Atlantas
“In the very, very likely eventt of a water landing…” — Spirit Flight Attendant
Overview
Went to Georgia Tech (GT) with E, my roommate, to attend their new trading competition. Had fun, met up with friends, toured GT/Atlanta area.
Trading
@ Georgia Tech seemed to be run decently well, at least an 8/10 on the trading competition scale, although there are still the usual problems.
Note: I have never been to a trading competition, but I kind of have an idea for how much worse it could have been.1
Smells Like Spirit Pt. 1
To get the full travel reimbursement, we rode Spirit Airlines for $246 roundtrip and I actually ran into C, a TA for CS42, at ATL airport, so we saved some Uber money on the way back.
Spirit did a lottery raffle on the way back where the person with a yellow sticker on their tray table wins a free flight. After watching Squid Game/going to a trading comp, this appears quite predatory because they are taking advantage of people’s inclination to gamble.
Model Student
I didn’t finish my homework for Ma 3 or CS 155 so I had to finish them between the competition rounds, and at the end during the competition.
I was actually running a matrix factorization script for CS 155 in Colab instead of playing with the competition Colab and drawing a Huffman Tree instead of doing some pathfinding problem.
Smells Like Spirit Pt. 2
After taking the red-eye to ATL, I certainly smelled really bad and I was wondering how much that affected the outcome of the physical token trading game.
Perhaps people were avoiding our team simply because we were stinky, or maybe we were creating a trail of stink that our opponents could not cross without suffering powerful nasal damage.
Old New Friends
I met two friends at GT, P and K. P has appeared before in the 2024 July post2.
PnK
Although our PnL3 was not very good, at least we had PnK to show us around.
I met K a few years ago playing Minecraft Bedwars with P, and then transitioning to League during COVID. We’ve never met in person before but I guess we have now.
She might be coming to LA in May, so hopefully she visits Caltech and E and I can give her a tour.
GTouring
GT’s campus is very large and it has many roads going through it which I felt was quite unsafe, and is evidenced by how P knows at least two people who get into car accidents every semester.
However, I think it is much nicer than Caltech’s campus because it is quite practical with roads cutting diagonally through most places, but also makes it harder to see new shortcuts.
Clough
Clough Library is 7 stories tall and every study space contains the number of people you will see at Browne Dining Hall at Caltech. So, two of those and you would probably have more people than are at Caltech.
They have quite a lot of manga at the library and a lot of computers/monitors. However, the study spaces/pods require reservation because there are so many people.
I guess we need to do reservations too except most people seem to do homework in house lounges instead of the library.
Filming
A portion of an adult film was filmed outside of the physics building at GT, or so I’ve heard.
In other news, the new Captain America movie (which E lost an online bet on) also did filming in Clough. At P’s lab building, Coda, they converted the outside of it to a Chinese ER two weeks ago for the new Karate Kid with Jackie Chan.
I don’t know why they’re still making Karate Kid after the Jaden Smith one but I guess they’re still going at it. P’s PI apparently got to meet Jackie Chan which is super cool. He should get back to making Rush Hour 4 though.
Food Options
Food options at GT seems very plentiful compared to Caltech but after further analysis it’s actually just fast food that there are options for.
For good food, you generally need to drive off-campus or eat the same few restaurants.
However bad the restaurants around Caltech may be, at least we can drive off-campus for guaranteed S-tier food.
Fun fact:
I had a group hug with P and K at the end, so they also suffered massive nasal damage, probably. P tried to avoid it but he ran out of jukes a long time ago…
Uber
We had two interesting Uber rides from and to ATL.
fst Uber
A young Kendrick fan picked us up from the airport except he wasn’t able to get into the correct pickup zone because he didn’t have the license to do pickups from the airport.
snd Uber
On the way back, the driver was calling a guy on the phone who seemed to have tricked him into losing $350 on some kind of gamble so he was basically just arguing with that guy the whole time.
Wayback
We actually ran into a TA for a Caltech class at ATL on the way back, so we hitched a ride and saved some Uber money.
Flight or lottery?
Spirit did a lottery raffle on the way back where the person with a yellow sticker on their tray table wins a free flight. After watching Squid Game/going to a trading comp, this appears quite predatory because they are taking advantage of people’s inclination to gamble.
That may have sounded funny coming from someone who went to a literal gambling competition, but it seems very possible that people would be more inclined to come back just because there’s a raffle.
RNG
B was sitting in the middle seat and there was a girl on the other side who was incredibly interesting.
She didn’t know how to put on the seatbelt at first and we had to tell her how to do it. She was trying to put it in backwards; perhaps she has never been on a plane before.
During the flight, she was sleeping and putting her leg up and pretty far into B’s territory, which made B quite uncomfortable, but it was manageable; much less annoying than the old dude in front snoring really loudly for 20 minutes.
Near the end though, the descending announcement woke everyone up but the girl was still half-asleep and she started grabbing B’s thighs very aggressively and B completely freaked out and did not know what to do.
I thought it was kind of hilarious that she was still half-asleep and doing that but I guess it wasn’t that funny to B.
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