Dinner with six strangers

First, a link to my movie, Koala Bears. I made this with a few friends as part of the Campus MovieFest while I was at Berkeley in 2007. We had a week to come up with a five minute film, from start to finish. The timeframe was pretty tight: I pulled my only ever all-nighter finishing the editing (we started shooting on Friday for the Monday morning due date), of which there was a lot (inserting all of the non-live action material). It's pretty cringeworthy and I am well aware that there are no Academy Awards in my future, but making it was one of the most fun things I've ever done.

Here it is.

EDIT: I don't think that link works. Try this link, then click on 'browse the movies', select 'California Bay Area 2007' and 'Berkeley', then find 'exploding tofu - Koala Bears' down the bottom (note that lower case letters go after capitals, so we're not where you'd expect in the alphabetical order). If you have time, you should also check out the top 16 movie 'A Group of Random People - The Getaway', which was my favourite.

Now, an explanation of why I've put this here now. This evening I went to dinner with six strangers. This is an initiative of MIT's student activities office, offering a chance to meet people over a free dinner and have a chat about all sorts of things. I expected it would be much like my American holiday (/university open house tour) of March and April, which I really enjoyed, so I signed up. I wasn't disappointed: there were interesting people keen to just have a good evening chatting, and a nice meal over which to talk.

That really was the highlight of my trip around the US. Everywhere I went, I met like-minded people, who liked friendly conversation. I remember an evening at a nut-themed pub near Stanford (I suspect there are no Palo Altans reading this blog, but if I'm wrong, you can remind me of the name), where we discussed all sorts of things, from whether Americans really knew so much less geography than Europeans, to whether current social practices are slowing evolution, and whether international mobility might be preventing this from in fact taking place. We perhaps didn't get into such deep discussions this evening, but it was still a very good night.