7.2 million Calories

Well, it's been a while since I've posted, but that's because a lot has happened!

First, there was the amazing trip to Grand Canyon. You can read more about it on Mom & Dad's Blog which features some amazing pictures.

This entry is about something equally amazing, if in a completely different way.

I'm talking, of course, about the Krispy Kreme Challenge. The Challenge was started in 2004 as an improptu dare among friends. Greg Mulholland somehow shanghaied us into running 2 miles from the NC State Belltower to the Krispy Kreme store in downtown Raleigh, eating 12 Hot-Now glazed doughnuts, and running back to the Tower. All in under an hour.

After we got big press coverage (including in the Sports Illustrated On Campus list of 102 things to do before graduating college #85) and saw increasing campus support for a new tradition, Greg and I decided it was our duty to make this a big event. That first year, we convinced some 150 people to come out and run in the cold.

This past weekend, I traveled down to Raleigh to help out with the challenge, which this year featured over 3000 runners!

With the brand new camera my parents got me for my birthday, I was able to take some great pictures of a not-so-typical trip to Raleigh.

As usual, I drove down on Thursday after work. And as usual stopped at what just might be my favorite Starbucks, the one at I95 Exit 33 in VA. (Don't even bother trying to go to the one off Exit 173 in NC...impossible to find the liquid crack. Also, I've boycotted exit 162 in VA).

But then I got a phonecall from a 919 number. I answered it, and through the static could just make out "Hi Ben, this is Joe from..." I hung up and called again, not optimistic because I cannot seem to complete a call anywhere between here and Wake County. (You know those AT&T/Cingular ads where they talk about the fewest dropped calls of any network? Well, if you have AT&T, you're welcome. Because I am singlhandedly dropping the network's entire quota of calls.) I was expecting a call from Joe from the Raleigh News & Observer, who was doing a story on the Challenge. It turned out the call was from Joe from the NC State Technician. I spoke with him for a little while about the history of the race, which led to this feature the next day.

I kicked Friday off with breakfast at Big Ed's. Everyone has their favorite breakfast spot, and this old-time country kitchen complete with farm equipment dangling from the rafters and older versions of the State Flag hanging on the walls wins hands-down in my book, though it's not open on Sunday and Saturday morning is always too crowded. I recommend it at about 9am on a weekday. (Possibly the only other contender for a favorite breakfast spot would be the place on A1A Blvd. in St. Augustine Beach, FL. I've gotta find out what that place is called.)

Then I proceeded to parade around campus, showing the Technician feature to anyone who might be interested. I managed to run into both Peaches and Danny on campus. I knew that volunteering at the challenge would bring me in dangerous proximity to doughnuts, so I decided to go for a run. After calling up and down my contact list, Josh Coltrane finally called me back and said he'd go run. So, a quick 3-mile jog at Lake Johnson and I was ready to get to the Krispy Kreme store to check in for the race, have a symbolic last enjoyable doughnut (more for the runners than the volunteers), meet with the co-chairs of the race to figure out what they neeed me to do and speak to the N&O reporter.

Just as I got there, things started to kick into high gear. The co-chairs got busy quick, so I didn't have time to get a briefing. The registration line had grown long, so Will and I helped bag shirts and regsiter runners. It was great to be involved, and of course to see people like my cousin Emma and fellow '07 park Will Quick in line ready and excited for the race.

We sat down at Red, Hot & Blue, which just took over the historic Hillsborough Street building where Darryl's restaurant used to be, and which has been sitting empty for the duration of my college career. I'm not sure if this kind of place can survive in a town where people know their BBQ, but it's always good to see something happening on Hillsborough.

["What do you have on tap?" "Uh, let me check the list. The only thing I know is that we've got PBR for $1" "Well, I'm not going to do that."]

Then Will and I walked over to Peele Hall to track down Kendall and Thomas and get the final word on Water. It was nearly midnight by this point, and last-minute prep was still going full force. (The highlight might have been when Thomas called Laura (the director of the Park program) at 11:30 to ask if she had an extension cord.) We got our briefing, and went back to Will's to watch a few more episodes of Flight of the Conchords before bed. Nevermind that sleep was nearly impossible between the party next door, and the fact that Will and TBO's apartment seems to lie right on the fault line between two or more rival gangs.

