I Love Geeks!

I had a blast hanging out at the annual Protocol 42 lan party last night at the University Union building. I don't go to game, just to visit Nick (who is on staff), see friends and to experience this contemporary culture. I just love geeks, they're so adorable. And I truly appreciate this groups enthusiasm for what they do.

The guys on staff spend most of the day before setting up tables, servers, cables. There are a lot of cables. I couldn't even pretend to know what any of these are for, but I'm in absolute awe that this makes sense to these people.

But, they have it all worked out and gamers just need to bring their machines and plug in.

And they did.

I spent most of the evening just wandering around, taking photos, watching the gamers and listening to their exclamations of victory and lament. On the whole, it's a wonderfully assorted group of people and I get a real kick out of observing them. It's also a great opportunity to catch up with friends I don't get to see as often as I would like.

There was also a costume contest this year, which saw some really creative and fun entries. I think my favorite was Shake and Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Though I did really like the Sackboy costume from Little Big Planet which, incidentally, looks like I game I would actually want to play.













The University campus is a fun place to hang out at night. It was a beautiful evening and my friend Mindy and I had fun wandering the deserted courtyard.

We found random things like Nader campaign buttons and this weird sticker. Wonder what this is all about?

A thoroughly enjoyable time, as usual. See you next year, guys!!

Geekery

This photo was taken by Nick at last nights P42 lan party.

It's a.....well....you know....computery, uh, thing.

It's pretty and I like it.

Data Heads

Okay, smart kids! This one is for you!

True or False:
You can cut a cake into eight pieces with just three straight knife cuts.

Well, according to the people at 'Cranium', you can.

To cut eight pieces in three movements requires two vertical cuts that cross, then one horizontal cut.

This question came up a few weeks ago while playing 'Cranium WoW' with a couple of friends (boys against girls). The boys drew this question, and got it wrong (although they did end up kicking our asses in the end). This sparked a bit of a debate because try as we might, square cake or round cake, none of us could figure out how this was done. My husband even went so far as to spend some time Googling this conundrum a few days after the game was over. He found the same answer, but could find no visual example of how this was done. Could the folks at Cranium be wrong?

Chances are, no. The solution is probably staring us in the face, and is so incredibly simple that when someone smarter than us finally points it out we're gonna kick ourselves.

So how about it.....do you know how this can be done?

EDIT:

Less than 45 minutes after posting this, Nick found the answer! As predicted, it's pretty simple and we feel totally stupid. Seems the problem was that we were thinking in only two dimensions, rather than three. We were trying to draw it out rather than trying to apply it to a real-life cake, which isn't flat. Although in all fairness...nobody actually cuts a cake this way which is probably why this never occurred to us.

Anyway, problem solved! Thanks, Internet!