meat on a sword

Hurrah, the course is basically over. I've been pushing pretty hard the last several nights trying to wrap up a project. It's been fun and tomorrow looks like it'll be a lot of useful, interesting material. For the most part, it's been interesting material, but of uncertain value in terms of how immediately useful it would be back at my district. A lot of the material has been inter-disciplinary, which makes much of it new and thereby rather interesting. But, like I said, it won't be of immediate use back in Farmington, but it definitely helps with my understanding of the larger picture from a technical standpoint.

Anyway, today was the presentation of the projects so that big hump is done with and we had a class dinner at a Brazilian restaurant tonight. The place was called The Gaucho and served meat on a sword as advertised. The meat was ok, but not as good as a similar type of restaurant in Houston that one of the instructors has been to. For the most part, the more well done the meat was, the drier and less tender it was and there was too much of that. But at least there was a reasonable amount of variety as different waiters with different swords kept coming around. And it's hard to go wrong when you wrap fillet mignon with bacon.

I wonder if any studies have been done on how groups seat themselves at a dinner table. When we all entered the restaurant and were directed to our table, there was this awkward standing around as if people were waiting for some direction to be seated. I looked around quickly and sat down somewhere near the middle, but definitely not in the middle. As the dinner and conversation progressed, I realized that there is some strategy in where one sits from both a table access standpoint as well as a conversation access standpoint. There are twelve students in the course as well as the primary instructor and a couple guest instructors who were in town to watch the project presentations were also at the dinner. I was the first to pick a seat so I didn't get much say in where I was relative to others. However, I did sit in such a place that I was close enough to engage my end of the table in conversation, but yet far enough from that end that I could listen in to what the other end of the table was discussing. It helped that one of the guest instructors was sitting at the very end of my end of the table so that was someone with a good insight into the company. Basically, I was able to successfully engage my end of the table and still have a handle on the general tenor of the other major table conversations. For an information junkie like me who likes to know what's going on, that was great. So now I'm wondering if this is a good strategy for picking a seat in large group settings in the future. Basically, to sit about a third of the way down the table to have conversational access to most of it and be able to listen to basically all of it. The only thing I could refine is to let a couple others sit first and pick my particular side based at least partially on where others are sitting. However, I don't like having to wait for others to awkwardly sit down when I can just pick a seat first.

Over-analysis is so easy.