What Happens at Caltech Stays at Caltech

Well, obviously.

What Happens at Caltech Stays at Caltech

You want an awesome ‪#‎tbt ('Throwback Thursday')‬? OK, I'll give you an awesome #tbt!

Tomorrow, I am flying out to Pasadena to attend a reunion/workshop for the 20th anniversary of the CDS* department at Caltech!

And I have even packed my faded 20-year old Lloyd shirt that I got ... [all together now] ... when I was frosh at Caltech in Fall 1994.

* Control and Dynamical Systems (not TFM)

(Approximate) Quote of the Day

Today's quote of the day was uttered at breakfast this morning by an old alum. I'm going to need to be slightly approximate on the phrasing (because I can't remember everything precisely), but the point will come across loud and clear. The line I'm going to give you is the straight line. You provide the joke.

"The only news service I trust now is Fox News because they're the only ones who give it to you straight."

Wow. I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out how the rest of us (both of us) at the table reacted.

The Usual Bastards: Reunion Tour

It looks like my old gang, The Usual Bastards, are going to have a reunion "tour" in the near future, possibly as early as December. (Well, the tentative plan is to do this in December, but we'll see how it goes. The tentative place is to go to Vegas, so that this will become Vegas III.) Vito Dai, Ben Williamson, and I are officially on board. Vincent Lin is visiting Ben for two weeks starting in a couple of days, so Ben will work on him. I'll see Kin Chan at the end of the month when I got to PAX, so I'll ask him. (I am waiting for my own timing to become a little clearer before I send out a spam.) Louis Wang lives in Nevada, so he better come. Otherwise, Ben is just going to have to kick his ass. Young Wang may not have enough money to make it, but perhaps he can combine it with a visit to his brother. Of course, locals can come as well, but the timing is going to be chosen to maximize the number of Bastards who are present. I think Nelson Escober, Brian Limketkai (part of our crowd but not technically a bastards), and Varun Tansuwan may be hard to convince, but we'll see how it goes.

With this post, I am adding the label "Bastards", which I should have added before.

I don't feel like getting into this right now, but I'll eventually write a blurb about how our group got that name. (It's actually kind of weird that name stuck for our group.) Also remind me to tell you about the cheese golem (from the first AD & D session we ever played together).

What happens in Estes Park stays in Estes Park

Tomorrow morning, I have a flight to Denver (I know, right when the March Meeting is ending) followed by ground transportation to Estes Park, Colorado. I will be attending the wedding of Lloydies Sam Bench '01 and Matt Reese '01 and a lot of Techers I haven't seen in many years (and some friends I have seen more recently than that) will be there. It should be very fun.

The timing of the wedding was purposely aligned with the end of the March Meeting in order to maximize the number of physicists attending it. (Matt is a physicist and was responsible in part for the Lloydie-Scurve dinner at last year's March Meeting becoming a Lloydie-Scurve-Yalee [how does one spell Yalee?] dinner.) In fact, the first formal e-mail announcement was titled something like "March Meeting and wedding" and was timed to be just before the abstract submission deadline for the March Meeting (and included a reminder about that). It was really quite classy.

There is a small chance I'll run into one of my friends at the airport (given the relative timing of my flight in and her flight out), though I don't know about relative airlines, so I'm guessing that won't happen. I'll hazard a guess, however, that I will see some meeting attendees that I know who are not people attending the wedding. It's just a matter of whom.

I almost forgot: this will be my first flight in which I am not taking a laptop with me since March 1998, when I was visiting grad schools.