Retreat

The departmental retreat was today. It began way too early with a bus ride out to a beach somewhere west of here. We arrived and huddled indoors into nice room, where everyone promptly unpacked their laptops. Wireless was 10$ though, so no network for me. There were presentations, introducing the new grad students, talking about all the different CS groups, the ones whose profs were there and those without any present. Then the new faculty member gave a great presentation on some of his work, and we had managed to make it to noon without me falling asleep.

Lunch was good. I don't even remember what it was, except for one small bit: there was a pasta salad, it had some red peppers, salami slices and an excellent marinade. I wanted to go find the chef and ask how to make it. It was served again as a side for dinner, which was totally ok with me. After lunch we played a team game - computer science trivia! There were many categories of questions, including movie questions (where you could file the answers into a few categories: War Games, Hackers, The Matrix, Star Wars, etc), guess the number questions (How many colors did the Apple IIe have on its standard display?), and the best group, department trivia! The last one was the really big hit, as occasionally the responsible faculty member would be present and would recognize that it was about him, so when the group he was in answered the question, the rest of the groups who hadn't answered yet would quickly catch on. (I think the best of these was along the lines of "Which faculty member had a research paper published in Playboy in (some year I don't recall)?" That faculty member was present, and gave us the whole story after the question had been answered.)

After the trivia game, we headed outside. You may think that it's a shame that we went to the beach and didn't go outside until 3 pm. But really, it was completely overcast, smoke haze overhead, and pretty cold. Still worth going to the beach, but not the best of conditions. I grouped up with a bunch of other students and faculty who wanted to play volleyball, and spent all the time until the dinner doing so. Great fun, got to dive everywhere and generally look like I was expending a ton of effort (which I was) and being effective (not really), and so I had a lot of fun. Except now everything is sore, playing games on sand is really tough on some muscle groups that aren't normally used.