SeanMcb.com

Tonight is my last night in Boston. Tomorrow I’ll head from the cold land of Massachusetts to the equally-cold land of Montana. It’s been a good last few weeks at school. Very very busy, but good. This year feels especially rushed because I’m leaving two days early so that I can be home for my high-school choir alumni concert and various other holiday activities that I usually miss. It will be nice to be home, but the early departure leaves me with lots to do in much less time than usual here at Olin. I’ve been trying to finish up final deliverables, work on my Expo presentation, pack, say goodbye to friends who are studying away next semester, and have a little fun all at the same time. I’m also sad because two of my suitemates (and best friends) are going to be absent next semester, one studying abroad in China and the other starting a new business in California. The end-of-semester rush will leave little time for proper goodbyes. Luckily, we’ll all be back together for senior year. (Yikes.)

Right now, I’m sitting in the computer lab doing what Olin students always do before Expo. Expo is an end-of-semester event where we all show off something we’ve been doing during the semester. It’s a bit like a science fair, but there are both posters and oral presentations (students choose their poison.) Many students choose to do posters. Now, Olin students are busy people, and during finals is no exception. So, naturally, nobody gets around to making their poster until the night before Expo. The school owns one poster printer, so I’m sitting and waiting for my turn to print my 3′x4′ section of glory. (I’ve just spooled my poster to the printer. Hooray.) In previous years I’ve tried to get this done early because I KNOW there’s going to be a rush, but this year I’ve literally had no time before now.

The student slideshow went off well today. Every semester, Matt Colyer and I put together a slideshow of the student body’s semester (with music, photos, laughs, etc.) We’re getting better and better at the process, and Kristen Dorsey and Andrew Tsang have both joined our happy band of slideshow engineers. It’s a really fun tradition and a nice chance for everyone to unwind during crunch-time. We had a great turnout tonight and everyone seemed to have a good time. I know I’m going to appreciate having these things to look back on down the road.

Finally, I’ve been killing time in the printing queue by playing this great game called Picross. I found a good online version called TylerK’s Picross. Basically, the premise of the game is that you know the number and size of all the groups of dark pixels in the rows and columns of an image. You have to figure out the intersection of this information and recreate the original image. It’s very challenging, but pretty addictive once you get going. Here’s one strategy I’ve figured out so far: try to determine which pixels HAVE to be dark. In other words, if you have an open space of 7 and you know it contains a block of 4 somewhere, then you know that the center pixel HAS to be filled in. Try it out, you might like it.

I’ll be posting up the results of all my final projects and putting the deliverables up in my portfolio once I get home, so look for that soon if you’re interested.