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18 APRIL 2007

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jake's and jokes

G: John and I met Chris and Jake and Ingrid in DC Friday night at HR-27 for the DC Comedy Festival. There were two shows at 7, 9, and 11pm, one upstairs and one downstairs. We bought passes for all evening.

We met them at the table they had gotten up front. The 7pm show was good, but then they made us leave and come back again. We weren't sure how far to leave and ended up staying in the building and getting back to the same table for the 9pm show. Jake and Ingrid decided they were getting tired and went home, and Rich text messaged Chris to say he was in line outside. He never made it in, and that was too bad. Chris teased him with texted lies about how the comedian was doing 15 minutes on cuff links and was killing, when the show hadn't even started yet. Rich replied, "I hate you." Chris sent another message back saying, "OMG! He's started on ascots."

The 9pm show was a long line up of short sets - auditions for the Tonight Show. It started off pretty good but somewhere in the middle was a very strong string of comedians and I was laughing so hard at one of them that I was crying. I didn't notice the comedian look at me funny, but then he did a bit about how when someone laughs really hard he looks at them like, "What's wrong with you?!"

We were all pretty tired after laughing for a couple of hours and decided not to stay for the 11pm show.

The next day the three of us went to Jake's for his birthday celebration of gaming all day. We arrived sometime in the afternoon and I played John's game, Inquisition, which John won handily. Meanwhile, Liam had brought all sorts of chocolate and Chris and I pigged out on it.

After Inquisition we played Free Range Chicken, a Why Did The Chicken...? variant where everyone writes down some random words or phrases. They get mixed up and two are drawn. The judge puts them in whatever order they want and then declares what kind of responses they want, such as "movie plot" or "college course." As usual with a Chicken game, hilarity ensued.

We played Coloretto before John dropped Chris and me off at the Metro to go back to the Comedy Festival. We went to the same place but this time watched the shows downstairs. It wasn't as funny as the first night but still fun. The 9pm show was called the Weird Show, and it wasn't that weird. But still kind of funny.

We saw Rob Paravonian at the end. I've long enjoyed this piece of musical comedy. Chris said he'd taken a class with him. We saw him by the bathrooms after the show and Chris said hi and talked about the class they'd taken together. I told him I enjoyed his work on a Dr. Demento CD and on youtube. He invited us to join the comedians at a bar, but we decided to go back to the party instead.

We walked in the rain from the Metro, and found the stragglers in a poker game. When that finally wrapped up we went home around 3am.

John did our taxes, and got them in on time. He filed for free again this year, on the web for both state and fed returns.

game design helps the hubble

J: I used my game design skills to help the Hubble Space Telescope!

Each time the astronauts open the HST to replace parts, they expose fragile instruments and optics to possible contamination. Space suits are not very clean. One of the teams at NASA is coming up with laboratory methods to model the kind of damage done to the Hubble whenever the astronauts open the doors and let the dirt in. Then they can correct for it in the data.

A scientist visiting our lab was explaining a Rube Goldberg device that sits inside a vacuum chamber and drops tiny sand particles on a disk of pure silicon. I won't go into the details, but it involved a funnel, sand, a speaker, and alcohol. While he talked, I had one of my "moments." My eyes glazed over and the game designer in me said, this should be simplified. Come to think of it, I guess most Rube Goldberg machines should be simplified, if you are striving for efficiency rather than comedy.

A few minutes later I was telling the scientist how to do the whole operation sans alcohol. To his credit, he didn't just brush me off. He drew a picture of the redesigned contraption and reviewed how it would work. He told me my idea was a good one and he'd take it back to his people.

My favorite kinds of scientists and engineers are the ones that gladly listen to strangers' ideas. After this particular favorite scientist left I joked with the other guys in the lab about my idea. I said my Irish background wouldn't allow me to waste alcohol.
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