Hey, check it out, I’m speaking at the Internet Commons Congress in Washington DC on March 25!  Look at the “schedule”!  I’m on Thursday on the “Digital Democracy” panel.  Tune in to the audio webcast if you can, I’m speaking 10:30-11:30am EST on Thursday.  It’s going to be insanely awesome, and now I actually have an excuse to miss class.  I was fretting over whether it was worth committing academic suicide to go to this conference, but now that I’m speaking, I kind of have to go, my concerns are now… academic!  Ha!  Ha!  Bad Swarthmore pun…

In other news, I successfully found a blind date for my roommate Jerome in the Swarthmore tradition known as “Screw your Roommate”.  Everyone gets a blind date on the same night, and you find your date by recognizing their costume: For instance, I was Red Hat Linux (I had a ginormous construction paper hat), and I was told that my date was another open source mascot (she turned out to be the BSD Daemon, of course).  I thought it was pretty funny that I was playing matchmaker, but I guess it doesn’t really count because I screwed Jerome with my friend Christina from Haverford, who is definitely not single.  Sigh…  Jerome was happy though, and I guess that’s all that matters, and I was glad to see Christina too.  She was supposed to be a character in an opera (supposedly the Ring Cycle), so she had this funky corset on, goodness knows why people have these things in their dorm closets. And Jerome was a mathematical ring (he went around saying, “I’m closed under addition and subtraction!” or something to that effect).  It was a fun night.

Oh, and Vertigogo, Swat’s improv comedy group, did an awesome show!  The best part was the dating game, where each contestant was supposed to represent something different.  Neil was an international organ thief, Joella was a chicken embryo, but the other kid whose name I forgot stole the show as The Meaning of Swarthmore!  And because some people have been filming on campus a lot in the past few days for a Swarthmore propaganda video, some of Vertigogo spent a good part of the show miming the actions of an annoying camera crew 🙂  It rocked, go see their shows if you get a chance!