Probably a short post tonight because I got back to the room around midnight and just spent the last two and a half hours derping around on the internet.

Woke up this morning and went in to Hacker School. Ended up arriving pretty much right on time. I think leaving around 9:30 would be optimal, but tomorrow is my last day at this hotel so it’s kinda a moot point. I have to figure out how to get to Newark airport on Friday…

Worked on my Compsci assignment (Last problem set – ever!) until 1pm, then grabbed lunch with some other Hacker Schoolers (Jimmy, Joy, Nick, Martin, and some others) at a sandwich shop near the school. Ate at James J Walker Park, which is about two blocks from the School. Martin is from Sweden, and Jimmy and I talked with him for quite a while about Swedish politics and worldwide environmental issues.

Found some people on our internal chat app who were interested in starting a small D&D group for weekends. It would be nice to have something to do Sat/Sun. Otherwise I might end up going in to Hacker School 6 days a week out of boredom.

Returned to Hacker School and spent some time working on Budgeted. Got hungry around 5 and decided to do something different to distract me until 6:30. Joe had posted on our internal chat app that he wanted a Javascript/JQuery code review, so I went and found him at the other end of the space, and we sat for a while and went through his code. He had written a cool little JQuery flashcard app which used localstorage, and it was well programmed, with a few mistakes that weren’t particularly novice. We went back to my computer and I showed him around Budgeted for a bit. Nina joined us in a conversation about Hacker School and nerd culture.

I had coordinated with Nick and Alan earlier that day to go see Punderdome 3000, which is basically a pun-making competition. 16 contestants vie for audience cheers by performing 3 minutes of puns on 90 seconds off preparation time. It was very well done, and the father/daughter team that runs it was amazing. Beer was $7, though, but I guess that’s New York? I’m not going to go into super detail, since as far as I can tell they had a film crew there and it will probably show up on Youtube eventually.

The long line for Punderdome. We arrived 30 minutes early and still didn’t get seats.

Terrible picture of the Punderdome stage.

Returned to the Hotel on the A, and a guy got on and recited some of his own poetry. He was very confident and had a great speaking voice, but the other people on the train didn’t seem to react much. He called himself “Poet”. I thought it was a neat experience.

From New York City,

–Erty