It's nearly midnight. It will be well past when I'm done with this blog entry. It may read quickly, but these entries usually take me at least half an hour to write.

I didn't get home until 11:45PM today. Yes, I was at work, but no, I was not working. My workplace has a rather high geek quotient, and at least two boardgame groups formed from their rolls. One of my teammates is a new hire, new to the company, new to the area, etc. I invited him along.

Today's (and every Tuesday, though this was the first meeting I could attend) started at 6:15PM. Well, 6:30. Geek time is always a little late. When a geek says, "I'll see you at work tomorrow morning," s/he means sometime after 10AM. I joke that most of my team doesn't do single-digit mornings, or, if they do, only for small values.

At some point well after the time announced we headed off to a restaurant chain called Claim Jumpers. My coworker opted to stay behind, to possibly meet us when we returned. Claim Jumper's decor and theme is that of the Wild American West. The food is hearty, the portions oversized. If the media is to be believed and we've an obesity epidemic, then this restaurant and others like it are contributing factors.

After a "won't need to eat for a week" dinner, we proceeded back to the building where we first met. My coworker wasn't there, sad to say. During dinner, during games we talked. I played Spades, a trick-taking card game. Someone said it was "bridge-light." Another group played Seafarers, which is evidently related to Settlers of Catan. Afterwards, we talked some more and then tossed around a few hands of Apples to Apples.

I didn't ask, but gathered from their demographics that these were mostly college hires. Grad students, mostly, or so they seemed. Very bright, and talking about even more bright people they worked with. Deep magic sorts of things, such as running a kernel debugger on the machine it's debugging (I'm sure the Heisenberg Principle applies here!)

A nasty not-so-secret about the tech industry: it's very ageist. Age discrimination is hard to prove and even harder to prevent. Tech by definition is dynamism and innovation. It is what makes tomorrow happen. Those who can't keep up are left behind.

And you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

It was refreshing to interact with these youth as a peer. It was rewarding to see how nonchalantly adept they were with technologies I regarded as bleeding-edge. It was inspiring to see how the brightest of the bright are ... well, brilliant. And it's scary to think that I'm not just their gaming peer, but their professional peer.

Me, I'm off to finish the next layer of my origami Epcot ball and then go off to sleep. I'll crow about it tomorrow. The good digicam is down in LA with SpouseKitty and Kitten, so you'll have to put up with crappy phone-camera pics.

===

I'll crow about it now. 658 grams. 1.4476 lbs. 20 lbs of paper covers 17 x 22 x 500 = 187,000 sq. in., so 1 lb covers 9350 sq. in., and 1.4476 lbs covers 13535.06 sq. in, which at 4 sq. in. per piece is 3383.765 piece.

I'm going to round it up to 3390 because I think it likely I forgot 7 pieces. The goal of this is not to see how many are in the model, but to see how many should be in the model. As the model initially required 30 pieces for the inner core and the first three or so layers each required some multiple of 30, I feel better rounding to the nearest multiple of 30.