Greg’s Journal Archives
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Saturday, March 12, 2005
10:40 a.m.

We survived! Somehow my midterms are over, my assignments are turned in, and the spring break trip was had without actual physical fatality. That may not seem like the news of the century right now, but it would have been nice to know on Thursday. Thursday in French class, before Mme. Lathers came in, it was discovered that none of the five of us students had started writing the midterm essays (due the next day at 5 p.m.) yet. This led to mutual agreement that the assignment was too long and to Bethany and Candice coming over to my room at 9:00 to work on it and share reference books. Candice left a bit after midnight, but Bethany and I slogged it out until 3 a.m., at which point she was 60 percent done with the paper and I was hovering around the 50 range. ASL was cancelled Friday, but I got up early anyway for more paper work, went to networks and crypto, and then sunk the rest of the afternoon into writing the last essay and making it look reasonably complete. The whole package (eight pages of French) was handed in at 4:53 p.m. Then began preparations for the trip to Washington D.C., which I don't think I've even mentioned in here yet. Packing, eating Jessica's leftover Chinese for dinner, calling home, putting things in the car, getting maps and directions, etc. took until about 7:30, when Jeremy, Vicki, and I crammed everything into my car and drove to Vicki's house. We spent the night there and left for D.C. at 9:00 the next morning. We were there around 3:00, having maintained an average speed of between 5 and 15 mph above the posted speed limit on all freeways — 15 over being the minimum required to keep up with the flow of traffic in Maryland and Virginia. Kathi met us at the hotel in Arlington a bit after 4:00, and then we all jumped on the train and went into the city. From there, a brief synopsis: Saturday 3/5 — Walking around: the reflecting pool, Lincoln Memorial, Korean War Memorial, and World War II Memorial. Sunday 3/6 — National Gallery of Art, and Vicki and I went to the rotunda at the National Archives. Monday 3/7 — National Aquarium (a disappointment), rotunda and reference room of the National Archives, a walk by the Capitol, ice cream and used bookstore near the Eastern Market. Tuesday 3/8 — The reference room at the National Archives (just me), meeting with Rep. Kucinich's aide. Wednesday 3/9 — Air and Space Museum. Vicki and I drove back to her house. Thursday 3/10 — Home. I came back up to campus yesterday (Friday) night in order to get started on work right away. The assignments and other responsibilities are already piling up; more on this later if I get a chance.

Saturday, March 12, 2005
11:19 p.m.

There wasn't a whole lot of substance in that last post, so by executive order we'll have another one for the day. I had a few things in mind earlier that I was going to write about — the Carnegie Mellon open house e-mail story and my annoyance with professors who e-mail out assignments during spring break — but I think I'll pass them up in favor of something a bit different. Vicki came up tonight, and she and Brian and I watched "The Terminal" here in the suite. Afterwards, we read through our 23-page "quote page," and then Brian and I read my professor quotes site as well. This led to general reminiscing about freshman year and classes and professors we shared in the past. As we were going though all of this reading and laughing, I realized that there was one person who was always a part of our exploits back then that I hardly ever see any more, and that this is quite sad. We used to do lots of homework together, hang out on weekends, etc.; at one time, for a few weeks during freshman year, we could just look at each other and spontaneously think the same thing and burst out laughing. I really miss that. (Word of warning: I have a sense of impending mushiness; feel free to skip the rest of this entry if you can't stomach it.) I think the hard part about things of this nature (i.e. relationships) in general is that everything is subjective. I can imagine that a certain relation exists between me and someone else, but I have no clue if it actually exists or if I'm way off the mark. (This is something that applies to at least two people I can think of right now.) Acquaintences? Friends? People who, a long time ago, took a class together and laughed at the same jokes? The natural thing, I suppose, would be to ask and be told a definite answer, but this is an easy thing to write down and a hard thing to go out and do. It's probably why I've never had a girlfriend or anything. People have been confused by relationships before now, and they must have sorted it out and faced up to it somehow. So, theoretically, I could too — but, being a shy, geeky computer nerd with no experience, I'm writing a post about it instead that probably only a few people will read. The zero-tolerance iron-discipline bit inside of me is expressing the rational opinion that it's not late enough at night for me to be writing two-bit diary stuff like this and that I should stop bleating for sympathy (or whatever this is) and go to bed. I can sometimes get into these wacky reflective moods where things get blown out of proportion and obsessed over until something else comes along and distracts me. In this case, though, the internal drill seargant is only going to be partially satisfied: I'll stop blabbering on, but I'm posting what I've got. We'll see what happens next.

