Austin, Day 8: Departure

(So, so belated...)

The morning of our departure was relatively tame. I read more of my Gettysburg book, finished the main body of the work. We went to a Chinese restaurant, Pei Wei, for lunch, finished packing (I'd loaded my bag the previous night), and I played through Wily's castle in Mega Man 2 on Difficult again. I had just made it to the second final boss and figured out how to hurt him when we had to leave for the airport. Ah, machts nichts.

At the airport, we got through security in minutes and found our gate, where I sat down with the book I had decided on for the plane trip home: Michael Lewis's Moneyball.

Only five things were permitted to interrupt it. First, I got dinner at a (mediocre) burrito place in the airport. Second, boarding. Third, taking pictures out the window during the flight. Fourth, disembarking. And fifth, finishing it. It was one of the fastest and most engrossing reads I'd opened in some time.

At home, I saved all my photos to my computer, and am planning to copy them out onto my external hard drive (separate from the automated backups, I mean). Digging through to make a proper album will take a bit (and does anyone know a good free Mac utility for stitching together panoramas?), but that is all to come. Right now, I'm home.

Okay, not right now, as the location line will tell you, but still.

Omegling!

I think I've come up with a new game for Omegle.

Stranger: hi
You: Greetings.
You: Would you be interested in playing a game?
Stranger: yeah... what's game?
You: It's called the imitation game, or the Turing test.
( You: One participant is the interviewer, and the other is either a human or a computer program. )

Footnote: the imitation game is first described in Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a paper by Alan Turing - an easily-read transcription is available from the Loebner Prize website here.