and was subdivided into something like 80 different "tasks" requiring answers of some sort. I finished a few minutes before 6:00, which left me just enough time to eat dinner in the UC before heading to... Capture the Flag With Stuff!
This is one of the most bizarre games you will ever come across. The rules (seven pages printed) are here, and the total cast and crew probably numbered around 100, at least for the first game. Each team gets an entire six- or eight-floor building for their territory. Of course, the play is designed for maximal noise-making and insanity, which caused a number of professors and grad students still working in Wean or Doherty to give us strange looks, ask us if we were playing "that weird game," or request us to stop skipping through the halls outside their offices screaming "Yankee Doodle." Much more fun than I was expecting, actually, because I was able to avoid the more humiliating aspects of the game by playing defense most of the time. We ended around 1:30 a.m., after a lengthy rules presentation and three hour-long games, making my third late night in a row.
I've got some more stuff to say before the story of my weekend is complete, but since it's now past 2:00 again, I think I'll go along to bed and save the rest of it for sometime tomorrow.
