Texas Instruments TI-92+, Список советов

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experience. After a short promotional film for the state of Indiana, we all enjoyed the main feature on
animal migrations.
The film ended at 6:30, at which point we returned to Fort Harrison, as my family and I had reserved a
room at the Harrison House for the night. I checked in, then we all headed for the room. The Harrison
House was once military housing for officers, with two small apartments sharing a large, comfortable
common room. This was an ideal arrangement, as we spent the evening in the common room. After
some confusion in getting a Papa John's pizza delivery set up, Ray taught us a dice game called
Farkle. This is a reasonably complex game, for which he obviously made up most of the rules. Even
so, it was plenty diverting until the pizzas arrived. After a delicious pizza supper, we were refreshed
and invigorated, and the real work of the conference began.
Nah, not really. We did talk quite a bit about calculators in general, and TI calculators in specific, but it
was mostly a review of old issues, including:
- the ti-calc CDROM fiasco,
- the flash app contest,
- Ray's appearance as 'feature' on the TI student web page,
- the annoying 24K asm limit,
- the violent-orange color theme of the TI student web pages,
- advantages and disadvantages of TIGCC vs. the TI SDK,
- the place of graphing calculators in education, both now and in the future,
- speculation about the Steen Machine,
- more speculation about Oliver Miclo's problems with TI-France,
- the enigma of E.W.'s true identity (yes, we could not escape this, even here), and
- the various cartoons on the TI student page.
I brought pretty much my entire calculator collection, so Ray and Bhuvanesh got a chance to see and
play with many HP calculators, including the HP-49G. This prompted many interesting stories and
observations from both Ray and Bhuvanesh, as the calculators reminded them both of various
anecdotes.
After much more talk about calculators, math, science and technology, Ray and Bhuvanesh headed for
home at about 2:00 AM. I was sad to see it end. The following day my family and I went to downtown
Indianapolis. Since this was not part of Calc-Con '02, I won't go into any detail, except to say that future
conventions should make the effort to visit the observation tower, in the Soldier's and Sailor's
monument in the center of town. You can take an elevator nearly to the top of the tower, which results
in a truly spectacular view of Indianapolis and a pretty big chunk of Indiana, too. Not for the
claustrophobic, though.
I had a completely wonderful time, and I believe that Ray and Bhuvanesh did, too. It was really
rewarding to meet Ray and Bhuvanesh in 'real life', and they're both just great guys. We plan to do it
again next year, and it would be even better to have more people there. We may change the location
so that more people can attend, and I would like to consider opening it up to users of any calculator
brand, not just TI. I will also try to get a TI representative involved, although I have no idea in what
capacity. I am open to suggestions on this.
Ray added these comments in another post:
[16:19, 3/11/02] Re: TI Calc-Con '02 trip report by Ray Kremer
Let's see here. The museum also has a marvelous setup involving pool balls rolling around on a track,
on the way from the top to the bottom they would activate various bells and gongs. One section
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