Things have come a long way towards becoming relatively normal in the last few days: I've been spending most of the day on campus, have done some fun things on the side, and finally (as of about half an hour ago) have Internet at my apartment.

I see I haven't really written about orientation yet, so I guess I'll do that now. Last week was the overall graduate student orientation, which mainly consisted of sessions with titles like "Auto Ownership in the U.S." that were mainly directed at international students. Not too much new content for your average U.S. citizen, except for the part about health insurance and some of the services on campus. I was mainly hoping for it to be an excuse to meet some people, and that part seems to have come out quite well. Last Thursday the university sponsored a sort of three rivers cruise downtown; any new grad student could go by buying the ticket for $10 and (because they'd run out of places) finding your own way to Station Square across the river. I wasn't really planning on going at first, but then one of the few people I'd met at that point said he was going, so I bought a ticket Thursday morning and figured out how to take the bus to downtown Thursday night.

Of course, I never did meet up with the guy who said he was going, but almost immediately I bumped into Ian from the University of Michigan, who I'd crossed the day before when we were sticking pins in a world map to show where we came from. I ended up spending the first part of the cruise talking to him and Katrina, who had come with him, and then by extension to the various people who they'd already managed to meet. Ian was the one who told me about the nice computer lab (see entry from Friday, August 19) so I could start posting my journals again.

Ian and I crossed paths again at the computer lab Tuesday, and he happened to mention that he was going to a scavenger hunt that the KGB was putting on last night. (This needs some explaining. Once upon a time there was the Carnegie Involvement Association, what seems to have been a general-purpose group for CMU students who liked doing various things together. Eventually, though, it was felt that the group was focusing too much on one particular activity, so a divergent faction broke off and formed a separate organization. Since the first had the alluring acronym of CIA, they decided to call the second the KGB even though it doesn't actually stand for anything. Since then, some people have suggested it stands for Keeping Geeks Busy.) At any rate, it sounded intriguing, at least, so I said I would meet him there.

The hunt was a lot of fun, actually. I ended up in a group with Ian and Ross (two other grad students — we were the only ones in attendance, so we stuck together like the freshmen we are), two undergrad freshmen, and two sophomore KGB members who filled us in on some general campus knowledge. The things we were supposed to bring back were subject to some interpretation (e.g. "the sun" and "invent a country and provide proof of its existence"), and sent some of our group members scurrying to the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle for Sweedish fish and bean dip ingredients. In the end, our amazing and completely-improved 32-second skit about the life of Andrew Carnegie — in which he's resurrected from the grave, becomes president of Washington, D.C. (which had broken off into its own nation), receives reports from two cabinet ministers, greets the emperor of Japan, is shot at by an assassin, and saved by a Secret Service agent — netted us massive amount of points by combining about a half-dozen of the hunt items into one and resulted in us being the first-place team by a nice margin. You should all definitely expect more reports on KGB activities in the future, because they certainly sound like a fun group of people to do things with. Think of late-night editing at The Observer combined with natural freakiness of CS majors and you'll have the right idea.

This is already a really long entry, so I guess I'll have to save a recap of the LTI orientation for next time. Those events don't end until tomorrow anyway, so I'll just talk about them as a group and try not to get sidetracked.