Today I am in Ohio at the University of Cincinnati with Alex, John, and Brian. We are doing the Revolution UC 24 hour hackathon. It started at 3 PM today and ends at 3 PM tomorrow.
I’ve never been to a hackathon before. Instead of giving lessons or learnings, I’ll just say what has happened.
Even though the drive is only about two hours, we left at 8 AM to beat traffic. We had time to kill and were hungry, so we went into town and got Thai takeout. I got Pad Thai, super delicious and satisfying, exactly what I sought. Unfortunately, my three companions were less satisfied with their meals :(. Maybe we can get something good for everyone on our way out.
The hosts here got some various gadgets ready for us to use during the competition, including an Oculus Rift. It’s a virtual reality headset. Everyone on the team was excited about using it, so we built or project idea around it. We were going to make a virtual haunted house that read your thoughts (with a Muse) and made more of the house based off of what scared you the most. Unfortunately, after hours of trouble shooting with a desktop computer and then with a laptop, we couldn’t get one image to display on the Oculus. We had to quit and change projects.
That’s been fun so far though, we’ve been making an internet connected curtain opener android app thingy.
I expected pizza for every meal here. Instead, our hosts made us rice, cabbage stuff, collard greens, and vegetable calzone-like things. A great surprise, very generous of them for this free event.
Public Domain Dedication.