Banff and back

Hey all, I’m back from the Banff BME Conference and soooooooo tired… but it was a blast. Left Friday at 4, got to Banff at 8 and spent the first night socializing with all the Edmonton BMErs, as well as meeting the Calgary student reps for the first time in person (had been e-mailing back and forth for 3 months organizing the student games). Free beer and wine before 10 = lots of relaxed and goofy people. CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN!!! This is one of the two reasons I come to this thing…

Stayed at the Banff Conference Centre, and it’s like a really nice hotel. Close to a hiking trail (Tunnel Mountain Summit) which me and a few other people went up on Saturday during the free time, took 1.5 hrs round trip (I think they calculated picture-taking time when they gave the 2 hr estimate).

View to the north









View to the south (Banff townsite) on top of the mountain, 300m elevation gain; Leandro, Lisa, Bernice (who hiked up in her dress boots, impressive!) and Francois





There was snow on the ground, which was depressing, but it was actually quite warm in the sun; had the first official snowball fight of the year :P





View from the audience; I had to give my presentation from that podium. It turned out really good; actually won second place and $175! Hehe, now I have drinking moneyimeanrent…





After the presentations on Saturday and the free time, we had “THE GREAT CHALLENGE”! Mark was the scorekeeper, Jay and Elizabeth are the two Calgary student co-organizers.




For the first game, we taped names of animals to people’s backs which they had to guess after asking people yes/no questions. It was actually pretty hard, only 15 of the 40 people got the answers…













Second game of the night was the hopscotch race, and man were people fired up about this one… it didn’t help that we used masking tape for the stone and it rolled all over the place :P… Some of these people were hardcore hopscotchers!












Leandro had to rethrow his masking tape like 6 times…and the guys were just as good as the girls!















The third game was an “Iron Chef” design competition, where each team had to get a pingpong ball through the hoop without touching it, the hoop or throwing it. They could also come up with as many ways to do it as they wanted; I assumed the limit would be three, but one team came up with 6 entries, so demoing was super-long; there was the gondola, the pulley, the ball-on-string, the ball-wrapped-in-paper (by that point I didn’t really care ^^;;), the simple lever, the slingshot, the shotgun (which hit the hoop, Jay, in the ear :P)…
































Hey, put those chairs down! :P




































This guy got Jay in the ear… hahahaha >:P









It was a fun time, and we made it back to Edmonton in 2.5 hrs (usually a 4-5 hour trip at normal speeds :P). Now I’m at home and tired as heck because we had to get up at 6 AM after staying out last night at the Rose and Crown… haven’t gotten those pictures yet though :P… my prof got totally hammered and missed the session today because he had the 26-oz. flu XD Anyways, I’ll sign off here and go to bed.




Cheers, Ange