Will and I were the first ones to the store that morning. (Which meant we got free coffee from Herman, the store manager. Without him, there never would have been a KKC.)


Good to know we weren't the only ones making last-minute strategic plans (Herman's on the left):


Ever wondered what 300 dozen doughnuts looks like?

My job in the challenge was to make sure the runners had water. This was my job the year before, and it didn't go so well. We didn't have enough coolers, so the water stations quickly ran dry and long lines formed. This time, we made sure we had plenty of coolers, and did some last-minute recruiting of volunteers. Our distribution plan worked a little better, people still had to wait a little, and the first station the runners hit couldn't keep up. The 300 of our KKC.

The water table that wasn't:

Here comes the lead car. Well, if you had to pick someone to follow to the doughnut shop...

Here's the first runner. Auburn Staples, the 3rd place finisher and last year's winner.

Madness, and some group's themed T-shirts:

At this point my pictures stop, because I was fully occupied with scooping water for the runners. My arms were sore by the end. I was dripping wet (though fortunately I was wearing GORE-TEX shoes, pants, and jacket)

When all the runners had cleared out of the Krispy Kreme parking lot, leaving only smashed doughnuts, boxes, and the occasional pool of emesis - Ok. Lots of pools. - it was time for cleanup. So Jessie and I drove back to the belltower with dozens of boxes of doughnuts.

("Chris, how many boxes did you get in your car?" "Twelve dozen." "Gross!".... see what I did there?)

The red corolla was a veritable santa's sleigh of doughnuts. And what were we going to do with these doughnuts? What else... give them to the winners as prizes!!

All in all, the event was a huge success. Drawing over 3000 runners. Raising over $20,000. And hopefully fueling broader interest in the race so that we can hit our 5000 runner target next year.

One last cleanup effort: Can't leave any puke on the belltower stairs.

If you can't find anything ironic about converting our monument to the brave men and women who fought for our freedom in the Great World War to a finishline for the Challenge... At least it's all for sick children.

Mugged!

This past Friday, PBC was having an end-of-the-season get together at the boathouse, down in Georgetown. (A rich, clean, happening part of Washington, D.C.) I left at about midnight, walked to my car which was about 3 blocks down a well-lit Water street. I get about halfway there and I start hearing quick footsteps. All of a sudden these two guys came up behind me on my left side, one hit me. I didn't know what was going on, I thought it was just some random violence, some guys looking for someone to beat up, so I turned around and started running, hoping to make it back to the boathouse.
But, come on, I'm not going to outrun a young black guy in a sprint. I might have held him off long enough to score a touchdown, but life's not like football. (probably a good thing, if it were like football I might have ended up like sean taylor) So he catches up to me, tackles me, hits me a few times, yells at me then grabs my wallet out of my back pocket and they run the other way.
All things considered, I'm fine. Things could have gone much worse, and I didn't end up with any real bruising, though I couldn't chew on Saturday. I canceled all my cards over the phone right away, so I didn't have to worry about that.
The fact that it happened on a well-lit street, at 12:30 (early evening by DC standards) and in Georgetown all make it very surprising. So surprising, in fact, that when I called the police, the dispatcher sent them to Southeast DC, probably assuming that there was no way I was talking about Northwest. The police made up for that delay by sending four squad cars and a detective.

Repeating the scenario, in my mind it seems like what happened was really best. (This is a nice corollary to the prisoner's dilemma.) I'm not a big guy, but surely high school wrestling plus being in rowing shape would have given me some kind of hope in a fight. So lets say I had just fought back right away. Well, I know that if I were going to go around mugging people, I'd have some sort of a backup plan in the form of a knife or a gun in case I came across a guy who did fight back. So, either I would've gotten beat up pretty bad (there were two of them) or worse - and they still probably would have gotten my wallet. So, then what if I'd been equally equipped with a gun or a knife, the way any real red-blooded 'murcan should be. Well, they were ready for what was about to happen, I wasn't so they would have had the edge. My first chance to draw would have been when they turned and fled after the fact, which would pretty much be murder any way you slice it. And of course, in any of the above scenarios where they succeeded in the robbery part, well, now they have my driver's license with my home address and can come find me for revenge. Even if they didn't get the wallet, the chances are very high (like 1) that I'll be back in that very same area.

