E-Week Banquet

Last night Phil, Jason, and I went to the Engineers Week Banquet , held at the Renaissance Hotel downtown. I had never been to the E-Week banquet before, but student tickets were only $7 (for a $40 meal), so I figured I had nothing to lose.

There was an opportunity to socialize before dinner, and Jason and I spent a few minutes talking to Meral and Tekin . I especially wanted to talk to Tekin, to make sure that he knew I didn't hate him, even though I gave him a fairly scathing evaluation in EECS 341. Meral is my adviser, so it didn't hurt to talk to her either. Although most of the conversation was typical faculty-student chit-chat, Meral did make a rather interesting off-topic comment, but I'm not going to talk about that here. I also found out that a course in human-computer interaction is going to be offered soon, which is good.

Dinner was delicious, the best parts being the spicy tomato soup and cheesecake with raspberry sauce. After dinner, there were a few preliminary speakers, leading up to the keynote. All of the preliminary speakers sucked, and I was beginning to worry about the keynote. Fortunately, the keynote speaker turned out to be interesting. He was John Nottingham of Nottingham-Spirk Design Associates , and the talk was called "Relentless Innovation". Although his talk focused a little more on "here's what we've done" rather than "here's how we did it," it was still engaging. Nottingham-Spirk has done some very nice consumer product design, and sounds like a great place to work.

Overall, I got my $7 worth.