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                              /_/                  Student Edition

FESTIVUS, A HOLIDAY FOR THE REST OF US
As one of the many wonderful ideas HP's Emotional Well-being Committee has, this last December there was a holiday cubicle decorating contest. The grand prize was a half day of vacation, and you were allowed to decorate with any theme you want. So I decorated according to the ways of Frank Costanza, a new holiday that was scratching me right where I itched. Here is a web representation that closely approximates my cube's decorations.
http://victorynetwork.net/michael/festivus.html

LOUD AND ANNOYING, THE PERFECT COMBINATION
About a week ago a bunch of cubicles near mine were filled with people who had to be moved for various reasons. The cube closest to mine was filled with an extremely loud office assistant. When she talks on the phone, which is about two hours a day, there is no word she says that I can't hear perfectly and occasionally she gets into these fits of laughter that make me wonder whether I should ask to be moved, ask that she be moved, or just kill myself now and get it over with.

TEAM BUILDING EXERCISES
My manager has some lift tickets for Copper ski resort that he's been trying to use, so far unsuccessfully. I heard him telling someone how he didn't want to waste the $70 that he had paid. Coincidentally, within two days of my hearing that, my group received an email stating that we were going to have a team building day, skiing at Copper.

MORE IS BETTER
Foosball, the greatest of parlor games, can be played with more than one ball, even though many so-called "experts" would tell you otherwise. Multi-ball foosball is much more exciting than single-ball because it is much more difficult for people to take forever to set up a shot because of other action on the table. (Skip the next few lines if you don't care.)
RULES:
The other HP guys and I used to play with two balls where you had to make both balls to score a point. Because games sometimes went for a very long time, we now play with three balls. If you make two of the three balls, you score one point. If you make all three balls, you score two points.

JUNK
Whenever someone sends out a non-work-related email to the whole lab they put "JUNK:" in the subject line. People use this as a way to get rid of concert/sports tickets they can't use, birth announcements, etc. Recently however the JUNK emails have become more abusive, including two emails about cars for sale in the last two weeks. But what is a nuisance for others has become entertainment for me and a few other guys. We are now gambling on when the next "JUNK: car for sale" email will be sent to the lab. Since many people have a strong aversion to giving up their cash, we are gambling restaurant "club cards" (like Subway club cards). So when a bunch of went to The Great Steak Escape the other day, instead of getting two credits each on five different cards, we put them all on one card which will be the "pot" that we gamble on.

GRADUATION PICTURES
I have posted some graduation pictures on my website. (Most of these were taken by my mother.) I plan to post many more pictures soon. If you have any pictures that would be appropriate for my page, let me know.
http://victorynetwork.net/michael/events.html