Nevertheless, I would have greatly preferred the good old fashioned robbery at knife/gunpoint/threat. I could have just forked over the cash, kept my wallet, license, ID (most upset about the student ID, it's my only way to pretend I'm still an NC State student), scuba certification and hunter safety course certificate. (never know when you'll need those). The constant rehashing of the scenario is rather frustrating; I've never before been able to really empathize with people who have been the victim of a crime.

I'm avoiding getting angry or disillusioned about the whole thing by choosing to believe that these guys really needed the money for their mom's diabetes medication so she could live through the holidays. (I first thought antiretrovirals, but that sounds like I'm wishing AIDS on her which doesn't sound as compassionate.)

I suppose that, absent always walking around with a huge PBC oarsman, the only thing I could have done differently would have been to carry less cash.

Postlude:
On Tuesday I received in the mail a package containing a wallet, with all my cards (minus my metro SmartTrip... but, it wasn't my wallet.


[During my last trip to Raleigh, Danny, Dave Hoffman, Steve Marks, and I were having a discussion about wallets: about how Steve finally got his down from George Costanza-size, Dave's is a double-George, and Danny's was impressively slim. I've been pretty good about keeping mine minimalist; I even went as far as to throw away some old receipts, notes, and driving directions on the spot. But I was still ridiculed for carrying the diving card and the hunting card on me. Well, Danny, for a good 3 days you could have really laid it on thick with the "I told you so." But, since I got it back, lesson un-learned.]

It was sent to me by someone who had found it in Farragut Square, not very close to the site of the attack. This leads to so many new questions! Why the other wallet? Is this the mugger's wallet, and he just liked mine better? Why not just keep his too then? How did it get to Farragut? Did they just throw it out of a car window? Why not just throw it all away? Why put it in any wallet? It was interesting that they were smart enough not to use the debit card, I guess the TV news reports tipped them off to that one.

So, some lessons for society:
1) Balance of whether or not to put the address on the license. If not, I wouldn't have gotten my stuff back in the mail. But, if they'd wanted to get me good, the muggers could have rolled up to my house and who knows what. I suppose the finders could turn stuff (without an address) in to the police, and the police could take charge of getting it back.
2) The news never should have ran any stories about criminals getting caught by using the debit card. They should have just kept that on the DL, maybe more criminals would get caught in the future?

If you have any theories about the returned wallet, boy howdy would I love to hear them.

A day at work

So people frequently ask me what it is I actually do at work.

Basically I sit in a dark, dank basement and look at a computer all day.

My coworkers:

To keep ourselves entertained, we've started a few projects:

Our rubberband ball, now about the size of a softball. We've played cricket, basketball, and wallball with it so far. Next we hope to bowl with it.

Jesse is building a tower of coffee. When it hits the ceiling, he gets promoted.


And finally, no post about an office could be complete without a motto. Well here's ours, as written on the whiteboard at the front of the room:

Head of the Charles

The Head of the Charles Regatta was held this past weekend in Boston/Cambridge. If you were watching the ALCS game on Saturday night, you might have seen some footage of a few races going by.
This is the largest regatta in the world. Granted, The Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge is more prestigious and has more total spectators; (estimates range from 10 - 120 million TV viewers) each draws nearly a quarter of a million spectators to the banks of the rivers. But whereas Boat Race only has 36 competitors, the Charles features approximately 1,700 boats and 9,000 participants.

I rowed in the Club 8+ with Potomac BC; we also raced a Masters 8+ and a Champ 4+. Unfortunately, the Champ 4+ broke a rudder cable early in the race and had to withdraw. The Masters did very well against some tough competition. The "87 Gold" boat that passed them ended up getting disqualified because one of their rowers was found to be in his 20s, younger than the 30 year-old Masters limit. Blatantly ignoring the rules is one thing, but what makes it worse is that bow seat in that boat was none other than Mike Teti, the US national team Men's Head Coach.
NC State's rowing club also brought 2 boats, a men's Club 4+ and a Lightweight 4+. Both rowed very well, the club 4+ missing the top 50% mark by just 7 seconds.

Blog Revived

For those of you who checked my blog while I was traveling through Sweden, you noticed that not much happened after my trip to Riga. But hopefully this will be the beginning of more regular posts.
For the most part, my posts won't be as exciting as Donny's (in Bangladesh), Kristina's (Chile), Greg's (Cambridge), or Saket's (Stanford) but hopefully I'll at least be able to keep you up to date on the interesting things that do happen around here.

For those that aren't aware, my life currently consists of rowing at Potomac Boat Club and working at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

(The respective logos of the USPTO and PBC. I'm not sure why the eagle is golden, though it seems to be a common feature/flaw of US seals. I suppose it does look better than a real bald eagle.)




I've also been auditing the German 101 course that my mother teaches at Catholic University, though I can't attend lectures. It is certainly interesting to see the dynamics of learning a new language after spending the past 3 years on Arabic, and Spanish before that. German is, first of all, considered a less difficult language than Arabic, and this is made even simpler because of my knowledge of both English and Swedish. I'd like to become fluent in German, but I also need to make sure I don't forget all of my Arabic.

I hope to rotate my posts in this forum between stories and updates on my life, so that my friends across the world and around the country can keep up to date; I also hope to post interesting updates about my experiences with the US Patent system from the inside.

And finally a note on the new title of my Blog. (Copyright 2007, Benjamin Gaddy.) Perhaps it'll be the title of my memoir. A reference (tribute) to James Joyce, and a fascinating book which I read in the 12th grade AP English, one of the few I finished. I'll explain the rest in my next post!

The unfinished symphony...

...I mean blog post.
Written after our return from Riga, this was all I managed to write down. Better late than never, and better something than nothing.

So Amit and I boarded the M/S Cinderella and set sail for Riga, Latvia. A quick look around the terminal told us that this wasn't a popular destination among young people - we were the only two people between 15 and 55. We ended up doing quite a bit of walking around the ship just to make sure we didn't miss anything that was going on. But we could rest assured... nothing was happening. We did spend quite a bit of time at the casino, watching people throw away tons of money at roulette and blackjack. We tried to figure out how we could beat the system, but as hard as we tried, we just couldn't do it. We did play a little ourselves, too. I put in 1 Crown into a slot machine, and got 4 back. I decided my luck was up and cashed out. Later, Amit put in a 20, and a few pulls later, ended up with 46. We re-invested 6 of those, and promptly lost them, so figured we should stop. Amit thought he had roulette figured out, so he put 5 SEK on red. But the croupier told him there was a 20 Crown minimum, so he put another 15 down. Black 22. Later we saw a machine that had 1 credit left on it. Amit pushed the button, won 5 SEK, cashed out, and we quit, happy to be 8 crowns ahead.

Stockholm

We visited Drottningholm, the residential palace surrounded by English and French gardens.













We took a pretty touristy photo...

















On Monday morning, we decided we were going to take the 10am English tour of the City Hall. We got off the train at 9:50 and hurried.

This is where the Nobel Prize dinner is held each year, in the Blue Hall. The architect, Ragnar Östberg (our guide said his name about one hundred times, so we'll never forget it) originally wanted to paint the bricks blue, but decided it looked better as a copy of an NC State building. Ragnar Östberg wanted a glass roof, but contemporary construction methods didn't allow it. So he decided to place windows at the top. Our guide, not quite familiar with idioms in the English language referred to Östberg's compromise as a "final solution". I suppose we should have told her that it might be a good idea to rephrase that before the next tour.

A wood carving of Nobel found on an armoire in City Hall.

















The tour ended at 10:50. And we wanted to make it to the 11:15 tour of the Nobel Museum in the Old Town. So once again, we started running. We ducked into some back alleys to try to find a short cut.

