The Finite

For all of Sunday night, and most of Monday night, I was working hard on the Math Team’s annual slideshow, which has for several years been the domain of personal idol, Dan Pfeiffer (Why did you leave, Dan? WHY?!!!) who regrettably graduated. He did the previous two year’s slideshows, 2006 and 2007.

It runs a total of 6 min 20 sec and is comprised of photos from Mrs. Barfield, Schmitz and myself. The two songs used are, well, the first one is obvious, and the second one is “Little James” by Oasis.

Perks to being the one making the slideshow:

• Acne mysteriously disappears from all photos of myself.
• I can name myself whatever I want.

Drawbacks:

• White people’s red-eye. Red-eye is never a problem with Junyong or Matt Yang or Junyong’s sister. This is also why Walthers didn’t appear as much as he could’ve.
• Single core rendering.
• Format compatibility.

There’s a weird happy feeling that I get knowing that I created something special that people enjoyed, like inventing a famous sandwich or case mod or webapp.

You’ll notice that I wore contacts for the night at the hotel. This was for several reasons, one of which is to have adequate vision for swimming in the pool. I want to avoid accidentally tackling an unusually tall 12-year-old Canadian tourist by the pool deck during a heated game of Leonhard Euler. I have a supply of 30 pairs of disposable one-day use contacts just for such a purpose. They have an interesting effect on people. Nicole thinks I look younger, while Dan thinks I look five years older. I think I just look weird.

I’m beginning to think that it’ll always be a good math meet when it snows. By “good math meet” I mean karaoke and candy and Hitler. Let me explain.

The Karaoke sort of died after Aaron (and his iPod) left Math Team last year. Andy has had his laptop for the last few meets but those tiny speakers are drowned in the vibration of the van. Solution?

Use a headphone jack-cassette tape adapter to tap into the van’s speaker system with a laptop.

As the snow began to fall and the windows fogged up, the Karaoke Phunk Bus was reborn.

The requested songs: Come Sail Away by Styx, Free Bird, and of course, songs from the musical Rent. When else can someone hear Frisbie and John Hubberts sing “Seasons of Love“?

We also got Kari screaming, “DOMINICK THE ITALIAN CHRISTMAS DONKEY” at us all night. That was a weird song. Now it’s in my head forever.

Meredith’s always fun to sit next to. She’s just got interesting stuff to say (“Why is it pronounced “sugar” instead of “suh-gar”?). As we passed a car dealership, she sparked a conversation about how they kept the cars so shiny even though it had just snowed. There was also no snow next to or under the cars. They might have used salt, but then how do they prevent salt deposition on the cars? The agreed-upon theory was a giant tarp across the entire lot.

The meet was at Community High School in West Chicago. Even though it was the most generic school name possible in a very unimaginatively named suburb, we still had trouble finding it. That’s where Google Maps saved the day. We simply pulled into a Dunkin Donuts parking lot, pulled up the town where we were and located where we were based on street names.

Wait…how did we get internet access moving at 40 mph? Well, that’s the magic of technology. Specifically, Schimtz’s. He got us on the information superhighway on the highway. (Neal)

We got to the destination just minutes before the freshmen competition. The bad news was that ours was the junior/senior van. Not to worry, the freshmen/sophomore van arrived just ten minutes later.

The juniors found something interesting while exploring. Hitler lives. Er, he actually retired last year, but he lives on in a mural.

It was enough that they gave him the mustache, but did they have to put his arm on top of the zero like that?

And guess who got a perfect paper. Mr. Hates-math-team-but still-goes-anyway Walthers. I rewarded his perfect paper by pelting him with peppermints. Junyong congratulated him by grabbing his ribbon and hurling it as far as he could (which, because it’s a ribbon, was about three rows up the auditorium). And Meredith got first in the orals competition, carrying on the legacy of the legendary Brent from last year.

We emerged from the school to a couple inches of snow and more coming down. What else could we do but play Winter Wonderland as we blazed down a snowy high way?