Sprint day so far:
~2am-ish: Catch a cab with fellow TOPPers from the party at Ian's, which was wonderful fun (a fellow partygoer: "This is surreal. We're surrounded by these pioneers of the web... I mean, to introduce yourself with 'Hi. I wrote CherryPy, ' or 'I wrote Paste', what's that like?") and subsequently crash in my hotel room.
10am: Wake up, having slept deeply and for far, far longer than usual. Remember previous night's falafel with great satisfaction; am most decidedly not hungry. Decide to read. Read.
Noon: Meander over to hotel. Discover OLPC sprint location moved. Discover laptop still hates wifi.
1pm: Give up on wifi. Use cable. Grumble a bit. Eat lunch.
2pm: Install, install, setup, install, setup, install, install, branch, checkout. Scatter around trying to figure out what to do and which of multiple routes to installation and getting-started-developing is the one to take. Resolve to document much more. Oi.
4pm: Finally settle into a groove of coding. "Coding" is a slight misnomer; what I'm actually doing is learning pygame which involves bouncing between multiple tutorials and copying and modding lines of code until I have a structure I can work with with a simple event-handling loop. Occasionally become distracted by Pippy and looking through Pippy code as well as email, newsfeeds, and so forth, but finally realize this multitasking kills all my efficiency, and close all windows except for "Learning Pygame" ones. Proceed significantly more productively henceforth.
7pm: Finish game. It's ugly, hackish, and not terrifically entertaining; basically, you are a bird, you poop on cars, and send them spinning when you hit. No scoring. No end. Atrocious art (done in 5 minutes on my laptop). Consider myself to have "sort of learned pygame." (Later confirm, while looking at Anil's code, that there is much I do not know.)
8pm: Now it runs inside the XO emulator! Yay! I've made an Activity! So to speak.
8:30: Pizza - doubleyay!
Now: Eating pizza, blog.
Later: Exploring Pippy.
I think what I enjoy most about the TOPP and the OLPC offices is that they kind of feel a bit like sprinting all the time. Not constantly, not entirely, but there are aspects of the environment that are sprintlike that I'm quite fond of - collective ad-hoc question-answering, loose physical layout, ridiculously smart people from varied backgrounds, fun projects (that do kind of save the world and all). I wish that I could do this all the time.
Also, it's really nice to be at a sprint that I'm not running! I actually learn to code this way. I think people assume I know a lot more than I actually do because I've run OLPC sprints (well, Jams) before - I can point people towards lots of resources, but haven't actually contributed substantial code myself. Been trying to change that. I'm trying to back out of "management" for a while. It's hard, because was beginning to get effective at the former, and feel really awkward and raw-newbie in comparison when coding (there are people here in high school who can code in circles around me - it's amazing).
I'd like to do more sprints, but find it hard to do them (physically) on my own. Something like Saturday House might be real nice for that - a space where I can go, surround myself with people, declare I'm doing This For Sprint, then sprint, then show it off.