Picnic Day 2004

[nibot]

Every year on some day in April, UC Berkeley and UC Davis have their open houses. Why they're on the same day remains a mystery, but this year we managed to go to both! At Cal Day I got some snazzy new T-shirts to flesh out my collection of UC Berkeley / Hacker Conference / Physics t-shirts and then we headed out to UC Davis for their famous Picnic Day, an event that attracts 10,000+ people and is even a local bank holiday.

This is the same event where in 1999 we found the sex+math poster, and where jake 2000 first got to meet other robots. It's also the one-year anniversary of meeting kennyjensen and dolinski. (Check out this picture of kenny and me in Switzerland!)

Now Davis is an Ag school if there ever was one, and the hilight of the Picnic Day trip was frolicking with all the various animals. In one freaky coincidence they had a goat petting zoo on one side of a room and a meat taste-testing booth on the other. Yikes! Diane and Michelle picked out a cat to adopt, and we all ogled the fistulated cow.



Picnic Day ends promptly at 4pm (eh??) and it seems that everybody pours out into the city for post-picnic-parties. Davis' answer to Game Day? There's still fun to be had over in the arboretum, where Battle of The Bands is just getting started. Here the marching bands from all of the University of California campuses and a few upstarts such as Humboldt State and that junior university across the bay and down the peninsula gather to play songs and produce general merriment — until they give up or expire.







If the Cal Band looks a little pedestrian by comparison — don't worry, they're just getting started. They have at least six hours to go!

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

So that's where the rumors about windows in cows at Davis came from!

I remember band people always talking about Davis Day as one of their big events. They never had a Strong Bad tuba while I was there! I'm not certain if I recognized any people or not - I probably would if I stared hard enough.

What's the point of a band like the Cal one as opposed to the Stanford one?

[eigenvalue.livejournal.com]

yay defcon!
i think i attended defcon in 1998 ... or 1999 ... i forget.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

ah.. the memories!

i'm the kid in the front right side of this picture (just the back of my head!)

http://www.defcon.org/images/graphics/PICTURES/JEOPAR-1.JPG

Variation on a DefCon

By Bucket Man

My own personal DefCon story began two years ago. I had been
invited to DefCon I by a girl I met at the Continuation High
School I had ended up at through circumstances we won't go into.
A few days after the convention, she mentioned that we wouldn't
be going after all. When DefCon II came around I made
reservations at the Sahara and introduced some friends of mine
to hack/phreak in a big hurry so that I would have someone to
share the bill with. On our way out the door, our designated
driver's mother decided to commandeer the car, and as none of us
were 25, we were unable to rent one. Fortunately we only had to
pay for one of the two nights reserved. Then, along comes DefCon
III. I never thought I would get there, but owing many thanks to
my fellow party members, Light Ray and Squibb, as well as a wack
on the side of the head to the low life who canceled on us the
day before... I not only made it to Vegas, I even lived through
the experience.

Day One was mostly spent exploring the hotel and sharing
drive-up horror stories. We did manage to attach "Fred," our
laptop, to an outside line in the convention room. (An amusing
fact, since apparently Dark Tangent had requested that the hotel
disconnect the phones for that very reason.) We tore off a wall
plate and explored through the roofing above the hallway leading
to the convention room. Jarik talked the hotel staff into
bringing us water. It was shortly after this that we swore that
we would go the whole weekend without once paying for food,
alcohol, or women. We were partially successful: We paid for
food twice, I supplied free drinks, and didn't get any women.
After the first meal, however, I did discover the fastest way to
clear a path through a crowd. Wear a black trenchcoat in 100+
degree weather, and have someone behind you yell, "Look out!
He's got a gun!"

continuation

[nibot.livejournal.com]

The midnight speech fell short of my expectations. Speaker: The
author of the Little Black Book of Computer Viruses. Topic:
Publishing. Summary: "Uh...hi. Write books. Yes. You must write
books. No, really! Write books! It is morally imperative that
you all write books. I wrote one and no one would publish it,
and, not considering the possibility that it might have been
because it wasn't any good assumed it was a vast anti-hacker
conspiracy and published it on my own and sold nearly 300
copies. So, you must write books. Write books and I will publish
them for you. I'll give you 1/10th of once percent of the
profit, so write books..." Sorry, but I had a hard time
believing that this guy's real motivation was to preserve our
moral integrity and establish cultural connections to the past
for future generations. Light Ray walked out in the middle, came
back an hour later and the guy was still droning on. Oh well, I
suppose I'll recover from the emotional scarring, but after that
didn't bother with any of the other speeches, and probably
missed some good things. Rumor has it that my raffle number was
the first number called for the 4x CD drive, on Sunday.

Around two AM, I figured that the best way to get free drinks
would be to walk behind the bar and grab bottles. It worked. An
hour later I talked an extremely attractive girl into letting
myself and two of my companions into joining her (and her
boyfriend) back in her hotel room. Now...according to Jarik I
massaged her feet for three hours, but I don't believe him. All
I know is that it was dark when I started, and it wasn't when I
stopped. Then I passed out under a table and the three of them
played strip poker. (Damn you, Jarik! You could have kicked me
harder!)

It was Saturday night that I was awakened from a daze by a call
from Arclight asking if it would be ok to use our room as
broadcast station for a pirate radio station. "Sure," I said, I
mean, it wasn't like I had anything better to do. So, shortly
thereafter, the KDNA crew shows up and starts setting up
equipment. Meanwhile, I put on an old Halloween costume of Ali
Abbabwa from Disney's Aladdin and started wandering around the
hotel. I wanted to go to the Aladdin hotel and pretend to be
staff, but couldn't find anyone with a camera. Hey, it worked at
Disneyland. Light Ray and I ended up running around the hotel
with, "Crazy GTE man," a guy who had stolen a GTE flag and was
using it as a cape telling everybody to tune in to Pirate Radio
104.7 KDNA. Light Ray changed into a ninja uniform and I donned
my infamous Chun Li outfit. (Yes...Chun Li from Street Fighter
II) I was surprised by how little I got harassed about it. Most
people just chuckled and waited to see what else we would do.
Security freaked out about the ninja uniform though, none of the
elevators would work for us and we had to use the stairs for a
good portion of the night. (Evidently a good thing, because
security was looking for the broadcast point and figured we were
a good place to start looking. If nothing else, I figure not
many people can claim they've wandered through a Vegas casino
dressed up as a fictional oriental girl. Hehehe...wonder what
I'll do next year...

Re: continuation

[eigenvalue.livejournal.com]

err, bucket man, eh? hehe.

When I went, I was probably only 14 or 15 or so. I didn't really participate in any of the events or games (Find the Fed? Catch the Fed? I forget what it's called) or anything, but I had a good time just hanging around. I remember meeting Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600; I thought that that was pretty cool.

Re: continuation

[nibot.livejournal.com]

no, i was 'light ray'

[quirkyfemme.livejournal.com]

There needs to be more cute japanese schoolgirl band uniforms.