Ugh, today I was awake at 6.50am, then out of bed 5 minutes later. I do not like to be awake at such times. But I was. I got dressed semi-nicely (I left all my actually nice stuff in Florida because I didn’t think I’d need it), made sure I was mostly awake, then walked over to McKenzie (north end of campus with the Business School) to meet up with the rest of the people going to the SIFE Regional Competition. Turns out there were another five students, and two faculty members.

The competition was certainly interesting to see from an American perspective. A heck of a lot cheesier stuff from the teams that had been around a while, and the new teams were just under-prepared in most cases. From my experiences in New Zealand as well as from watching the presentations I made a bunch of notes on what makes for a good presentation and what to focus on and so on. It was interesting to note the technical aspects as well. One team even had ambient music playing softly throughout the presentation, blended with more punctuating music for some of the animated PowerPoint sequences. It was good to meet up with some of the SIFE people I had not met before and get a handle on where the UW SIFE team is headed and what we’ll be doing. Looks like I’ll be handling the technical side of things again, as well as providing a great deal of advice on how to go about things. Being involved in the promotional stuff, the fundraising and so on… I think all of those will be good experiences for me and I’ll certainly be able to hone my selling as I once again pimp out SIFE to all and sundry on campus. ^_~

Anyway, almost everyone left before lunch so they could get back for their 1.30 classes, but since my coming dashed my first couple of classes anyway, I could stay for lunch and discussion because my next class wasn’t until the afternoon. Lunch was a Caesar salad or something and some cake with fruit. Not bad. The discussion around the table was interesting-ish, and the lady I was sitting next to was a businesswoman starting up a new company with her husband. Sounded like interesting stuff. There were speakers as well which weren’t too bad, stressing the importance of teamwork (both working with and leading a team) and of networking with business people for future opportunities. Its events like this that make me realize I should get my act together and design (and print) some business cards! After that we came back and I got dropped off outside my apartment complex. I came in and did some minor email and administration stuff.

Since I got a little caught up in that, I didn’t leave myself quite enough time to get over the the EE building for today’s Colloquium and not be late. So, I decided that I’d try out the live webcast version that the CSE department provides on some of the lectures. Sure I miss out on the free nibbles and drink, but it’s certainly cool technology stuff, and I get to see the whole thing rather than miss the first 10 minutes of the topic. Today’s Colloquium was on Predicting 3D Protein Structure Computationally (as opposed to experimentally, which is time consuming and expensive), which was built up from an earlier Colloquium I went to last quarter.

An interesting thing about taking this approach was that it let me write some emails and part of my blog entry at the same time, while I listened to the Colloquium but didn’t necessarily watch the video feed at the same time. Pretty cool, but no free food…

Anyway, I stuck around at home and generally felt like my brain was fried for a while. I talked to Anastasia on the phone, did some more emails and read some stuff. Then we had a power out. No power, no internet, no phone, no nothin’. The whole of Steven’s Court was in darkness. When I went outside to check on some of the neighbouring buildings, I ran into Jon, one of my classmates from Graphics last quarter. He told me that he’d talked to the people working on it and apparently they needed to cut the power in order to fix something else (why they chose a little after dinner time to do so is beyond me) and that it would take 2-3 hours before it was fixed. Kyung said they had an outage over the break while I wasn’t here which lasted for 12 hours, so I guess I should be grateful it wasn’t one of those. It ended up actually lasting less than two hours, probably closer to one and a half. I did a little work on my LeithList template, a bug fix for work-work, and general admin shit. I had some issues with my phone not receiving text messages properly.

Despite the fact that I got up ridiculously early, I still had trouble getting to sleep. Go figure. I’ve got another early day tomorrow, although not quite as bad as today. We’ll see how these early morning requirements do at correcting my body clock.