I started off today by sleeping in a bit – I stayed up until 3am the previous night, and I knew there was no way I was going to get in to Hacker School on time (10:30), so I set my alarm for 11am. Got in to Manhattan around noon. Worked with Erik, Alex, Ian, and Matt on the Risk AI programming for a few hours before getting a late lunch at Getting Hungry. Returned to Hacker School and continued working on the Risk AI server. We’re still working on the main game server, although we’re hoping to have that done by Monday evening.

I tried to take a nap in the late afternoon, but Erik and Ian were working on the Risk program a couple of feet from the beanbag upon which I was trying to sleep, and I had too many ideas not to join in the conversation. I ended up not napping at all, and helping them with the Risk stuff.

There was a quick round of presentations by people who hadn’t presented before – including a game of Breakout ported one file at a time from Java to Scala (which has Java Interop), and a Pac-Man game with a level editor and guns (featuring sounds from old FPS games!).

After the presentaions, we were all invited to a alumni meetup at a bar called Fat Cat, which is less a bar and more a giant game space, with about two dozen pool, chess, shuffleboard, and ping-pong tables, along with a live jazz band and lounge space.

Peter Norvig, Bella, Nick, Travis, Nabil, and I walked over together, right about the time that it started raining torrentially. We stopped in at a pizza place and grabbed a slice since we were all getting hungry, and also to get out of the rain.

Fat Cat is all-ages (or, at least, 18+), which meant that the under-21s in Hacker School could attend. We played games and games of Bughouse (a chess variant with four players and two boards), and plenty of actual chess – some other Hacker Schoolers managed to get a pool table, and mostly I stood around and chatted with various Hacker Schoolers and Alumni.

After a few hours, a bunch of us left Fat Cat and walked across the street to a pizza place, and had a slice on our way to Mary’s apartment on the lower east side. On the way there, I got into quite a conversation with Sonali about my ideas for a school, and “nerd” culture and labeling. I’m hoping to write a blog post about my school in the next few days (I want to talk to Peter Norvig about it, too!)

Mary lives on the 6th floor, which was even hotter than our 4th floor apartment. I had one beer and stood in the stairwell where it was a little bit cooler. She had hooked up a Raspberry Pi to the door buzzer so that you could text a number and it would let you in, which was neat. After about 45 minutes, I left with Javier, Richard, and Laura, to catch the F to the R, which dropped me off about a block from home.

I arrived at my apartment to find Ian and Levi playing StarCraft 2, so of course I joined them for an hour or so. The internet started lagging out a bit, so I quit out and surfed the internet until I was tired enough to go to bed.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty