Seminar Stories

For the past two days I've been at a day day conferance requiring obsenely early wake up and wear and tear on my hands. We [my group] were "Critical Observers"...meaning that we got to go free cause we were gonna take notes and then write stuff up afterwards. There were a few other financially dulled college students there also posing as Critical Observers; all students participating in the SFS program however. So essentially it was a pain in the neck and were were the odd ones out with no doubts.

Everyone aside from us "Critical Observers" was over 30 with a very few exceptions and most of which must have been around 50 at least. Our days were about 8-5; waking up at 7ish and more like 6ish the first day. We got free food, however not really to my likeing. Just about everyone else loved it. Fancy food the second day and a fairly 'nice' bagged lunch w/ sandwhiches, salads and desserts the first day. I say nice cause that is the general consensus. I couldn't stand the sandwhich even though the meat inside was good...i am not sure what else they had in there. I couldn't even eat the fudge which had an array of contorted...objects...within it such as golden raisons, figs, and some other thing that had such a strong taste it overpowered all others. Today it was a steak dinner which i ate only a little of because i am picky about steak, potatoes had too much butter and, well, the cheesecake I ate...like cheese...which is very slowly and I didn't finish.

Enough about eating difficulties...I am sure you want to know about this newfound culture of old people. I noticed that nobody sat in the front seats when the speakers were talking...the front row was almost always empty. It was like a high school class; even in college people sit in the front row. Of course, I claim to have the right to avoid the front row since I was the youngest there and the lot of us were mistaken for high school students (more specifically 16yr olds). Not to mention we were the only people there who really had nothing to do with computer security... You might be able to forge Mechanical Engineering into it (John) but there is no hope for Biotech (me) so I tried to avoid that as much as possible. There was something similar to a job fair...something like maybe a marketing fair? In which I somehow managed to obtain really cool goodies and a pen that could put up nice competition with TI's.

Another interesting note; there happened to be a guy around who had sonic like hair...it was pretty cool but he wasn't in my 'track' (series of seminars) so I didn't get to analyze this although i wish i had a camera just to prove that sonic hair could be done. It was pretty amazing for some 30 yr old super geek.

It is amazing how common sense some of the stuff the speakers talked about was. No wonder nothing it getting done. I really think that a dictatorship would allow things to go so much faster...none of this week debate stuff on the color of ID cards...

Oh ya, John's comp also had a severely damaging virus preventing my access to the internet for more than exceptionally short periods of time until this hour [midnight...yes, i started this post earlier]. I am glad it's multi-day infection is over and I was welcomed back into the cyber society, barely.