2/16/16: Ice Cream Social!

1. Another quick post since I have a dentist appt early tomorrow!
2. The day was basically
1. Prep for ice cream social
2. Ice Cream Social
3. Glee
4. CS hw
3. Breaking these down in more detail:
4. Went to math, then physics. Left my big bag of presliced banana in math in my hurry to get to circuits, so that I could make an announcement for the Social. The banana may still be there tomorrow morning. 
5. Made the announcement, went to SPS meeting, where discussed Social logistics, as well as this quarter's camping trip and the Spring trip to LIGO. 
6. Got post-its, bananas, ate lunch while walking up and down the Ave.
7. Prepared post-its, catchphrase cards, then ran up to Full Tilt. Picked up the ice cream--had a cordial chat with the scooper Grace, who's attempting an apprenticeship for elevator maintenance--then ran back to the SPS. 
8. Took everything up to C-520 to set up. The Biophysics lab meeting got out right before we had to start, so set-up was harried. But soon ppl were trickling in, Hira was putting post-its on their backs, and we had mingling. One professor advertised a tutoring class/practicum and literary club he was running. Everything was going pretty well, although some profs were talking among themselves, not engaging the undergrads.
9. Then I started the Q&A game! The profs and grads split into two teams, Theorists and Experimentalists. Undergrads--quite willingly, I didn't have to use any of my prepared questions--offered up questions to the teams, which huddled, submitted candidates to answer the questions, whose answers were then subjected to grading by show of hands by the undergrads. Things went really well. All the profs were having fun, laughing at their goofy answers to the questions which started out about physics and got goofier as the game went on.
10. The end of the game found Theorists and Experimentalists tied at 28 hands each. So I opened up the Paper Airplane booth. Several profs made airplanes, which was awesome. One goofy experimentalist and neutrino researcher, Detwiler, crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at the wall for points. The Theorists, already few in number, sublimated back into the woodwork of the physics building; the Experimentalists won the day.
11. Talked to Prof. Detwiler for a while, then we cleaned up stuff. One mistake--left rings on the nice wood table because I didn't use a tablecloth. Frustrating!
12. After the Social, universally deemed a success,
13. hung out in the SPS with some shmids trying to figure out transistors
14. Went to Glee! Rehearsed for 30 minutes in our normal room, then trooped to a room in Meany where we went over the whole frickin' Requiem (went a full 2 hours) with the Women's Choir, U-Singers, and the Orchestra. Madcap. Ran into lots of people I knew. Requiem is hard however--still needs lots of work.
15. Grabbed quick dinner at the 8, went up to Haggett. Caught the end of floor tradition--ppl were playing a slap-happy card game.
16. Did Hardware lab! We're supposed to exploit poorly written C code, using a now outdated library function gets(), which writes a string onto a buffer (array) on the stack. Thing is, you can mess with gets() by passing a larger string than the space you have allocated (gets() doesn't know the size of what you have allocated), which causes gets() to overwrite other data on the stack--in particular, the return address of the function which calls gets(). In essence, you can redirect execution to somewhere else in the program, or, if you're clever, paste your own code on the the stack and execute it! This is known as "stack-smashing". Did the first two phases--have one more for tomorrow.
17. Realized I hadn't registered for next quarter! Freaked out and grabbed all the classes I'd been thinking of--thermal physics, systems programming, complex analysis, a "global trends" class that Rishabh from waay back in Freshman Quarter Educational Change recommended, and accelerated accounting. Will have to prune these later.
18. Wrote this log and hit the hay! 'Night all!