FUDCon NA Draft Incoming: Olin 2012

[Mel Chua]

As an alumni of Olin, I just want to chime in a few things:

* Breaking the internet is next to impossible; 200 FUDCon attendees will 
almost certainly not put as heavy a load on the network as 300 Olin 
students (all engineers armed with laptops incessantly streaming data).

* Lovely woods out back with a walking trail and a ROBOT TEST TRACK. You 
can peruse the organic garden and the honeybee hive... or watch the 
autonomous orange-harvesting tractor students built. Your call. :)

* Yes, Olin is suburban, which is why attendee-organized excursions to 
the city (both Olin and the conference hotel are 15 minutes away from a 
main train station) will be happening in the evening. Anyone up for a 
bookstore tour of Mass. Ave? (That having been said, I won't deny it's 
less convenient than, say, MIT. On the other hand, free parking is 
abundant, and we're looking into setting up an Olin-Hotel shuttle.)

* The proposed hotel is beautiful, has conference rooms that would serve 
nicely as hack suites, and could potentially be turned into a 
cost-effective FUDPub venue - and has what appears to me to be 
astonishingly good internet (they're several miles from MIT directly off 
a major highway, so I guess there must be some giant line running below 
them, and routers every 10 yards down each hallway on each floor). Free 
internet to all guests, blazing fast.

* There's good food. I know every single restaurant within walking 
distance that's affordable to a college student; Indian, Thai, Italian, 
American, French, ridiculous artisanal cheese shop, homemade ice cream, 
etc. Slightly further off is the ice cream parlor that sells milkshakes 
the size of one's head, with 12 scoops of ice cream.

Basically, I'm pretty psyched about this bid.

--Mel