Kicked off a couple things this weekend. First, family reunion -- I am incredibly
proud of my cousins, who are rallying to get the Lim clan in the same
place at the same time for the first time in... oh geez, over a decade.
Lim family reunions aren't trivial; imagine 8 sisters and all their
husbands and kids spread out across multiple cities -- every timezone in
the (mainland) USA, China, and the Philippines. Last time this
happened, we were all little kids; some of us weren't even born. This
time around, we're using our fluency in electronic collaboration (my
brother is apparently a spreadsheet-scripting ninja; my cousin Megan and
I co-drafted an email on Etherpad last night) to get things together,
even if it means hunting down our moms.

In Seattle, Mindy
(Northwestern University, engineering) pointed out that our generation
had an unusually high proportion of geeks. I've noted this before, but
it is true; out of 14 kids, we have an electrical engineer, 2
mechanicals, 1 bio, 2 chemists, 1 industrial designer, 1 economist, and
at least another in the pipeline who's not yet in college but is
planning on the engineering thing as well. (And now I wait for one of my
cousins to go declare a theatre or French major and break the trend --
but that would be cool as well, because there are so many different
kinds of geekiness; everyone's intensely interested in something.)

Anyway.
The second bit of plot I set in motion was an email sent out to the
other incoming grad students in my department, which went roughly like
this:

I have the direction sense of a piece of bread, and frequently learn my
way around new places by getting lost in advance. I figured it might be
a good idea to do so before I actually had to be anywhere, and wondered
if anyone might want to come along... Join
the Lunch N' Lost brigade, armed with cell phones and campus maps and a
sense of shamelessness about asking questions, and we will:

  • Heroically attempt to find ALL the destinations on our list in an hour
  • And take dramatically-posed photographs in front of each of them
  • While leaving thank-you notes for folks who help us
  • Promptly at noon, stop and break for lunch Somewhere Nearby.
I'm
going to do a first round on Monday; if you're interested, meet me in
the entrance of ARMS at 11am. I'll be holding up a picture of a panda
for identification purposes. The building website claims there is a "soaring atrium" that "highlights significant Purdue Engineering achievements" and also says there's a lunar sample somewhere in that atrium. I will either be
by that lunar sample at 11, or I will be hopelessly lost.

Before Sebastian headed out to Vancouver for LinuxCon, I revealed to him that this was actually part of my Devious Master Plan to start a panda meme within Purdue Engineering. But sssh, don't tell anyone, it's a secret.

Bwa ha ha ha! (bamboo-munching noises here)