Monday, March 14, 2005
12:24 a.m.

Another night of feeling weird. The day, of course, was perfectly fine and normal, but when it comes to 11:30 or 12:00 (or 12:30) at night, my brain won't cooperate with the idea of going to bed and instead starts constructing these fantastic chains of images or thoughts that keeps me up all night. It's a problem I've had since I was a kid: I've never been able to shut my mind down to the point where it will go to sleep easily, and every now and then I get these long nights of being awake in bed for hours. I remember one way how I used to combat this when I was little. We had this tape at home — I think it was "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" — that had a larger-than-usual amount of empty tape at the beginning before the FBI warning and such would show up. During that time, which was about 80 or 90 ticks of the little counter on our VCR, the screen would just be black. So, in a misguided effort to blank out my mind at night, I would imagine a little scene that started with me putting the tape into the VCR. Then I'd go sit on the couch, and the "camera" or POV of this scene would move in on the TV until you couldn't see anything except the black screen. I'd hoped that this would work long enough for me to fall asleep. Nothing of the sort. My little scene would end with my sister (also watching the tape, apparently) saying something about how long the video was taking, the FBI warning showing up right away, or the scene dissolving into something else completely unrelated. Since I've been at college, I've taken to combatting these sleepless episodes by getting up, turning on the light, and either reading or poking around on my computer a bit. This has lead to some interesting late-night IM conversations starting with friends asking "Aren't you usually asleep by now?" and then (in at least one occasion) addressing some fundamental question of life like what I was pondering in my previous post. Either that or I'll start typing out Chapter One of a great work of fiction that I'm going to eventually complete, but these never get any farther than their first-night Chapter Ones. Then they litter my hard drive forever with names like Book3.doc. Earlier tonight I started reading "The Inimitable Jeeves" from a P.G. Wodehouse book that Mark lent me, during which time I finally realized that the Bertie Wooster referred to in Dorothy Sayers' "Murder Must Advertise" is actually a main character in Wodehouse's "Jeeves" series. That makes the Sayers reference a bit clearer, but not too much since the reference was a comparison involving that character's physical appearance, which so far has not been documented at all chez Wodehouse except for the fact that he has bad taste in cummerbunds. Perhaps some more reading is in order....

Tuesday, March 15, 2005
9:21 p.m.

I know I'm not going to be able to get any work done until I've written this out, so here goes... Down With KSL: A Rant, of the Finest Quality, Against the Staggering Insult to Intelligent Computing Known as the KSL iBook So. I have a six-page term paper due in my sign language class Friday, so I went over to the library immediately after dinner tonight to start working on it. I checked out one of the iBooks (laptops) from the desk, went up to the third floor, pulled some useful books off the shelf, and sat down with my computer to start writing. An hour and a half later, I think I've got enough to save my work, take my books, and go home. "Saving" on a KSL iBook means e-mailing whatever you've got to yourself using the CWRU webmail. So I click on Internet Explorer. An IE window duly pops up, but remains obstinately blank. After awhile: "Connection error." Close IE. Try again. This time, type mail.cwru.edu into the address bar. Still blank. After awhile: "Cannot find server." Give up. Plan B: Use my USB jump drive and transfer the paper onto that. Take out USB jump drive, plug into computer. Nothing happens. The directory exploring capabilities are limited to pathless places called "Documents" and "My Applications" on the hard drive. Plan C: Connect to the CWRU VPN, access the library printers, and print out my paper. This means I'll have to retype it at home, which is rather annoying. Double click on VPN client. Click "Connect." After awhile: "The VPN subsystem is not in place." Plan D: Go to the library desk and see if there's any other way to get data off of their stupid computers. Result: there isn't. Best suggestion: copy the document out longhand. So I write out by hand everything I had typed upstairs, turn in the laptop, and leave, mentally promising at least one angry letter to someone in KSL and possibly one angry column in The Observer. What kind of brain disease would have to possess someone to make them take a perfectly beautiful new computer, with CD drive and USB ports and everything, worth $1400 and dumb it down to the point that it's only got one method (and not even a reliable one!) of having any interactions with the outside world? I want a computer, not a glorified sheet of notebook paper. You can't even check one out without a Case ID; would it be so bad to trust the students with a functional USB port or floppy drive? At least put in some kind of administrative back door, so that the thing could be mildly useful in case of an emergency. The way things turned out tonight, I would have been better off to pay 25 cents per 15 minutes to type my paper on the typewriter down in the library's basement. That's the essense of my rant. You could argue that the losses aren't too bad: some sanity, about 45 minutes worth of time (plus however long it takes to write this), and a sheet of notebook paper. But what if I had written the whole six pages? There's no way I would copy that all out by hand and then retype it — I think my first choice of action would have been to take the computer to a reliable hacker and let them break into the system and enable some functionality. Either that or keep the laptop checked out until the web browser started working again. I strongly recommend everyone who reads this to be extremely careful with the KSL iBooks in the future: on no account use them to produce anything important.

