It seems I’ve been neglecting this blog ever since, well, I started it. Which is itself a very blog thing to day. I kind of feel the need to post some updates that I should have been posting all along, but rather than sneakily backdate them to make it look like I had my act together and was just never publishing drafts, I’ll just add posts as they come to me to fill in the blanks.
I’ll start with getting my iron ring. Some friends have already written about this, so I’ll just briefly recap: around the beginning of the 20th Century, some important Canadian Engineers decided it would be A Good Idea to have some sort of ritual to impress upon new Engineers that they have huge responsibilities to society now. They enlisted the help of Rudyard Kipling to develop an appropriate ceremony, who came back with such a thing, and a symbol of that commitment: The Iron Ring.
Figure 1: Mark Jobes’ iron ring.
This is a big deal for Engineers, as it’s one of the last things to happen before you graduate (and arguably more important to us than Convocation). At most universities, the ceremony is accompanied by epic partying, but at McMaster, the whole shebang is referred to as Kipling, and starts the night before the ceremony with some epic pranking – which I will cover later. Suffice to say, I got no sleep the night before, which made things… interesting.
The day of the ceremony was a rather celebratory occasion. We started off with an Electrical and Computer Engineering breakfast – good food, and some inspiring speeches from various profs and other Faculty members. We then headed over to the David Braley Athletic Center for the ceremony itself, and proceeded to wait for (what seemed like) an hour in line. The ceremony consisted of <REDACTED />.
When we were done all that, we all stared at our hands in disbelief (except Kofta, who shouted a lot). Due to massive lack of sleep, I remember very little of the time between then and getting to the party at Liuna Station – I’m fairly sure that I wound up at West End with Mark and Kitt, and I know I made it to the bus from Mac to Liuna Station, where I’m told I fell asleep. After that, what I do remember, is probably best left unpublished 
All in all, an excellent time despite the lack of sleep – and that’s (part of the) Stuff I’ve been up to lately.
