Vegas! woot!

yep, Kevin and I went to Las Vegas. it was pretty cool, we stayed at Kevin's relative's place. so we saved up enough money to do other stuff.
on the first day we went to the gun range, which kevin's cousin (who is an ex-marine) showed me some really cool stances about shooting. i did pretty good with the rifle.
after, i went to the bodies museum, which is basicly anatomy class all over again. but it was worth the 20bux to get in. i spent like 4 hours inside drawing. kind of creepy, but it was good pratice.

after that, kevin and i went to a show called Anthony Cools (hypnosis comedy show). basicly he hypnotise the volunteer audience and make them do "stuff"
being in Vegas Kevin and i went up on the stage to volunteer. he got us sitting in 2 lines and told us to close our eyes. at this point i was thinking there was no way he can possibly hypnotize us. he started talking telling us "facts" about hypnosis, things like : the more intelligent you are the more likely you will be hypnotized, while you are hypnotized you will still be conscious. and then the assistant put on wave sound track and tries to make us go to sleep. after 15 mins i felt more relaxed and not as nervous about being on stage in front of 100 or so people.
he told us to imagine we are in a symphony and we all have one intrement; and then he did the 1,2,3 (snap) (with our eyes closed). i was afraid of being the only one who's not playing an interment so i just imagined i had a bass and started playing. after a while he came around and did the (snap) to signal us to sleep. when he told us to wake up again, i found that half the people around me all got asked to leave the stage.
anyway he did a few things asking individual people to do stuff. like this guy named JM whom the hypnotist told that every time that JM hears country music he will feel his ass burn. and the only way to make it stop burning is to rub his ass on the stage floor. so he did and everyone laughed.
then he did the 1,2,3 (snap) to signal people to fall asleep and said to imagine all of us in a porno audition and imagine the chair infront of the stage to be the hottest opposite sex there is. and basically asked us to do the chair.
i was up first, and yes i did a chair in front of 100 people. and i felt great after wards for some reason. and then some girl did her thing on the same chair, and then Kevin, did his thing on the chair, which was very disturbing... more disturbing than the way i did it. after that the hypnotist did another segment of individual thing asking a woman named Anita to forget her name, but she can only remember it if she sings the happy birthday song to herself.
after that he asked all the guys to pretend they are a member of the Chippendale, well... you can imagine what happens after that.
i went on the stage because i was curious about hypnosis, i was wondering if it can work on me. i followed everything he wanted me to do because i thought maybe if i keep doing it maybe i wouldn't be force to leave the stage. sadly i realized at the end that there is no such thing as hypnosis, but the real motivation of doing that was that fact that 1, it is Vegas, 2. peer pressure.

anyway Vegas was fun, did a bunch of stupid stuff on that show but i am leaving out the details because Kevin and i both agreed on never revealing it. i guess one of u guys just have to get one of us drunk to find out just exactly what happened on that show.

-DK

p.s. you people need to post more often!

CMU's Greatest Claim to fame

Carnegie Mellon's Smiley :-) Emoticon Turns 25, Sept. 19
Wed Sep 12 10:35:00 EDT 2007

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The ubiquitous Smiley-face :-) emoticon, created in 1982 by Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Research Professor Scott E. Fahlman, turns 25 on Sept. 19, and Carnegie Mellon computer scientists are celebrating a milestone that revolutionized computer communication.
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By stringing together a colon, hyphen and parenthesis, Fahlman gave computer users a tool to express emotion in their email messages. For the first time, people were able to communicate humor or positive feelings with a smile, or express negative feelings with a frown :-(. The little characters helped to dispel misunderstandings and squelch what otherwise could result in “flame wars,” in which the original subject of a conversation was completely lost in diatribe.
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Smileys quickly spread from Carnegie Mellon to other universities, businesses and, as the Internet grew in popularity, around the world. Smileys in infinite variations continue to humanize email to this day.
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When Fahlman created the Smiley, few people were using computers, and even fewer were sending messages. But Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Department, the foundation of today’s School of Computer Science, was a hotbed of innovation and lengthy conversations. Messages in phosphorescent green or orange characters were constantly being posted to online electronic bulletin boards (b-boards), the newsrooms of the day.
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Fahlman posted his suggestion in response to a humorous message in which someone was joking about a contaminated elevator in a building. Another person worried that some people might take that as a serious safety warning, provoking a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to mark comments not meant to be taken seriously.
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“I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” wrote Fahlman. “Read it sideways,” he added, helpfully. And so, at 11:44 a.m., Sept. 19, 1982, Smiley was born.
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Twenty-five years later, in honor of that event, Fahlman and his colleagues in the Computer Science Department are inaugurating the annual “Smiley Award” for innovation in technology-assisted, human-to-human communication. The award will be based on a competition open to individual students and small teams in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. The winning entry will receive a $500 cash prize, sponsored by Yahoo! Inc.
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“Scientists and technology leaders the world over know Scott well for his great computer science research,” said Peter Lee, head of the Computer Science Department. “His seminal work on knowledge representation contributed fundamentally to the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and his leadership in the design of Common Lisp has had a major impact on programmers and researchers for the past two decades.”
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During a career spanning more than 35 years, Fahlman has performed research in many areas of artificial intelligence and its applications, including problem solving, knowledge representation, image processing, natural language, document classification, artificial neural networks and the use of massively parallel machines to solve AI problems. His current focus is the Scone Knowledge-Base System (www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/scone/). He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
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But despite all his research contributions, Fahlman is best known as the creator of the email Smiley. He continues to be amazed and amused at Smiley’s success.
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“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” said Fahlman. “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a Smiley, in the 25 years since this all started.”
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For the inside story on Fahlman and a history of Smiley, see www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley and
www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm.