Nolan’s Notes

Wow, it’s been a whole month since my last posting! These last couple weeks have been filled with exams, final projects, and a ton of end-of-semester surprises to fill out my first year as a college student. I didn’t have opportunities for many pictures that I haven’t done before, but I am plenty involved with various activities around Carnegie Mellon’s campus. The first was a highly interactive event put on by the CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center, called Building Virtual Worlds. It was first started by Randy Pausch (who I’ve blogged about before), and I had a lot of fun attending it’s various showcases. The first was an exciting pre-show event called “Get In Line,” where arts and science students separate into groups and try and best each other in various activites using their cellphones! And of course, inside McConomy Auditorium, the ETC students showcased their game-oriented projects with an excited crowd awaiting. Search YouTube if you’re interested in watching them, they’re really cool!

Later in the week I played in the Kiltie Band final concert, which was cool too. Skipping the ECE picture, the map of names is showing the hierarchy of a test that the “Science of the Web” professor Luis Von Ahn proposed to his students. Their task? See how many people could enroll in a facebook group. If they reached 3,000 people by the end of the week, they would get an extra 10 points on their final! The black circle in the top left corner is where me and a few of my friends are. Thankfully, they reached 3,000 people by Friday, and we got a really cool map to boot.

The last picture is of a new game that I discovered that is called Blokus. The game is basically like Tetris, except that you have to play the pieces at direct corners to each other, making the game a lot of fun for everyone, especially the engineering and computer science students at CMU. For those of you back home, I guarantee you, you will be hooked!

Can’t wait to come home for Christmas Break! Now…just to get through Finals