Phew… that’s enough tech news. Well, okay, almost. This morning Apple upgraded their 1U rack-mount server and introduced a new hardware-RAID solution. If you don’t know what these things are, that’s fine. Just know that it’s good news. Apple also today announced the lineup for the Worldwide Developers Conference in May! WWDC is a pretty big, pretty important event. The 2002 event is actually how I ended up with a job in Florida. In my eyes, a significant item on this year’s agenda is the track on Enterprise IT. This is huge — it means Apple is seriously looking at expanding into the business market. And guess which market has the cash-money bling-bling?
Okay, okay, I’m done with the tech. Yesterday I played Ultimate up at New College. When I stepped out my the door at 4:30 to go play, the weather reminded me of Victoria — overcast, damp, about 9 degrees C and on the verge of drizzling. “Oh great,” I thought. “I hope we have enough people to play.”
And so I made the seven mile trip to New College, disc one of Slinky helping me get there. Arriving shortly after the Marco V & Benjamin remix of “Love Struck”, there were seven folks on the field: Maria, Chris, Danny, Mike, Andrew, Ben and Matt. Certainly a reduced number, but not unplayable. Shortly after I got my cleats on, Maria left and David arrived, so we had enough people to play four-on-four.
We scrimmaged; no-one kept track of the score officially, though I think the team I was on was losing pretty badly. 🙂 That is, until we decided to totally screw up the other team’s expectations and played this wild defense where only one person was covering the disc and the other three were positioned close to our endzone, covering nobody. Pretty crazy huh? But it worked! I was that one person covering the disc, and I blocked a pass and took off down the field to the other endzone to receive a gigantic huck. They never saw it coming. And that marked the shift in momentum — I think we were winning after that. After we were totally exhausted, we decided to keep track of the score and played a game to two, which my team promptly won. Then we played another game, this time to one — which we won as well. Ultimate has a big psychological element to it.
After the game I went for dinner with Matt and Danny at the Tropical Thai Restaurant. Apparently Danny and Matt are pretty well known at this restaurant, so we got extra big glasses of water and I got an extra big coke, without saying a word. It’s who you know, I tell ya. I ordered their Massaman chicken curry, hot. Danny got a vegan dish, mild on the spice. “Ha ha, weak American palette,” I snickered.
Mike and Danny are the “field captains” for the New College team. Over dinner Danny explained this meant his and Mike’s job was to ensure there were never lines of entirely new or entirely experienced players on the field, and that the team was booked for enough tournaments, etc. Danny and Mike’s goals for the team this semester was a team of players without egos. But it’s difficult. There are some extremely athletic players on the team who only come out to play in the tournaments, and skip practices altogether. But without enough people at practice, it’s very difficult to teach team skills in the game, like the stack, or zone defense. Just ask anyone on my former team Tron, they can tell you about the struggle. Once there’s enough people, the team can benefit as a whole. I suggested that they could take attendance at practice to help deal with this problem. The problem there is that this rule is easy to suggest but hard to enforce, especially when you’re in the finals and down a couple points.
I guess at Tropical Thai they’re keeping it real, because when I got my curry, it was HOT. Like, my entire face was sweating a quarter-way-through it hot. I got it boxed after struggling to reach halfway. I never knew my nose could drip so fast! Meanwhile, Danny had already plowed through his entire plate. Medium-hot for me next time. Heh.
Matt asked Danny about how “retroactive negotiations” worked, and I found out that New College has a very different way of evaluating students. At the beginning of each year, you sit down with an academic advisor and a few profs, and you come up with a “contract”. You work out an agreement — the contract — which says how many courses you’re going to do well in that semester. The idea is that by satisfying the contract, as a student you gain the freedom to take other, not-necessarily-related-to-your-degree-but-you’re-interested-in-them courses, and if you don’t do well in them, that’s fine — they won’t affect your GPA, ‘cuz they were never part of your contract. Kind of neat, actually.
But back to retroactive negotiations. Grading at New College is basically done as follows — you can either get various forms of SAT (Satisfactory), UNSAT (Unsatisfactory) or INC (Incomplete). If you don’t satisfy your contract, it’s possible to retroactively negotiate it so that it is satisfied. But as Danny explained to Matt, this ability is usually only extended to students who have shown a past history of doing well.
So that’s pretty neat. I’m pretty happy — last night was new ground for me. I crossed that Ultimate-only relationship that I’ve been finding so tough to break with most of the people I play with. Hooray!
So today we had a new employee start in the software department, hooray! Since I’m feeling paranoid tonight, I’ll simply refer to him as the new guy for now. Seems likes a very bright guy. He’s going to be doing software quality analysis/assurance for us — thank god. We can use all the help we can get. He’s already found one issue that will be entered as a bug — fantastic! Having the new guy on board means that we’ll have more time to spend working on actually fixing those niggling little issues that have been haunting us for the past six months. 😀
Oh man, I knew things were going too smoothly today: I forgot to get my accountant those 2001 entry and exit dates to/from the US. Crud. I guess I’ve got tomorrow then; the next time he’s at work is Wednesday evening.
Found this picture while I was digging through some of my photos. This is actually a photo of a photo. 😀 Left to Right: Erin, me, Zameer, someone (sorry!) and Braeden? Is that you? Heh. Anyway. I think it was September 2001, and we’re sitting on the asphalt behind what was once Cosmic Reality Lasertag, taking a break from “Birthday”. Davin spun at that party, and Brad was there too — it was uberfun.
