PHI

The evening after graduation, I rented out the Panther Hollow Inn for a party and bought the first 60 pitchers of beer. I had won a cash prize in the Motorola Software Solutions Competition, and decided that there was no better use for the money than to convert it directly to Yuengling. A remarkable number of people showed up.  There were even some distinguished guests from out of town, like Vince, Kristi, Alison, Fiona, and Ethan. We blew through the 60 pitchers in record time.

It was a great opportunity to say goodbye to all my friends before they skipped town, but unfortunately I was a little too inebriated to do this very effectively. Things took a turn for the worse when Vince bought me a double shot of Wild Turkey, a drink that has been aptly described as the portal to hell.
BEFORE	AFTER

Nevertheless, the party was great fun, and I wish that I had thought to do it earlier in the semester. I received the largest toast I’ve ever seen — there must have been more than a hundred people raising their glasses. I learned that there’s really no faster way to gain popularity than to provide free beer.
I’m not sure where the flower in my ear came from.  I don’t remember that part.	Winner of the charming facial expressions contest.

Shearing

One article described the achievement of Rodney Sutton, whose “lifelong dream came true” when he broke the world shearing record at Turangi in December.  “The 33-year-old from Reporoa trained solidly for months to achieve the level of fitness needed to take on the record,” wrote Shearing correspondent John Hart.  “The record involved shearing one lamb every 38 seconds for nine hours to break the record set my Alan McDonald in 1993.”

The article goes on to describe the extraordinary feat in exhaustive detail.  “As the drama of the afternoon unfolded,” Hart writes, “it became gradually apparent that the frequency of lambs caught and dispatched was slipping, even though there were still a few going at that 37 second pace — mainly the bigger lambs, strangely enough, that seemed to suit Rodney’s style more than the little wrigglers.”

Fortunately, the magazine also contains lighter fare, should one become overwrought after reading such an intense shearing story.  This clever cartoon gave me quite a chuckle.

Ass Morpher

I find the PantsCam humorous because it is such a flagrant abuse of technology.  It combines a great deal of sophisticated software and hardware engineering effort with recent innovations in lightweight portable computing, wireless networking, and object-oriented design for web-driven applications.  It then produces a result so fundamentally stupid and useless it’s enough to make a grown programmer cry.

In a similar spirit of exploitation of complex advances in technology, I present my latest web creation, the Ass Morpher.  Morph away!

Graduation

I apologize for sounding like a commencement speaker, but it’s difficult not to wax nostalgic when leaving behind a place full of wonderful memories.  Today I was looking back on the more than three years of monzy.com updates I’ve amassed, and I was glad that I had chronicled the time I spent at Carnegie Mellon.  Personal web pages like this one may be an exercise in self-indulgence, but I think that one day I’ll be grateful for having kept such detailed accounts of my college escapades.