Thursday, March 17, 2005
12:48 a.m.

Quick update: Leaving tomorrow (well, today, actually) at 8:20 a.m. on a bus to Pittsburgh to attend the Language Technologies Institute open house at Carnegie Mellon. Will return late Friday night, as the bus is scheduled to arrive at the Cleveland Greyhound station at 11:30 p.m. Assuming I don't get mugged or shot before an RTA bus can haul me back to campus, I should be back here reporting for duty at a trivia club competition by around 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Missing class and all kinds of other important stuff going on here in the meantime, and the homework keeps on piling up. Not my idea of a good way to spend the end of a week.

Monday, March 21, 2005
3:44 p.m.

Quick report on the Carnegie Mellon trip: pretty good, except for the side effect of getting sick. There were no "interesting" people on the bus, unless you count the two ladies behind me who were speaking African French, and the short trip on the Pittsburgh equivalent of the RTA would have been beyond reproach if the driver hadn't been rude. The city itself, though a lot like Cleveland in industrial background and recent financial woes, seemed to have more things to do at night and more people around doing them. I missed most of Thursday's formal activities, but I arrived in time for lunch and meeting times with faculty members. (Although, since I didn't really know too much about what they did there, the meeting times weren't put to quite the good use they should have been.) And in time to pick up a whopping great bag of free stuff. I was in fact eating some of "the Burgh's Black & Gold popcorn" and doing some networks homework back at the hotel (before dinner) when I commenced feeling vaguely ill and remained so until dinnertime Saturday. That's what I get for eating anything from the Steelers — it must be proof that the mere mention of the name does physically turn the stomach of your average Clevelander. Friday was an unending succession of PowerPoint talks, all in the same room, but I found some time to go outside and wander around a bit. The Language Technologies Institute is tucked away in the ugliest part of campus between things like dumpsters and loading docks of other buildings, but the main part of the place is pretty nice looking. Someone, in honor of Pi Day, had written thousands and thousands of digits of pi in chalk all around the campus, and that made me feel pretty much at home. Dinner was at a Korean restaurant with my Korean contact person, his wife, and their baby girl. The food was pretty good and all, but I felt an idiot for being the only one not able to speak the "native" language. (This is why I could never go to a country where I didn't know the language: I'd feel too American and stupid.) The Greyhound duly deposited me back in Cleveland just before 11:30 Friday night, but since the after-effects of the Steelers popcorn hadn't yet worn off all I wanted to do was go home and sleep. I managed to get out of the trivia thing Saturday, but not after I'd gotten up and rolled down the hill to Rockefeller at 9:00 just in case. The rest of the weekend was a game of catch-up (that I'm still losing) mixed with the inability to do work for any longer than about 30 minutes and a series of threatening IMs and e-mails from my editor at the paper. One of the things on my to-do list was a six-page paper for my ASL class, which I finished off at 9:10 this morning. I'd forgotten to give the thing a title, so right before printing it off I threw together a really classic-looking cover page done in 12- and 14-point Georgia with the title "THE NON-UNIVERSALITY OF SIGN LANGUAGE: HISTORICAL AND STRUCTURAL REASONS" across the top of it. The "non-universality" part kind of got to me as a copy editor because it sounded too much like a made-up computer science word, along the lines of "packetization" or "latency" to mean "lateness." But the paper was due in 20 minutes, so I printed it and ran away to class. When I turned it in Shirley said she didn't know what any of that meant, so I had to promise her that the inside wasn't that scary. The game of catch-up continues. On tap for tonight: AI homework and studying for a French quiz that's tomorrow. Maybe some Nerds of Plexiglass if I can manage it.

