Return from Break

The end of Thanksgiving Break is always hectic. Everyone's behind on projects and nobody knows what's going on. I'm pretty caught up and happy to be away from home again.

The end of November: NaNoWriMo is over, and No Shave November is too.

Thanksgiving Break

I never thought this day would come, but I'm really looking forward to going home. I am sick of my dorm room and sick of class, and looking forward to seeing old friends home for the holidays.

It is a nice sunny day, possibly one of the last, and I'm going to go and get some coffee and do the sudoku in the sun. That is as meaningful as I can be while I should be in biology.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Green Hair and Zombies

I heard about this game the other day from one of my friends who played a campus-wide version at her college. It's called Humans vs Zombies. Everyone except one lucky player (Patient Zero) starts as a human, outfitted with balled-up socks and Nerf guns(to stun zombies). Every player gets a bandanna, and worn around the head or neck means that you're human, and anywhere else means that you are a zombie. Creativity is encouraged but it does have to be visible. Zombies must "eat" every 48 hours and the game ends if all the zombies are dead or all the humans are dead. Zombies can only die by starvation, though. Everyone remains in the game until it is over. The total zombie/human count and what's going on are tracked on the website, so cheating should be hard? It sounds like a lot of fun but if people want to play Spoon Assassins we can do that too.

More complete Rules: http://humansvszombies.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_%28game%29

Edit: I'm not allowed to post to the iFoundry email exploder. But there will be an email. Eventually.

Friday Night Update

How did people live before technology? I've been trying to find Derek for about 45 minutes now, since about 7:50. Apparently he managed to find ISR, get into the stairwell, find my room, and ask my roommate where I was, then get back out the building, without being seen by me or anyone who I asked to keep an eye out for him.

The source of this problem is that my phone is bricked. As a tracfone, it becomes worse than useless as soon as the minutes run out. It won't even accept incoming calls.

So the planned progress on the TIPS identity video isn't happening, and that's why. Moreover I realized how much I rely on my phone.

Monday Brainstorm Session

We had a productive brainstorming session earlier today. Jenny erased my laboriously drawn coconut drink, but replaced it with a viable project idea. Our IBM project, at least, is going to be about the availability of dining halls. The plan is to track the current occupancy automatically with infrared cameras, if I recall the specifics correctly.

The composting company I brought up is the Landscape Recycling Center. They don't accept food, however, so they may as well not exist for our purposes.

"Bothering the sustainability commission until they complete all their cool projects" is presumably not a good project idea.

iFoundry picnic and State Farm contact-September 17th

Today our SSE group (now named TIPS) met with our contact(s) at State Farm. The meeting went well enough, I think. We didn't have a lot to say, but all we're doing at this stage in the game is getting all our ducks in a row so that they can be informed of things(to mix metaphors with non-metaphors).

I'd like to draw up a customer service flowchart at some point. The trouble with such a flowchart is proper notation, because customers have different shapes, sizes, and contact methods. My inner CS major wants to centralize a large customer pool then track them by their contact methods and their needs. I'll sleep on it, it's possible I've been doing too much algorithm design for work recently.