Elevator surfing. Green building. Wow.

Draining was fun. It was good to see Peter, it's a shame I couldn't show him something more spectacular in return for the stuff he introduced me to in Minneapolis this past August. His friend Aaron was also really cool.

I slept through the morning session of Mars Week. The afternoon talks were really great. The space artist guy was talking about our early missions to mars where he commented that "Mariner 3 sampled the Atlantic ocean." Nyuk, nyuk.

The flight surgeon guy was even funnier. He opened up his talk with a slide that had an equation like delta = 2 f omega pi. He said, "Now, I don't know what this means - I just made it up. But this is MIT and you're all engineers, and I wanted you to know that I'm sensitive to your needs."

The banquet was far better than expected. I sat next to the keynote speaker, a woman named Penny Boston. She's doing research into how to determine the existance of microscopic living organisms in extreme environments like Mars, thermal vents, the arctic, and... caves! She's a professor at the University of New Mexico, spearheading the microbiology research movement at Lechuguilla! She had all these great photos to show and we talked about caving a lot, etc.

And as we left for the night, she said, "maybe we'll go caving sometime!"

WH00T!

Coffeehouse was ok. No interesting locales, but good people. Oh, and I won the contest for Worst Pool Player at Coffeehouse by unanimous popular vote after a game against Mike.