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    • July
      • WMSCI 2005
        07/17/05
        Giving randomly-generated talks was the most important reason we travelled down to Orlando in the middle of July; however, checking out the world-famous SCI multi-conference was a close second. The conference began with a "plenary breakfast" early on Monday, July 11th. This included brea

      • The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information
        07/17/05
        A few minutes after 5 pm, the scheduled starting time for our fake talk session, the conference room was quiet. And empty. Quiet and empty. WMSCI and the hotel had posted sentries in front of our room, redirecting anyone looking for WMSCI registration to their room across the hall. Well, we thou

      • Into the storm
        07/13/05
        Early in the morning of July 10th, 2005, we landed in Orlando, armed with a laptop, a projector, a USB key full of unseen randomly-generated talks, 150 fliers and a poster for our special Analogic Labs-sponsored technical session, and a backpack full of wigs and mustaches. Hurricane Dennis was thre

      • Practice talk: PDOS group meeting
        07/07/05
        July 5, 2005: After a lot of work expanding the talk generator (adding clipart, graphs, extra slides, etc.), I decided it was time for another practice talk. With just a few days left before heading down to Florida, I gave a randomly-generated talk at the weekly meeting of my research group (PDOS)

      • A business foray / as our fine abyss
        07/07/05
        So we had this problem. What we thought would be a little website that would be visited by friends, and maybe friends of friends, had basically been seen by everyone in the known universe within a few days. We had become more powerful than anyone had every been in the history of mankind. And with

      • Practice talk: cognitive complexity
        07/05/05
        Once upon a time, an MIT professor named Mary Cummings contacted me regarding SCIgen. She said that she would donate to our cause, but on one condition: I had to spend the night in the haunted mansion on the hill.

        Ok, that was a lie. The real condition was that she wanted to chat with

      • The Department of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics
        07/05/05
        At some point during all the press craziness, Science magazine asked us for a picture of us for a SCIgen story they wanted to do. We asked our good friend Frank Dabek to take a few of us. Here's one we took in front of the Department of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics at MIT's CS

      • Acceptance! Popularity! Rejection!
        07/05/05
        In late March 2005, we were informed by Nagib Callaos Himself that our Rooter paper had been accepted as a "non-reviewed paper" to WMSCI 2005. The best part about this acceptance email was the fact that it was caught by the gmail spam filter -- it wasn't until several days later that