NYC trip (the short version)

So, this was a pretty great weekend. I'm still not recovered from it, and should be in bed, but seem to have missed that sweet spot before the transition from too tired to stay awake to too tired to fall asleep, so I'll knock something off of my TODO list and write a bit, but I'll limit it to the major bullet points...

• Spent Thurs-Sun in Brooklyn for performances of 2010: Our Hideous Future on Friday and Saturday.
• Friday's performance was good, but the audience was small, and despite the best efforts of friends who came to the show, I don't think we were really feeling the energy.
• Between shows we were fortunate enough to be able to enjoy the hospitality of <lj user=beetiger>, who let a bunch of us crash at her place. Thanks! She also took us to a diner that we concluded was had been raiding the estate sales of recently deceased old ladies throughout the area in order to decorate the place. It was the weirdest, tackiest, mishmash of chandeliers and porcelain dolls you ever did see.
• On Saturday we packed the house, and the energy was amazing. Ok, to be fair "packed" in this case means maybe 50 people, but we had to add an extra row to accommodate everyone, and that's always a great feeling. 
• One downside of having 50 people in a small theater on the third floor in August: So. Damn. HOT.  There was one industrial sized air conditioner backstage, and I (almost) wish the audience could have seen through the upstage curtain, the only thing that stood between the show going on onstage, and everyone who wasn't in the current scene in various states of undress, prostrated and worshiping that air conditioner. 
• Saturday night was just about everything I could have hoped for. Not only did the performance go well, afterward we found a restaurant that opened up their back room just for us. After days of being unable to find a place that wasn't either too small or too loud (or both) to let the cast actually hang out together, we had a private party room with no blaring music except the music we made.
• ...which we did make, when the bartender came back and said "I hear you're the cast of a show! Gimme a number!"; we did an impromptu a cappella version of Bangor Boogie, to which she responded "Hey, that was great! I'm gonna get you all shots now!". When I turned mine down, she just said "great, this one's mine then" and took it, at which point pretty much everyone in the group decided that she was One Of Us. 
• I also got to impress <lj user=imlad> and our Russian waitress by knowing who Vladimir Vysotsky was.
• After dinner, castmates John and Kay and I drove back to beetiger's, and then proceeded to stay up until 8 am getting increasingly sleep dep'd, drunk (and/or my own convincing approximation thereof, which happens when I get more social stimulation than sleep over a sufficiently prolonged period), and otherwise loopy. We cursed the suburbs for not having a 24 hour diner, and were giggling in the driveway, watching the sun come up when I exclaimed "hey!! it's morning now! regular restaurants are totally open!", and, collectively intoning "paaaaancaaaaakes", we were off, for further giggling over tasty breakfast food at a table with our own personal juke box. It was stupid and epic and a great way to wrap up a triumphant show.
• ...then I slept for three hours before driving home. Oof.
• The trip home should have taken  about 3.5 hours. Instead it took 6ish. We got a flat tire along the way, but that actually didn't slow us down much; from noticing the flat to being back on the road was only about 45 mins. I was all manly and self-sufficient and stuff and swapped to the spare all by myself, so AAA required. Rawr. Kay posted a photo of me changing the flat to FB and a friend noted that I looked like a "butch lesbian (this is a good thing)". I can live with that.
• The flat tire was also perfectly timed, as such things go, because not five minutes after we got back on the road a friggin monsoon hit, so at least we weren't caught in that. 
• Kay and John also ended up in my car, so we effectively extended our 9-hour no-sleep party into a 20ish hour one. To them, I say thank you for being fun traveling companions, and SANS PANCREAI!
• Between the sleepless Saturday and stimulant-filled Sunday, well... cf earlier comment about not feeling like I've quite recovered yet. Another sign of this having been a weekend full of new places, exciting events, and fun socializing is that going back to real life feels like con crash. 
• ...which means I should really go to bed already.

Take a class with me!

I recently saw a TED talk by the co-founder of Coursera.org. Many .edu establishments nowadays are putting courses online, but Coursera is a bit different in that, rather than just putting recordings of classroom lectures online, their courses are designed for online delivery. More importantly, while all of the course materials are freely accessible, they are designed to be taken like a regular course, at set dates in collaboration with classmates who are going through the materials at the same rate you are (all still for free). The courses include examinations and certificates.

I am very curious about this as an e-educator (note to self: come up with a less cringe-inducing term than "e-educator"...), and they have an "Algorithms I" course starting in a few days, which will hopefully both give me a sense for how they approach course design and help me fill in some of the gaps in my mostly-self-taught IT background (assuming I don't end up overwhelmed by zomgmaths).

Anyone interested in taking the class with me?

https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI

Even if this isn't your thing, check out the rest of what they have to offer. Here's the TED talk that turned me on to them. Edu people (ultimatepsi?) may find some of her data quite interesting.

http://blog.coursera.org/post/28489511739/daphnes-ted-talk-what-were-learning-from-online