Experiences

Today I finally made it out to the weekly bike ride starting Uptown, and it was fun. the meetup place is this diner that's in Uptown, which is the ritzy/fancy/snobby/pretentious part of town I guess. One thing I definitely like about it is that it is really bike-friendly and not as much car-oriented as the rest of the country.

Since it was a nice warm-but-not-hot Sunday afternoon everybody and their mom was out, and people were showing off their cars. So I got to see a new shiny Ferrari and a BMW convertible I had never seen before...no, it's not the Z4, it's a little bigger...anyway, it kind of reminded me of the "aperitivo" (cocktail) ritual in Italy, with nicely-dressed people and stuff...I ended up talking with this Turkish guy who was in a professional waterpolo team in Turkey for 15 years...but the most interesting part of his life was when he found a backdoor in the Pentagon website! So he and his crew got an invitation to the Pentagon to show the FBI how they managed to do it...and in 22 minutes "poof" they showed it to them right before their eyes! And they got a certificate thanking them for finding the fault so that they could fix it...how crazy is that??? He also supposedly stole several thousands of dollars and gave them to Greenpeace...all through the Internet I think...I didn't get the part about how he did this or where he got the money from, or from whom, since his English was not too clear...but it's definitely not something that you come across everyday!

Later on I came back to campus to watch About Baghdad, an interesting documentary directed by a Christian Iraqi who came to the States in 1991. A Q&A session followed, and it turned really interesting, as a guy in the audience had spent over a year in Iraq...and even though most of the "info" that were introduced to the public as new are actually almost common knowledge in Europe, it was still interesting to hear what Iraqis had to say 2-3 months after the invasion of their country.

Gotta grade now.