Another week of Hacker School begins tomorrow :) super excited.

We celebrated the beginning of Ramadan together on Saturday. Eating together was a lot of fun, and I felt a sense of togetherness as we gathered for our feast. Mihai made an absolutely amazing salad… I didn’t realize that salad could be less-than-lame, but that salad was probably the best thing I’ve had in my three weeks in New York. We also had rice, beans, and onions. It reminded me of home.

During Ramadan, Muslims are supposed to fast. They are only allowed to eat or drink when the sun is down, which means that you go without food from like 4 am to 8:30 pm. As I am no longer Muslim, I’m not obligated to fast, but I enjoyed fasting last year and want to try it again. Fasting helped me appreciate the food that I ate, and it framed the food as something for sustenance, not something I reach for when I’m bored. You also think about those of us without access to food, which is a humbling. I’m not sure how long I’ll fast, as it can mess with my mood and productivity, but I plan on fasting for at least a week.

When I told Amber about Ramadan, she seemed interested in fasting. She’s going to fast with me, with some slight modifications. Having a fasting buddy is fun, because even though I grew up in a Muslim household, none of the adults really ever seemed interested in fasting.

Also, the Hacker School Emacs User Group (hsEUG? hackerEUG?) begins on Tuesday. I’m super excited about it: we came up with the idea a couple days ago as a way to get the emacsers at Hacker School together to talk about Emacs. We’re modeling it on the Linux User Group I ran at Mason, with one talk a week on a subject that is at least tangentially-related to Emacs. I’m not scared that we can get at least one talk a week, because 1) I could probably give a talk a week on Emacs for all of Hacker School just by myself, 2) from my experience with MasonLUG, finding enough people to talk is usually not hard, and 3) people just want to talk about Emacs, yo. It’s low stress :P I just want to see everyone else’s tricked out Emacs configs!