Open Swartz » Personal http://www.openswartz.com Perl and open source development Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:01:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Geeky CMU memories http://www.openswartz.com/2009/06/22/54/ http://www.openswartz.com/2009/06/22/54/#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:00:18 +0000 Jonathan Swartz http://www.openswartz.com/?p=54 I’m at CMU (my alma mater) for YAPC. I haven’t been back here since just after graduating in ‘91. It’s a trip seeing it after nearly twenty years, with a mix of the completely familiar and unfamiliar.

I wandered around campus for a while this morning. Each place jogs random memories from my head.

  • Learning Unix through Andrew
  • Working on the Oz interactive fiction project, still THE most fun software job I’ve ever had (if anyone wants to pay me to write text adventure games today, I’m there)
  • Trying desperately (and failing) to understand Hidden Markov Models for a summer research job on Kai-Fu Lee’s Sphinx project
  • Watching the “Dragon Lady” whip through dozens of programming languages in as many days, feeling like Neo in the Matrix (”I know Prolog!”)
  • Working on a LISP machine
  • Getting pathetically addicted to Moria
  • Working as an esteemed Ccon (”Computer consultant”), helping users log in and sorting printouts for minimum wage
  • Eating pizza on the floor of Wean hall at 3:30 AM during many all-night homework hacking sessions

I feel old.

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