Ok, so last weekend was the last thing to actually happen of note, really. I went to the University of Florida Recruiting Weekend!

This actually started on Thursday night, when there was an informal dinner at The Swamp, which is just around the corner from here. There were a few people from the UF administration, faculty and student population as well as some potential recruits. Not a big affair, but neat nonetheless. The food was on the department and it was just a get-to-know-us kind of thing, with a few conversations about the doctoral program they’re trying to convince us to join. After the dinner we went over to the Harn Museum for a bit of an impromptu tour, which was pretty interesting.

Friday morning started very early, with breakfast at the department then straight into the informational sessions. The group of recruits was about 11, I think… a handful were UF undergrads looking to stick around and the rest were out-of-towners. We had information about the department in general, the PhD program itself and various presentations by some of the faculty on the kinds of research that they were doing. There was also a brief tour around the labs they have and what kind of place we would be working in if we’re accepted into the program. After that we had individual meeting sessions where we went off and met with particular professors. I met up with Professors Peters and Fishwick, both of whom are involved to varying degrees in graphics or the use of graphics. They were both very interesting to talk to about their fields, what kinds of things the future holds, what kind of student they’re looking for and just research in general. After that there was a bit of a break in which I came home and did a bit of email catch-up, then it was off to a semi-formal dinner put on by the College of Engineering. This was for all of the departments in the college, each department having at least a table or two for those who were attending. Dinner was nice, there were some good and some bad speeches, dessert was good and overall the conversation around the table was more of the same from throughout the day and previous night – stuff about the PhD program, what we were interested in, what they were doing and of course just general chit-chat.

On that note, if I have to hear about how UF holds both the football and basketball national titles one more time (this became a running gag that everyone said it), I may start screaming at people. Or hitting them, I haven’t decided yet.

Anyway, after that I went home and tried to do a bit of work and email before crashing.

Next day was less about the CS department and more about UF. Saturday morning I head off to the Museum of Natural History for a look at their Butterfly Rainforest exhibit (which was kinda nifty, although the butterflies were pretty lethargic due to the weather we’ve been having) before jumping in a big car with the others and heading off on a bit of a tour of the UF campus. We stopped at various places, got out, had a look around, got back in the cars and moved on to the next place. After all the touring around, we made tracks to “downtown Gainesville” (almost but not quite indistinguishable from the rest of Gainesville) for lunch at Harry’s. Some pretty good food and more fun conversation about all kinds of things, really. Less PhD stuff and more talk about crap, really. It was good fun, although the UF basketball team lost to Vanderbilt while we were eating (ending their 17-game winning streak), which mildly depressed the UF contingent. That said, they would rather it happen to the team now, rather than later when they’re in the play-offs. After lunch one of the Professors, Pete, was kind enough to drop me home on his way back to his place.

After that I did some work and went back to doing the things I usually do at home.

In other news, I have booked a trip to Seattle for March 20-27, where I shall be visiting my friends up there, hopefully managing to catch up with everyone and grab some UW gear, which I neglected to obtain while I was actually attending UW. Go figure.

I sat down and watched Coming to America with Anastasia on Monday night, which was hilarious. I’d seen bits and pieces of the movie before, but never actually sat down and watched the whole thing. Good Eddie Murphy movie, I would thoroughly recommend it. In other media news, Anastasia and I have also been watching a new show on the SciFi channel, The Dresden Files. Only four episodes so far and I’m already enjoying it immensely. The characters are good and have a lot of potential to explore a lot of different storylines, so I’m very much looking forward to the next ones! Actually, here’s an amusing anecdote about that. We missed the first one’s live showing on TV, so I downloaded it the next day and set it up to run from the laptop through to the TV, right? (As I do.) Well, we watched the whole opening sequence done in black in white about his childhood and we both thought, “Wow, this is really classy starting off a new series like this in black and white, kudos!”… it was only when they switched out of the flashback and it was still in black and white that we realised that the cable running between the laptop and the TV was a little bit loose, which meant the colour information wasn’t going through properly and it just looked like it was in black and white. When we plugged it in more firmly, everything was in glorious technicolour again and we went back and checked – that’s right, it was all in colour to start with. We were both a little disappointed at this, as we felt it worked much better in black and white!

Anyway, what else… for the UF Spring Break, Anastasia and I are probably going to spend at least some of it down in Tampa (the UW Spring Break is the following week, when I’m going up to Seattle). This coming weekend is the Orchid Ball, an event for the Engineering Sorority that Anastasia is in. So finally after more than three years of almost attending formals and not quite being in town for balls, Anastasia and I finally get to dandy ourselves up and attend a dressy event. More news on that after the weekend.

Oh, and we also (finally) got some bedroom furniture. We talked the guy down about $400 off the price, which made us very happy and we’ll be getting it delivered next week, probably on Monday.