Woke up this morning around 10:30, which is of course when I’m supposed to be at Hacker School. Emailed Nick to tell him that I was going to be late, and started heading into the city.

The R seems to be running express these days, so the trip was a lot shorter than usual. I think I’m starting to figure out where and when to switch trains, although I still can’t figure out which ones are express/local and when. The Q seems to get me in to town fast (across the bridge) so I’ve just started aiming for that one all the time, and the walk on this end isn’t terrible (about 12 blocks if I don’t get lost).

Spent pretty much all day at Hacker School working on the collision detection for Node Tag with Jade, who happens to also be working on a javascript multiplayer game and needs the same thing – a server side collision detection library. Mel (the current resident), Richard, and… Mike? (Can’t remember his name right now) all helped out while we were drafting the ideas on a whiteboard. It’s… complex, but under 100 lines of code so far. For the main library, at least.

We’re most of the way done with it, but there’s some final debugging to do. I’m planning on posting a technical article about it on here tomorrow.

I wasn’t feeling well at the end of the day, so I sat in a hallway, ate chipotle leftovers, and watched the final match of Dreamhack 2013! Tuned in right as it was starting – serendipitous. Also just spelled serendipitous right the first time, which is pretty much anti-ironic.

Took the 1 to the ebay offices with Richard, who is a New Yorker and knows his way around the city. I am seriously considering buying a compass so that I can know which way to turn when I leave a subway.

Mel’s talk was excellent – it covered programming and education, both of which I am very interested in. She tied theories of education into theories of programming (how is learning not like test-driven development and what does that mean?). Tomorrow she’s giving a talk on learning styles which I really want to attend.

Left after the main lecture because I still wasn’t feeling all up to snuff. Started feeling better on my walk home so I sat at a cafe and helped a Lawrence student access the Gaming Club Steam accounts. Walked home again, went out again and bought some beer, walked back home. Had one beer, watched some starcraft.

Decided to sign the apartment up for internet, since it’s well within what I budgeted for housing, and working off of my phone has started to get frustrating. It’s great for emergency internet but not the best for streaming video, playing SC2, etc. So, internet for the apartment. The wait time for TWC was long, but the rep I got was really nice and helped me set everything up quickly. Probably one of the better experiences with customer service I’ve had in a while, actually. Now if they just didn’t have a monopoly or throttle YouTube…

I digress. Today was a good day and now it’s time to post this on the internet and go to bed.

From Brooklyn,

–Erty Seidel