Social, Virtual, Academic
I've always wanted to play a house game of Apples to Apples. Because birthday parties are formulated around one's deepest wishes and longest-held desires, I got to play this game last Saturday.
It wasn't anyone's birthday in particular that day, but it lay nicely between tolchocky's and mine, so it was chosen as the day for festivites. Tradition was mostly ignored; there was no "Happy Birthday" and no cake. But we had massena, paul_stansifer, Katie, Emily, our Christine, cawthraven, Dina (who apparently has history with paul_stansifer and bananas), Colin, Seth, Gavin, Jake, and two acquaintances of Christine/Gavin.
Apples to Apples started as a way to pass the time before guests showed up. Index cards were cut into fourths; nouns ("check-out line at Shaw's", "othercriteria's abs", "the military-industrial complex", "risk aversion") and adjectives ("tubular", "soporific", "Irish") were scrawled and crudely illustrated. The nouns were exhausted by about four rounds into the game, so a crash program of just-in-time writing and recycling was instituted. And remarkably, the game continued through most of the night. It was not nearly as awkward as it could have been.
Meanwhile, in more virtual doings, I've written what's basically a "hello, world" for the Apache/web.py/MySQL stack. It's a todo list for myself with a read-only public interface and a read/write admin interface. It looks pretty primitive, with no chrome or bling beyond the favicon, but it was a lot of fun to piece together and should make me a bit less flaky.
Finally, I got my first grad school admit, to Brown's Division of Applied Math Ph.D. program, with fellowship support. Still waiting to hear from the other four schools I got applications in to.
It wasn't anyone's birthday in particular that day, but it lay nicely between tolchocky's and mine, so it was chosen as the day for festivites. Tradition was mostly ignored; there was no "Happy Birthday" and no cake. But we had massena, paul_stansifer, Katie, Emily, our Christine, cawthraven, Dina (who apparently has history with paul_stansifer and bananas), Colin, Seth, Gavin, Jake, and two acquaintances of Christine/Gavin.
Apples to Apples started as a way to pass the time before guests showed up. Index cards were cut into fourths; nouns ("check-out line at Shaw's", "othercriteria's abs", "the military-industrial complex", "risk aversion") and adjectives ("tubular", "soporific", "Irish") were scrawled and crudely illustrated. The nouns were exhausted by about four rounds into the game, so a crash program of just-in-time writing and recycling was instituted. And remarkably, the game continued through most of the night. It was not nearly as awkward as it could have been.
Meanwhile, in more virtual doings, I've written what's basically a "hello, world" for the Apache/web.py/MySQL stack. It's a todo list for myself with a read-only public interface and a read/write admin interface. It looks pretty primitive, with no chrome or bling beyond the favicon, but it was a lot of fun to piece together and should make me a bit less flaky.
Finally, I got my first grad school admit, to Brown's Division of Applied Math Ph.D. program, with fellowship support. Still waiting to hear from the other four schools I got applications in to.