Tuesday, March 22, 2005
7:40 p.m.

I have just completed my first real icon! Exquisitely hand-crafted from only the most primitive of ingredients (Microsoft Photo Editor), this logo comes in 100x100 pixel greyscale for maximum efficiency. Assembled using the best techniques in visual design (if it looks good, go with it) with authentic source material, it will surely be a hit whenever and wherever you use it. Download now! Sales talk aside, I have to say that I'm really happy with the way it turned out. I had tried messing around with it this morning, but I was having a hard time getting the layers to overlap properly. This afternoon I tried again at the Observer, where PhotoShop is available, but my complete inability to use the program (or maybe its complete inability to be intuitively used) send me away in disgust. I put this version together back here at home over the last hour or so. The background picture is an archive photograph from the Cleveland Public Library, and the word "Cleveland" and those black lines are from an old map of the U.S. that I found some time ago. Other good news today: got my AI homework done on schedule without any last-minute rushes. And it's mostly correct, too! We got our French papers back today also, and I somehow reached deep inside my inner self and extracted a 90%, which was immediately slapped onto my paper in red ink next to a smiley face wearing a beret. We're moving into the long-term homework part of the week now. The only thing (that I can remember, at least) that's due this week is some French stuff for Thursday, but there are some major things coming up — like another networks project and a draft of a crypto paper — for the week following that I really need to work on.

Random Stuff #6
Tuesday, March 22, 2005, 10:25 p.m.

Not Your Average Job Just when you thought you were falling behind the times, that your old-fashioned expertise was worth nothing in the modern world, something comes along that says: "Think again!" Innovative Systems Seeking Applicants for Full-time Position. Qualifications: BS or MS in computer or information sciences or equivalent. Prior work experience is a plus. Programming skills with C, C++, Java and/or COBOL required. This is probably the only listing in the entire universe for COBOL programmers in the year 2005, although it appears that there's actually a COBOL 2002 standard that includes object-oriented features and various modern conveniences. Wikipedia says: COBOL is a third-generation programming language. Its name is an acronym, for COmmon Business Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. [...] COBOL was initially created in 1959 by The Short Range Committee, one of three committees proposed at a meeting held at the Pentagon in May 1959, organized by Charles Phillips of the United States Department of Defense. [...] Many COBOL programs are still in use in major commercial enterprises, notably financial institutions. The expense of rewriting a very large code base, that has already been debugged, in a new language has not been thought worth any benefits that might ensue. Near the end of the twentieth century there was a flurry of activity for COBOL programmers fixing the year 2000 problem, sometimes in systems the same programmers had designed decades before. This problem was especially prevalent in COBOL code because dates are relevant in business applications, and most old business applications were written in COBOL. I would have to say that I've always considered it to be a dead language, at least to the point that there can be a dead language in a field that's been in existence for about 60 years max. I was perhaps going too much off of the opinion of Edsger Dijkstra, one of the supreme commanders of the CS realm, who said in 1975: "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."

Friday, March 25, 2005
1:26 p.m.

Coming up on another one of those crazy times when too many things are due. This round brings us the second programming project for networks (implementing reliable data transport on top of UDP, and then using our protocol to download files), networks homework, AI homework, the presentation of a song in my sign language class, and a rough draft of a paper for my (grad-level) crypto class. Networks is officially — in case I haven't mentioned this before — my least favorite class this semester, which implies that Prof. Wang is replacing Prof. Pod "Crazy Man" Gurski as the Number One Person Who Needs Some Sense Slapped Into Him at the present time. I started the network mess last night and quickly came to the conclusion that I don't like it when professors assign something long and pointless that has been implemented by other people 30 times more efficiently than I could ever hope to. Those kind of assignments make sense in intro classes like ENGR 131, where you're just learning the concepts of programming, but after a class or two you learn that one of the fundamental concepts of programming is code reuse. Mark and Jessica, it seems, are getting a similar feeling out of their computer graphics assignments, which as of last night were producing highly irregular, highly annoying, and somewhat amusing results instead of working properly. Other news this week: I edited my last real news section and copy-edited my last real Observer on Wednesday night. Next week is the April Fools edition and then the new staff starts to take over. Kind of a sad feeling since I've spent Wednesdays for the past seven semesters down in that office, but there's also a part of me that says it's about time to let the news department be someone else's problem. I feel like I've poured my guts into this paper for so many years, and it will be kind of nice to stop juggling classes and homework and other resposibilities around making sure there's enough copy each week. But I have no clue what I'll do with myself on the few Wednesdays I'll have off before the end of the year. It's been made quite clear to me by my mom that the idea of me spending all of Easter weekend up here working on my networks project is unthinkable — the idea almost brought her to tears when I mentioned it as a possibility. (Another reason why Prof. Wang is rising to the top of the annoyance pile.) So I'll probably do what I can on it this afternoon and during the day tomorrow and then drive home either late tomorrow or early Sunday. My sister, though, who I haven't seen since the beginning of January, is on a spring break trip to Florida and won't be home.

Sunday, March 27, 2005
7:42 p.m.

We need to have more days like yesterday. I got up around 10:00 and sunk about two and a half hours into my networks homework (making no progress) until Nicole rescued me just before 1:00 to go to Fribley. As we were finishing, Susannah, Mary, and a whole bunch of Alumni people came in and sat down. Nicole and I stayed and talked with them — we spent a long time discussing accents and the different ways people say things — and before we realized what time it was it was 3:00! There had been plans to run out to Heinen's and get some things to cook dinner with, but we hadn't heard anything of the other suitemates yet, and they hadn't been down to eat. We went back up to the suite, and almost immediately Jessica and Mark opened their doors simultaneously and we were able to make our plans. We eventually set the menu du jour as 10-bean 15-bean soup (50% more!) with ham, cornbread, and apple crisp. Jessica announced her intention of making deviled eggs later on as well. There was a bit of a delay before we were able to leave for the store: Jessica took a shower, Mark went into his room to practice Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, and Nicole and I sat out in the common room. It was during that time that I remarked that this is how a weekend should be. I should be sitting in a chair, with the promise of an excellent dinner coming soon, listening to a violin being played very well, and having a discussion about linguistics. The networks homework isn't a part of it. You may recall, of course, that networks homework was supposed to be the number-one priority of the day! We ended up leaving for the store after 4:00 and spending quite a long time looking over the gourmet cheeses, produce, oatmeal, breads, etc.; I think I've managed to convince Jessica, Mark, and Nicole of the superiority of Heinen's over competing chains, because we all bought much more than we were planning on getting. We got back at 6, and then started the cooking. Nicole brought her laptop down to the kitchen, which allowed us to watch "Blackadder" episodes while the beans were boiling. Dinner was served at almost 8:00, I'd guess, with a bit of good beer thoughtfully provided by Mark. A bit into the meal, right when I was facing the window making a French toast to Jessica, someone outside banged on the glass. It turned out to be Dan and Vicki. Jeremy's twin brother David was also up; those guys came in a bit later and brought some games. That lasted us until Saturday Night Live at 11:30, which was a rerun and not very funny, and then I read a bit and went to bed around 1:30. The combined effects of which was to keep me from going to Aunt Nancy's for Easter today. I set aside time to go to 11:00 mass and to call home and say I couldn't make it, and then spent the afternoon hacking away on my networks mess. I think minimum functionality by Tuesday night is going to be the goal here, so a C overall in that class would not be out of the question. I'm just not motivated at all to do any work for the class because the professor is so boring — and because he sent out a homework assignment while we were on spring break. I'm not the only one suffering this lack of initiative today: some of the Suitemates have also mentioned varying degrees of tiredness and inertia, espeically after how enjoyable yesterday was. So it's an ambivalent Easter this year, which I suppose is to be expected when you're dealing with college students. Definitely not as exciting as the time two years ago when I got a tick stuck in my hand and had to spend half the morning in the emergency room, but not as family-oriented either. At least no one here is trying to stick matches into my skin.

Monday, March 28, 2005
11:35 p.m.

