Thursday/Friday – Day 262/263
April 25, 2013
The next two days were pretty pleasant overall, despite high levels of stress. Thursday was another physics lecture on radiation, not easy but not overly difficult. Then was a group demo for networking. This unfortunately was a complete failure. Our code didn’t compile and even when we submitted a compiling version, it failed all the tests. We received a zero on our project and were sent depressed back to the drawing board, told to redo our project in hopes of at least some partial credit.
Coming away from that a little depressed, it was to Susan Greenberg, a good, Jewish, CIS friend to cheer me up. She did a superb job and I felt I finally got to know her well enough. Despite not spending inordinate amounts of time together, I was glad to have a certain closeness to her, and felt a little disappointed to know I’d be leaving her behind soon. My salad too was almost as enjoyable as the conversation.
I was still in recovery, so I napped a little in the afternoon before a major stuff up: I had accidentally mischeduled a Time to Shine rehearsal clashing with the Brahms Requiem dress rehearsal. I emailed the professor to tell him I’d have to miss it and he let me know that if I did so my grade would be less than acceptable. Thus I was forced to miss a vital part of the Time to Shine rehearsal in which we were filmed for the world tour of the video production.
The Brahms rehearsal was actually quite enjoyable as by now I knew the music well and could both sing and enjoy it at the same time.
Friday was intense. Today was our ‘Time to Shine’ and it began with an early run at 10AM with the full set before our run of it for the largest donors at eleven. The University President Amy Gutmann announced us before we burst onto the stage in our red and blue outfits, singing for Penn. The song itself, Time To Shine, was an upbeat pop number composed by the eminent Sean Altman, of Rockapella fame. I had also previously enjoyed his work on the jewish musical comedy scene and so it was quite an honor to work with him. Additionally, he shared a love of barbershop and so in the backstage rooms he and the members of Glee ran a few numbers together with decent success. The audience greeted us with thunderous applause and through our performance, the stage of the Zellerbach theatre twisted and turned with lights, sounds and graphics projected onto giant screens, glorifying the University.
Getting changed into regular clothes and heading outside, the heat hit fairly hard, so I headed to Hillel for lunch, before a short nap and then off to Penn Park for an on-stage rehearsal for the evenings performance before seventeen-thousand people. It was at this time that dear Sarah Silverberg decided to make an appearance on Penn’s campus, to stay with Julia Poslun’s, another friend of hers, and spend time with the both of us over the weekend.
Following that, back to my room briefly for a change into Khaki Blaze for the PGC performance and then to Penn Park again for the Glee Club Set. Unfortunately I don’t have my own photos of the whole day as I was too busy being part of it by I’ve included some shots taken by Penn photographers.
Following that Train and John Legend performed, and then the Time to Shine chorus that I was a part of. Unfortunately we weren’t exactly well received given the two opening acts and so despite the awesome feeling of being in front of so many people, it could’ve gone a little better. I’ve included below a Penn Communications snapshot of some of the crowd later in the night!
Penn had really pulled out all the stops for this party. Some of my friends in Wharton, the business school at Penn put together an estimate for spendings of around five million dollars on the event. Free food, alcohol, and entertainment for that many people doesn’t come cheap.
From there it was back to Hillel for Shabbat and dinner. Spent some good time chatting to Sarah and Julia, despite being soaking wet from an umbrellaless walk back from Time To Shine in my Shabbat clothes!
I was glad that evening to finally get back to bed and curl up in the warmth.
Tuesday/Wednesday – Day 260/261
April 23, 2013
I was still recovering at this point, and didn’t realize it yet but would be for a while. Today’s physics lecture was fascinating, explaining the mechanics of radiation and leading to discussions on the colour of the sky and water. I felt though it was difficult, I really understood it! I told the professor as such and he wasn’t particularly enthused but let me know that the next lecture was a continuation of the current.
Singing with Brian was better than last week, but my throat still wasn’t quite cutting it and things were more work than usual.
During office hours I had a nice chat with Shilpa Kannan about TAing and why computer science is awesome (definitely more ‘fun’ than finance). She wasn’t particularly enthused by all of my comments but I was glad to spend the time discussing things with her.
It was Yom Haatzmaut today and to celebrate Hillel was having a BBQ. Unfortunately for me I had missed the majority of it during my office hours, arriving just as things were finishing up.
PGC rehearsal finished early tonight and so I had a chance to get some more work done on the Networking project due Wednesday midnight.
Wednesday was mostly stressing out over the project. I skipped classes to try and pull it together but unfortunately I didn’t have much luck. Our project was hopelessly underdone. I was partially to blame for it this time, I definitely could’ve put more time in. However, the workload again wasn’t divided up evenly or even close to. Very dissatisfied as of 2AM.
Sunday/Monday – Day 258/259 – #TheNextBigThing
April 21, 2013
A week behind again! Somehow this keeps on happening. I’ll have to do my best to reconstruct it!
Sunday was Fling recovery and I was up early to ensure all my work was completed. I had a stack of things to get through. Had to prepare for recitation the next day, a submission for my security class, final project for networking, physics and no end of stuff for my students! The only break in the day came in the form of my study with Shlomo Klapper, but even he was exhausted.
Monday – I was up early in the morning, around six am to try get ahead of some physics work for my recitation at nine.Things didn’t go too badly but I found the material a bit beyond me. Seems to be a theme in this course.
However, this morning was also an exciting event for me. Samsung was launching an advertising campaign on campus and as part of it they were giving away ten Galaxy Cameras to students on campus with high ‘Klout’ scores and I was privileged enough to be one of the recipients. Thus at nine, I rocked up to their booth in Houston Hall with my photo idea and was handed a brand new camera, replete with 3G functionality and a full Android (Jelly-Bean) operating system. Not a camera-phone but a phone-camera.
The image quality on the beast wasn’t particularly good but it was sooo much fun taking it round and making skype calls from my camera. I received plenty of weird looks but there isn’t much I enjoy more than being the galactic source of some oddity.
Next up was Networking and then Security. The security topic this time was social engineering. I in fact had made plans for a class wide demonstration of this, but that has to be kept under wraps until tomorrows post. Needless to say it was decently clever but slightly mean. I spent the hour after preparing for my recitation which today was to be located at a slightly different place from normal, Kiwi Frozen Yoghurt! I had decided to take out my entire class given that it was the last chance I had with them outside of the following week’s exam revision session. Semester was fast drawing to a close.
PGC rehearsal and choral society were after, with choral society running really late given that this was our final regular rehearsal before the big concert on Saturday night. An early night after I finished my physics was well in order, my voice still wasn’t up to scratch.