It's been a busy couple of days -- sound familiar?

Short version of Wednesday night to Sunday morning: I spent most of Thursday and Friday preparing for World Expo in one way or another. At Tae Kwon Do practice on Wednesday I managed to seriously botch most of my attempts to break wood; a little painful and slightly nerve-wrecking. Fortunately it went a little better on Thursday night, and on Friday it went just as I had hoped (the wood broke). See pictures below. Saturday will go into the history books as 'the day of much great food' -- Pizza Hut for lunch, Dinosaur BBQ for dinner and Oktoberfest food for... well... second dinner.

Anyway, here's a little recap of this week's events:

Department Tea This is organised by the Computer Science Department a couple of times per semester. Usually this involves students presenting their computer science research or community projects. This time around I was asked to present some of my work for Oak Associates, a management consulting firm. This was how my presentation was advertised:

Pieter will present NTSNeditor, a diagramming application he designed for Oak Associates. The Talk will concentrate on the techniques used to make the application extendible, as well as the theory behind [the] design of the user interface. Topics covered will include design patterns, human computer interaction and graph drawing.

For more details and pictures, see my previous post.

Upsilon Pi Epsilon I didn't actually mention this anywhere else, but on Thursday I received a letter stating that I will be inducted into UPE next semester. Good news in the awards department. UPE is a Computer Science honor society; read more about it here.

Taking Pictures from the Center for Career Services Debbie Bolton was kind enough to point out that the view from Career Services makes for some pretty amazing pictures. She then proceeded to open one of the windows for me so I could figure that out for myself as well Thanks! Interesting detail: The piece of grass with the giant burn (to the left) is actually where the CIC Patriots' soccer games take place. (The burnt grass is due to the bonfire for Homecoming, a couple of weeks ago.)

World Expo This is Colgate's biggest cultural event. Most of the dance clubs, cultural/regional organizations and martial arts teams show up to give demonstrations. A lot of the cultural organizations have tables where they showcase bits and pieces (and usually food) of the culture they represent. The last couple of years, World Expo has been held during Family Weekend so that Colgate parents get a chance to participate in all of this goodness. This was my third World Expo participating in the Tae Kwon Do demonstration. This year around I was also one of the presenters, so after the Tae Kwon Do demonstration I got to run to the bathroom to put on my 'other' battle gear (suit).

Pizza Hut At some point during the week, Kaleena and I decided that we needed to eat at Pizza Hut. Since we didn't have time earlier, this turned out to be our lunch for Saturday. I think the last time I eat at the Pizza Hut in Hamilton was in May 2003, when AJ visited... Ah yes... the good old days. Lacking Pizza Hut ordering skills (the pizzas don't have names?), I left that part to Kaleena. We ended up having a pretty amazing Full House (read: giant) pizza with fresh tomatoes, bacon and pineapple. We ate exactly half of it, so the rest will be serving as breakfast/lunch at some point...

Side note: Kaleena and I usually do eat healthy, mainly by virtue of Kaleena's mad cooking skills

Oktoberfest This was a small get-together organised by the German Department / Club on Saturday evening. A lot of the people involved showed up to cook up some pretty awesome German food. Kaleena and I subsequently showed up to eat this food. All of this was pretty much right after we had dinner in 84 Broad (house dinner to celebrate family weekend), so we were fairly stuffed after that second dinner. Plenty of good times.

That pretty much covers the second half of this week. The weekend's proving to be pretty busy work-wise as well, so I'm going to head off and get some of that done. Oh and keep your fingers crossed: today's my second soccer game with the Colgate International Community Patriots ]-)