And miraculously, we popped up in the large square, right across from the museum.

We got a very interesting tour, including a history of Nobel himself, as well as the prizes. We learned that while he was most famous for inventing dynamite, he made most of his money from smokeless gunpowder. Nobel's will and death mask are shown to the left.

Each Nobel Prize winner receives an equal share of the interest generated by the Nobel foundation that year. The graph to the left shows the real value of the prize from 1901 - 2001. Nobel was hesitant to invest in Stocks and Real Estate, and so explicitly prohibited this in his will. But the foundation decided in the 1950s to overturn this decision. The prize has been worth 10m Swedish Crowns for the past few years.

And the gold medal itself, this the last prize awarded posthumously.

The prize diploma, seen at the bottom of the picture on the left, is hand drawn for each winner, and reflects the winner's specific research. Each of the five Nobel Prizes are awarded yearly, four in Stockholm, and the Peace Prize in Oslo. Contrary to popular belief, there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. (Though you could win the Sveriges Riksbankens Prize for Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel)

Below is a picture of an oar that represents several of Cambridge's Nobel Prize winners. The oar is in the style of those awarded to the winners of the May Bumps races held on the River Cam each June. Below would be the Nobel 8+. Although the 11 oarsmen they try to cram in might be a bit unsportsmanlike (Watson & Crick sharing 4 seat).

This is where Amit and I stayed while we were in Stockholm.

...NOT. But the Grand Hotel is where we will stay when we recieve our Nobel Prizes some day.

We also saw the changing of the guard ceremony at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. Actually, we heard the parade from inside the Nobel museum and ran outside to see what was going on.

Then came the real adventure.

We went to pick up our tickets for the cruise. We were told they only accepted cash. So we went and withdrew several thousand Crowns. Then we tried again to pick up our tickets. There was nothing in the system that corresponded to our booking number. So we called Silja line. "Oh, they were unbooked because you didn't pick them up." Little did we know, that we were only allowed to pick them up on the day that we ordered them. But alas, we were on an island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. So the representative said she would try to rebook. Meanwhile, we walked up to the Viking Line office. While waiting our turn, we called Viking Line, and got a quote for a trip to Riga at about 700SEK. Just as we hung up the phone, we got up to the counter, asked about various options, including the trip to Riga, which we were told now cost 1500SEK. We asked about the discrepancy, and she said there were no more 'last minute' trips left. Well...seems to me that we were trying to purchase even more 'last minute' tickets than whoever redeemed the last actual 'last minute' fares. So we called Viking Line back, and sure enough, they still had the 700 price. So we went ahead and booked it, and they told us to pay at the office. Fortunately, we were still standing right outside the Viking Quest office, so we walked right in, slapped our 700 down on the table...VICTORY!!!. I'm sure they didn't really care, but it felt like we had stuck it to the man.

So the adventure wasn't over there. Our big goal for the day was to get the pictures off Amit's camera so that we could put them on the blog. I guess you know the end of the story, since the pictures are here, but I hope you will all appreciate the lengths to which we went to provide them.

We couldn't find a single internet cafe in the whole city, so our next option was to find an electronics store that had computers on display. We'd simply put the memory stick in the computer, drag the files onto Amit's USB-key, and we'd be done. Well, we go to the store ONOFF, we find the display computers and ... all of them are locked. We find a salesman who unlocks it, and we get to work. We copy the pictures from the memory card onto the desktop. Pretty simple so we think we're home free. Then Amit pulls out his brand new USB-key, one of two hundred that he was personally responsible for ordering and had distributed to the participants of a conference last week. As soon as we put the drive in, the computer went haywire, popping up new Microsoft Vista windows left and right, until it ultimately shut itself down. We called up my cousin Johan, who helped us get the pictures onto a CD. But not before that same USB drive had crashed his Mac twice.

So in the end, we got our pictures, and we went out to dinner with Johan and Anna Pia, then for a walk to the highest point in Stockholm.

Amit and Ben play checkers...to a stalemate.