¶ oxygen annual meeting Posted 21 years, 6 months ago on June 18, 2004
so I went dark this last week cause we've been preparing for the Oxygen Annual Meeting. It's basically when all our big sponsors (Acer, HP, Nokia, Phillips, etc.) come to MIT for a big powwow and we show them fancy demos and explain to them what we've been doing with their millions of dollars. And it's also an effort to ensure our continued funding.

It was kinda like the stata center opening last month, just more stuff to do and more people to impress. This time was different, though, cause I was armed with my very own UROPs. That's right, I've been given charge of my very own undergraduates [evil grin]. When they work well, it's like having two extra hands. When they don't, it's like having an extra hand with a severed nerve connection.

I can't really call them my UROPs, cause Larry's paying them, and he tells them what to do in general, but I get a lot of help from them, and it's fun to call them mine anyway =P

---

I've started feeling more comfortable/confident around the other students here. Not so intimidating anymore. Still definitely don't feel super smart, but at least am feeling up to par, which is good. Around the faculty, though, it's a completely different story. Like, during the lunch and dinner sessions for the Oxygen meeting, I'd be sitting at a table with these chief research scientists at industrial research labs and my professors, and they'd be telling jokes about the pranks they played back when the Internet was the ARPANet.

Peter Szolovits told us about the "around the world" game - back when there were fewer than a hundred machines on the entire Internet, you'd login to a machine at home, then telnet to the machine in Utah (cause there was probably only one computer in Utah), then from there to the one in tokyo, then to australia, germany, etc. until you went all the way around the world back to your machine. Then you'd hit exit and see how long it took for your exit command to go around the world. I guess it seems kinda silly now, but that must've felt pretty cool back when there weren't a whole lot of computers.

So there they are reminiscing about the creation of the Internet and here I am being like, "uh... anybody used to play Trade Wars?"

---

No comments, be the first!

---

Comments disabled until the spammers go away. I hope you comment spammers all die horrible deaths and are forced to delete endless streams of comment spam in your days in purgatory.