As per the request of one of the DanceNet readers, here are copies of the past ramblings of the DanceNet Webmaster.
On this late night (or early morning), I contemplate what I learned this first day.
You know it's a good start when they designate the bathroom right outside your dorm room to be the one for your gender (normally, both bathroom on my floor were designated "Women" (lucky me!)
You know it's a bad start when you put your luggage in the dorm room, close the dorm room, and then realize that your key won't open that door (lucky it wasn't me).
The vegan line takes forever to move. Just step right up to the main entree line and order the "works" for the quickest service.
The output chutes on the ice dispensers in the cafetaria fit perfectly over the tops of the water bottles that they give each attendee.
The person whom I gave a ride from Logan brought Ghiradelli chocolate as a gift for the favor of a ride to Beantown. Last year's 3 passengers didn't do anything for me.
I don't miss living in a dorm room, though I'm quite annoyed that I didn't have air-conditioning in my dorms at RPI a bazillion years ago. These, however, looked like jail cells.
It's amazing how much better my dancing got when I danced with a great dancer who pushed my dancing. Never be afraid to dance with a "good" dancer.
Spending an hour chatting with the lovely Ms. Sykes on a variety of subjects is just as enjoyable as dancing that same hour.
Putting together a couple of dance floors goes so much faster when you have a lot of help. Screwing all the pieces together with a portable drill goes a lot faster than it looks.
There was a "quarterback camp" being held at Bryant College at the same time. I wonder what they thought of us dancers.
If people could refrain from putting down ridiculous complaints, I think feedback cards would be useful to the organizers.
Ben Yau and Sheri Kang from California are wonderful dancers to watch. Their "Spice Up Your Footwork!" workshop was the first weekend workshop that I've taken in a long time where I actually participated and enjoyed.
There's no such thing as too much ice cream. Besides, you'll just dance it off anyways.
Learn to pace yourself. There's plenty of time to dance.
This hike was my first long-distance hike (21 miles) and my first overnight hike. In reality, it was a crash course in hiking.
I learned the difference between hikers and "campers". Campers carry everything they need through the woods to their site so they could enjoy "camping"; hikers think in terms of "lightweight" because they'd rather be moving along the trail and nightfall/sleeping is just an interruption in the hiking. I was told that, for a first-timer, I packed a lighter backpack than most.
We parked a car at the Massachusetts end of the trail and drove up to the other end of the trail. With the configuration of the trail and the placement of the shelters on the trail, we planned on 12 miles of hiking on Saturday and a 8-mile hike to Massachusetts. This ended up being a great plan since we got most of the peaks done on the first day (about 11 hours of hiking) and most of the distance of the second day was a gradual incline (started at 7 am and finished around 1:30 pm). This was much easier on my legs.
It should be noted that whenever we encounted anyone on the second day, I would call out to my friends "Are we there yet?".
Lessons learned:
As I reached the top of Mount Watatic in Massachusetts, I could look back along the ridgeline to see Barrett Mountain and the few "bumps" in between (we started on the other side of Barrett that morning, about 8 miles back). Beyond Barrett, we could see Pack Mountain and North Pack Mountain, the other major peaks we had climbed the day before.
At that point, there was only one thought I had: "What was I thinking?!?!"
If you are interested in hiking, including reviews of hiking gear, take a look at the website of Mara Factor.
It's interesting that our government doesn't do more to stop this. Spammers are going to kill the Internet as a communications medium. People are not going to want to deal with email if they have to wade through a pile of junk to get that one legitimate message. Nowadays, most spam come through with subject lines written to look like legitimate messages so people will open them up; they've even resorted to disguising themselves as legitimate system messages.
Someone has to do something about this or pretty soon, everyone's going to stop using email.