Wednesday night I wandered around after Hacker School looking for somewhere to eat. I found myself in Little Italy, and promptly seated myself at a restaurant that seemed the proper balance of cheap and classy. $12 for a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine? Yes please; it was delicious. I think I ordered off the wrong menu, because my bill came to quite a bit more than the promised $12, but it was well worth it. I did a bit of doodling in my sketchbook, then headed home on the N train: the R won’t run from Manhattan to Brooklyn for a year or so, due to repairs from Hurricane Sandy.

Hacker School went normally Thursday- that is, a day full of learning and coding. I worked quite a bit on my Space Adventure game (check out the StarMap!), with help from Matt.

I’m also trying to build my Budgeted app using Angular, but I’m having a heck of a time getting people to help me with it for some reason. Kevin gave a great talk on Angular at my request on Wednesday, but I’m at the point where I need help with the actual code, and Kevin’s last day was Thursday.

A while ago, the Hacker School facilitators announced that we would be attending a party at the NYSE on the 8th. Exciting! People not associated with the exchange are usually not allowed into the building.  There was quite a hubbub about dress code: the NYSE has one, and a significant portion of Hacker Schoolers didn’t own the proper attire – one didn’t own closed-toed shoes. Apparently there was a mass shopping trip on Wednesday.

We arrived about 30 minutes early, so Matt, Nabil, and I walked down in the light rain to the tip of Manhattan, where the Hudson meets the Atlantic. We admired it for a bit, and then walked back to the NYSE building. They checked our IDs and we walked in. (There was a lot of security)

We went up to a big ballroom area where there was food and (non-alcoholic) drink. There were two little stations where servers would prepare tiny sandwiches or pasta to order. An entire table of fancy desserts.

Some people from Juniper Networks (the party hosts) gave a bit of a talk, and then directed us to a historical presentation of the NYSE.

We (the Hacker Schoolers) wandered there for a bit, then returned to the main room to mingle with Juniper folk. For those of  us not interested in a job through Juniper, it was a fun enough event but the socializing wasn’t particularly exciting.

I mostly hung out with Matt, Joe, and Willson, talking about past jobs, pay scales, and other programmer stuff. I’m under the impression that I have one of the highest experience/age ratios here thanks to my internships and early entrance into coding.

Took the R with Matt to catch the N at Canal St., and fell asleep around midnight.

Friday (Today), I woke up around 5:30, cleaned my room, walked to Staples to pick up a new book I bought (Videogame Character Design!) and packed my bags for Minneapolis, where I’m attending my grandmother’s memorial service tomorrow. Currently at the airport, waiting on my flight which has changed gates twice.

From LaGuardia Airport,

–Erty

P.S. I totally forgot – Peter Norvig was at the NYSE party! I chatted with him, Kevin, and Julie about various electronic education stuff, although I left after a Juniper guy entered the conversation and started the “I don’t trust Gmail because you guys read my emails” argument with Peter, which was kinda awkward.