Back from Berkeley

I came back last night. I'm still kind of tired, and I'll need to do a little work tonight for my book and in reading the draft of a SURF proposal. I finished the recommendation letters I needed to do imminently, so tomorrow I'll get back to dealing with something else with my book (that I meant to do before finding out that I needed to go through the edited text cover to cover to find all the things I wanted to change back or otherwise alter).

So, as Gazebo's flickr post for today indicates, one of the things I did up in Berkeley was develop my Guitar Hero skills. I had previously played either one or two songs on easy in Guitar Hero I -- I Love Rock & Roll (which I know very well) and some other song I can't remember. Cooperative Guitar Hero II was the weapon of choice on this occasion. After figuring out the controls (I was confused about them my first couple games), I started off by getting about 77 % success on level 1 songs and I ended up by getting low to mid 90s on all tiers, with a 89 % victory on Freebird. Then I graduated to medium and in my first game got only 57 % on a song I know really well. After that, I got 86%, 85%, and 83% on two level songs and one level one song (in that order), so that's pretty much my current level after a few hours of practice. Not spectacular by any means, but definitely far above where I started. I played in acoustic mode the entire time and as you can see in the picture, I stared down in the general direction of the floor in the best grune tradition.

On Sunday, while I was waiting for my plane at the Oakland airport, I ran into Meredith Alden '01, who I hadn't seen in a long time and with whom I hadn't kept in touch. The long-lost Kaon is now living in Olympia, WA and just got married in November.

Today, I played ping pong for the first time in 2 months with a pre-arranged sparring partner who I managed to pelt only a few times. (It was not on purpose, despite accusations to the contrary.) My foot is still a little sore, but I'm pretty much better now. If you asked me a week ago, I would not have expected to play today. I think my backhand loop got a little better, which is good because I really need my backhand to get stronger.

Also, I confirmed with Wei that the Thursday 9-11 pm slot had been the slot for the advanced class for the entire history of the course, so my prior confusion on the change for this term certainly had a lot of data behind it.