pleasant little moments

"Fearless" at the theatre down the street. Darryl asked Joby to buy him a huge bag of popcorn. For the next 1.5 hours, I heard a steady munch-munch sound coming from my right.

Me: [turning to Darryl near movie ending] Did you eat that entire bag?

Darryl: [cheerfully] Not yet. I'm working on it.

The movie finishes with one of the characters gasping out a death scene. Then we see him dancing in a meadow, his body bathed in a white glow. He frolicks with loved ones from his life, who also emit halo glows.

Me: Argh, he promised he'd return to visit that farm girl! And he never did!

Darryl: [cheerfully] He did it after he died.

...

Minutes later, walking out of the theatre.

Joby: Some of those subtitles were not very good. Like one of the last fight scenes. In Chinese he said a very poetic line, "Now that I am already standing on this podium, I need to continue." The subtitles were like, "We gotta finish."

...

Tea at Verde Cafe.

Joby: Princeton held a contest to see who could write the fastest hash table. All these people spent hours hand-tweaking assembly code. The fastest entry ran in negative 0.2 seconds. Turned out he coded a naive hash table implementation, and then did a buffer overflow to gain OS control and set the system clock back.

Me: That's awesome. I have a story about hacking a contest. I won't tell you the name, because it would be too embarrassing for that person. So, my acquaintance entered an online contest that pitted his entry against other entries. The entry that received the most votes via user clicks would become the victor. As the contest continued, he started losing, so he wrote a clickbot. Then another contestant wrote a better clickbot that generated three times as many clicks. So he complained to the contest organizer and got the other person disqualified.

Joby: And he won?

Me: Yeah. Not only did he cheat, he had an inferior cheating script. And then he tattled, and took the victory unfairly.

Joby: So this was Alipé then?

(Poor Alipé. Please don't cough up blood again, upon reading this.)

...

Sitting on a bench outside, 1 AM.

Darryl: We need to go, because I desperately need to use the restroom.

Qing: [while walking to the car] Don't explode, Darryl. Otherwise Niniane will have another intern bathroom story.

Me: [remembering an intern who was so cautious that he asked for permission to go to the bathroom] ... Yeah, I had a high school intern years ago on Flight Simulator, who was really really nervous --

Darryl: Did he wet himself?