It's now official that the combination of the excellence of Saturday, followed by the inertia and ugly weather of yesterday, followed by the piling up of things to do today has taken away any of the motivation I ever had to do my networks project. The class syllabus says that it's worth 10 percent of my grade, but it's been strongly hinted that those of us in EECS 325 (the undergrad version) will be able to get extra credit by doing the third programming project that's normally only for the EECS 425 (graduate) students. With a 50 percent or so on each of those, I should be able to hold my B in the course. I don't want to make myself go crazy this week, especially with only five weeks left at this crazy school, over something that probably won't matter too much anyway. I've also already gotten into four grad schools, so it's not like my performance is being heavily scrutinized either. Opposing this school of thought is my beginning-of-semester goal to get all A's this semester, or, barring that, at least no more than one B. The summa cum laude cutoff for our year is at 3.88, and getting only one B this semester should keep me just above that. Getting a C (or two B's), however, won't. And on top of that, what if everyone else in 325 decides to do the extra credit and this project? I may still end up with a B, but it wouldn't have any chance of being curved up to an A. I'm going to shut up about grades now because they're one of those annoying things I don't like talking about too much and because I realize it looks a bit... awkward... if I'm babbling on about not getting a 3.88 cumulative GPA when some people are fighting to stay above a 3 or 3.5. To those people I send the reminder that GPA and actual learning are not the same thing — if they were, I'd be floating around the high-C range. At any rate, tomorrow's going to feature the blocking-out of pages for the April Fool's Observer, some last-minute content-writing by the staff of a certain intrepid news department, a hodgepodge of homework, and hopefully the end of the will-I-finish-it-or-not networks debate.

Thursday, March 31, 2005
10:47 p.m.

Or not. Message from Prof. Wang Tuesday night: the project deadline is extended to Sunday at 11:59 p.m. So I still have it hanging out on my to-do list, even if I haven't touched it since Monday. This week's been a week of firsts and lasts. First time playing Boggle (Tuesday), first time this year with my bike out (yesterday), first time going running outside (today), last April Fools paper (yesterday), last week as official news editor (yesterday). You can probably guess from the above that the weather's been rather nice recently. Yesterday the high was supposed to be 68°, but it was also production night on the issue of the paper that generally takes the longest each year. I got to the office (or "the dungeon," as I was calling it) at 12:30 p.m., but Laura and Stefannie wanted to get some lunch around 2:30, so we walked over to the diner, got some food, and ate it outside behind Thwing. I also had gone to a quick meeting at 1:45 with Prof. Singer to see what grade Remington and I had gotten on our paper and presentation in number theory last semester. So I guess I got to enjoy the sun a bit. Now, a "normal" April Fools issue usually involves filling holes and writing content all night, getting the layout done around 4 a.m., and the editor in chief leaving the office around sunrise. During my first year on staff, I got my layout done around 2:30 or 3:00 and Tom left the office at 10 a.m. This year, a lot of us had gotten together on Tuesday to block out the pages and read over content so that Wednesday wouldn't be so bad. We also changed the format a lot so that we didn't need to generate as much content. So the layout was finished by 11:00. At night. And Laura was out of the office before 1 a.m. It was still near 70° when I got home, so Susannah and I went out for a walk around top of the hill, which was extremely enjoyable. Today I got up, looked out side, and immediately decided to go running down Fairmount. My goal was to go from Euclid Heights down Fairmount to Lee and back (3.8 miles), but by the time I got to Lee I felt like I was going to fall over and die in the tree lawn somewhere. I forced myself to keep going until I got back to Coventry (3 miles total), but that was a major stretch. I guess I'm not used to keeping pace myself if I'm not on a treadmill, because I know I can run farther than that! It looks like the running may actually turn out to be the hardest part of the triathon after all.... Jessica and Mark convinced me to go to the ACM talk at 6 p.m. tonight. It was supposed to be about the economics of hacking, which sounded kind of interesting, so I went along for the fun of it. Bad. Move. After 25 minutes of economic theory I felt my eyes trying to close on me, and after 70 minutes I made an escape to go to the Hudson Relay trials. (I ran four times around the track in Veale in 3:01.) Mark left a bit after I did, but Jessica managed to hang in there for the full 100 minutes of Death by PowerPoint and come out alive. She assures me that the ACM events aren't usually like this, but I have to say that the one today easily beat out sitting though an hour and 15 minutes of AI in an overheated classroom on a warm day as my worst experience of the day.