Tonight Yuki and I went to a "Welcome to D.C." event for the alumnae of the Carnegie Mellon school of Computer Science... I'm certainly not one who usually would go to these things, but we're trying to meet people in the area, and there were actually some cool people there. :) We're going to try to do more of this sort of thing, just to meet people, but Yuki's not too keen on going to the "Blogger Meetup"... haha... I'm still having an internal debate over whether I'll go alone... ;)

I was talking to Peter Lee, who is now the Assistant Dean, about a lot of interesting trends within and without the school, and one thing he mentioned really struck me. I had never realized how few CS graduates there are from Carnegie Mellon... He mentioned that they were starting to organize these events because only now is there a sufficient critical mass of students to make it worthwhile. In my class, I think about 107 people graduated in CS. It's really very small when you think about it... It's grown a lot, but I think he said this year there were still only 150 or so.

Another thing that I found pretty cool was that they're having Stephen Wolfram come and speak about his new book on campus. I've been looking through it and, although I'm sure it's not quite as Earth-shattering as he probably thinks it is, it's nonetheless a great explication of the discoveries & implications thereof that he's made in the field of finite automata. So I'll probably drive up for that and get my tome signed by the master. (This book is huge — about 1500 pages!) It's only 5 hours or so by car. :) I miss Pittsburgh anyway... :'|