After a hectic week of TWO midterms, I was rewarded with a cancellation of a homework (yay go methods! thankfully we don\’t have to create KLM models by hand…) and not having to go to the seminar dinner. As part of the hci program, we\’re required to take a seminar class where our \”grade\” is dependent on our attendence. Half of us are randomly selected to go to a pizza dinner afterwards so that we could ask questions of the speaker. The rest of us have to submit 2 questions that we would ask. Anyway, I was disappointed with this week\’s speaker. The talk was about how people failed to make correct responses in survey because they had a lack of information. DUH? What bothered me was that correct responses means that a survey is a test and not a survey. Even a flawed survey would have significant data of how a user thought. So no results should be discarded.

So I went back to the house to finally relax. Of course, that meant that I was unproductive for the rest of the day. I did however figure how to use internet sharing on my laptop so that my desktop could access the Internet (albeit very slowly). At this point, with the laptop occupying my room for two months, my desktop was sooooo noisy. But I did transfer over my mp3s over to my powerbook so that I could later exploit the power of OURTUNES. And I came up with this.

And knowing that I was going to be unproductive, I went to see the debate at 9 pm. The debate party was at this \”bar\” called Church Brew Works. The weirdest thing was that it was a bar/restaurant inside a former church. My first thought was how ironic it was, with the huge brewery canisters in the altar. The tables were made out of the former pews. Do you really expect alcohol to be so prevalent in a church? To me, it seemed almost like sacrilege. And yet in Pittsburgh? Not surprisingly, it was quite a liberal crowd. And because the debates were shown on two tvs and three huge speakers…it sounded like Kerry and Bush were giving sermons. I had trouble hearing. But since some organization called Moveon Pac was sponsoring the event, there was free chicken wings and pasta. It was fun to watch the debates with people booing when Bush spoke and clapping when Kerry hit the marks. There was also a huge cutout of Kerry on one side.