First Day at CMU

So, today was my first full day in Pittsburgh and my first day at Carnegie Mellon. The weather is a bit like Lancaster only more changeable. A colleague Jan described it as binary weather - everywhere else has two bits (four possible values) to describe the weather through the year whilst Pittsburgh has only one (two possible values). Though Spring and Fall the weather apparently just switches really quickly between Summer and Winter. Today certainly it's been partly warm (but grey) and muggy, and partly torrential rain. It's not been especially cold though so I think tomorrow I may leave the coat behind.

Here's a generic campus picture taken as I ate my lunch on the grass outside. I was surprised how busy campus got at roughly lunchtime, it had been much quieter as I passed through at 9am. By 1pm there was a BBQ, some volleyball and some lacrosse going on in addition to those folks just enjoying lunch or study outside.


I had a bit of a wander round in my lunchtime, mostly in the University Center. Managed to find the bookstore (which doesn't sell as many books as you might think), art store, post office, food court (no, really), FedEx, the games room, prayer room and probably some other stuff.

The campus seems to have a few cool little structures and other quirks, here's the first one I spotted today:


This is the Mobot Slalom Course used for an annual mobot (mobile robot) race. The record robot for this year finished in just over 30 seconds:


I left CMU at around 4pm feeling pretty sleepy but woke up a little outside. Having got back to my suite at the Shadyside Inn I figured I ought to go and buy some food somewhere so I was in a position to do some sort of tea. Went to Giant Eagle on Centre Ave and bought myself some bread, veggies, rice, butter, sandwich meat (bologna), crisps, granola, toothpaste, razors and shaving cream. That will do for now, but I did forget cooking oil so had to cook my stir-fried veggies in butter - oops. I also totally under-estimated how many veggies I wanted for tea, I think I was trying to compensate for the fact that I normally go way over :) Perhaps I can blame it on the strangeness of cooking for myself when I'm now fairly used to cooking for two (including one with a 'man' appetite).

And now it's 21:10 here in the US and gone 2am in the UK so I am definately close to my staying awake limit. Time to wash-up and then sleep.