Fruits, Nuts and International Women’s Day Celebrations

Fruits

• I woke up early this morning and did some Haskell, because I knew my day was pretty booked. Got a few CodeWars problems solved. Still on easy for now.

• I was thinking about the talk from Friday, and what he had said about US students; how the same ones who goofed around and were sort of the smart alecs up to high school or even Undergrad end up doing remarkably well in Grad school and beyond. And that it’s more difficult for those who were “top of the class” at lower levels, because they were good at regurgitating, but at the higher levels, those ones who were considered smart alecs were the ones who challenged assumptions and produced some really fascinating work. That appeals to me even more, because I’ve been called a wise-arse quite a bit growing up. I did well in class, and was in the brightest (aka Science) class, but I wasn’t at the top (as in, top 5 or whatever). But the teachers really loved me because of the same thing; the smart alec in me. I was the one who “rocked the boat”. I was that person of great mischief. That’s part of why I think I fit in with the hacker and FP community; there is a sort of childish curiosity and mischief.

• Speaking of boats…I joined a racing group today :D

• Also..interesting story; I was having a meal nearby to Googs today, and there was a homeless encampment right outside. It’s more and more typical out here. So I got there early and stopped by a place for a cup of tea. The waitress came up to me and served me, and said “I just wanted to say I really appreciate what you guys are doing.” Uhhh….?
• Turns out, she thought I was with the people who were helping with the homeless people in the neighbourhood, because I happened to be wearing a similar colour t-shirt as they had and well, I was the only person who looked like me in the place. Then she said that she felt horrible, being there serving people at twenty dollars a plate, when homelessness was right outside and people seemed to not notice, and that it was like some third world country. Yikes.

So, the actual conf

• Pretty fun! I finally got to meet the lovely Natalie and everyone was quite wonderful! I got to meet her, and she had a curvy-story in terms of her life’s path. She was a History major (from a State school) and a go-go dancer even! I find myself attracted to those kinds of people a lot. I generally find people who just did the same thing from a young age to be kind of boring, really. I like the quirky people who sort of didn’t have it all figured out, but it somehow worked out in the end. Googs seems to have a lot of those types of people. It’s really cool. I find them easy to talk to, and more interesting. Plus, some of the truly brilliant ones have all sorts of things they’re passionate about. I love that.

• It’s like our weird and quirky Haskell group that had people interested in everything from Mahjong to Accounting Programmes to making a new Language to Ontology using Haskell. I attended some other Meetups and it was just people making apps and talking about a library. No thanks.

We got these lovely Swag boxes

• I still haven’t opened mine yet! :D

We got to add labels to our badges.

• I chose “Immigrant” and “Builder”. I think that those two are pretty much me :D Although man, I do love a good American pickle! :D

Lunch

We split into two groups.

• One was more Stand-up. The other was technical. Guess which one I picked? :D

This was neat!

• It was raining, so under our chairs, they had these umbrellas!

Look closer!

• When the rain falls, they change colour! :D

Edible ice cream paper

• We got to make our own ice-cream sandwich. I had no idea this company is female-owned!

We were drawn by robots

• I’ve seen this sort of thing before, but this was a bit different because it connected the lines (vs points / stipple- drawing). Strangely, I knew the guy who was operating the machine, too. We had been at the same Maker-space years ago when I was learning about computational architecture! Small world!

Say what?

• Yeah, I was into using nodal computation to do things like control robots and stuff, before I got into programming. I guess I just like anything creative and technical.

Faces

And this one :D

Wait..where are the nuts?

• Oh, they’re here too! On the way home, I decided to catch a bus, and we were all in a good mood, and the bus driver was waving at the bar cycle (apparently that’s a thing; groups of people cycling while drinking in a bar-shaped cycle). Later on, some guy started walking up and down on the bus and spat at the dude in front of him. The driver asked him to stop. Then the guy hits a lady one seat from there and walks over to the driver and socks him in the eye! So that delayed the trip by 20 minutes, because the Paramedics had to show up and give the driver a check-up and we had to wait for another bus. Thankfully we were all indoors, because it was raining.

Clocks move ahead

• Tomorrow clocks move one hour ahead, so I’m going to listen to EDM to unwind! Met a lot of great people. Tomorrow, hopefully I can write some FORTRAN :D