Yesterday was the last day of orientation. We had a t-shirt design contest, and our design of the “on-shirt-user-manual” called “understanding humans” came out last :P. I’ll take a picture of the shirt that won soon, but I think it sucked. I just don’t like it. After some Q&A we had a faculty house party at the wonderful house of two HCI professors just two blocks away from my place. They had some excellent cathering; too bad no one was really hungry.

Anyway, the party ended quite early, so we had to find something to do. We first went to a coffee shop, which is such a weird place in the US. Can you imagine; they actually drink coffee there?! After a cup of “apple grogge” (which basically is just hot liquid apple pie), some of us went to another house party, this one hosted by two PhD-students who just bought a house. It was still empty, so there was plenty of room for a party. I got a ride from Nina, who has the coolest snack-sized dog in the world (Chocolate). I mean, everyone wanted to cudle the poor animal. When KC (a guy from Korea) tried to touch it, I screamed out “don’t eat it! don’t eat it!” which is a bit discriminating, but rather funny too :P.

Today I went to the Giant Eagle supermarket with Gabriel to get some groceries. It’s cool that so many students own a car, I can get a ride whenever I want :)! After that, Mark and I went to Sree’s birthday party. Shree is the daughter of the owner of an Indian restaurant, and her parents organize a birthday party each year, with free food and drinks. We really got stuffed!

Tonight I think I’ll go to the “Jam on Walnut” festival, which is like a mini-festival down the street. I first have to get some rest… :D

I just love people from Computer Science. They can make a simple thing so difficult to do! For instance: for a certain reason, the CS department (HCI is part of it) has its own e-mail addresses. So I have two addresses: one at “andrew”, which is the standard CMU e-mail address, and one at “cs”. The first one is easy. They just give you a username and they temporarily set your social security number (or your student ID number) as your password. You can reset this password easily.

The CS account is different. It’s Kerberos encrypted. This means that you get a username and a random global Kerberos password. This is not your mail password. You first have to create your own password (which is called a “/mail Kerberos instance”). How? Well, you make a Kerberos encrypted telnet connection to Jeeves. Eh, right, I can use telnet. I’ll just use the standard Windows client or Putty. Nope. Those are not Kerberos encrypted. What program can I use? Oh, you can use NiftyTelnet. Where can I get this program? You can download it from the CS Monolith server. Where can I find the Monolith server? Well, you have to be in the CS Windows domain to contact that server. Ow. I’m not. Well, then let’s just Google NiftyTelnet. Okay, found it. Install. Damn. I need the “KClient Kerberos libraries” in order to use Kerberos encryption.

I get the feeling that the Computer Science people deliberately want to make things more difficult! Why send me a “Kerberos master-password” which I can only use to make other passwords? Why not send me my mail password directly? Or make a simple neat site where I can set or change that password? Those guys are computer scientists! They should know how to do that!

The link to the “KClient libraries” doesn’t work. I give up. There are better things to do. Victoria bought Word Magnets for her whiteboard. I made a sentence for her. It’s the title of this post.

My schedule actually allowed me to sleep late today. I had a very mellow day, nothing important or very interesting to do. Mark had asked me to go to the play Rent with him, but he had to call it of. So I coinced the idea to see it to some friends. There were quite a few of them that wanted to come, but we ended up with only three of us: Victoria, Gabriel and me. Well, I’m not complaining; Vic and Gabe are excellent company :D, I just hoped more of us would join.

If you go anywhere in the US where they serve alcohol (a bar, a club, but even restaurants), make sure you take your ID with you! We had to get back to the car to get mine :P. We ate in an excellent restaurant. It was a really hot place, all cool people, and limo’s pulling up in front. They served superb cocktails and I had a great shrimp quesadilla.

The play was great too. I mean, this wasn’t a “Joop van den Ende”-reproduction, this was the real Broadway production! Vic gave me an update on the plot, which is based on La Boh√®me (I could only tell because of parts of “La Vie en Rose” being played several times :P). Anyway, it’s about a bunch of friends trying to make a living in NYC. It’s about relationships, disease, death, and, of course, paying (last year’s) rent. Rent is a pop musical, and I think it’s a bit weird to have a band (not an orchestra) play complicated patterns and modulations and stuff. But it worked; it was intriguing and catchy at the same time.

I really have to go to sleep now, tomorrow I have to get up early, and we end our introduction week with a big party. If it even approximates last friday, it’s going to be a loooong night.