Ginine Hefner is the building supervisor and works with Florence Doksansky. They both work for Barbara Schulz, the business manager. Florence was one of the first people we talked to because Dean Inman said she was nice and would probably help us out. Barbara was next on our list. We didn't meet Ginine until the day before we started installing wire during spring break, when it came to our attention that she was the person to whom the staff directed concerns such as "these students are bringing Christmas tree lights into the building by the thousand?!" She's also the one who actually works with crews who come in to install antennas on the roof, etc.

She let me draft a memo to the library staff explaining what we were doing (I cryptically called it "a display of color and light" or some such -- we still wanted it to be a surprise back then) so they wouldn't be too concerned.

-Soren Spies


More thoughts

The summer after Keith proposed Tetris to the house (1998), I was working at Brown for the summer and drew some designs for playing tetris with a "BasicStamp" microcontroller on my office whiteboard. The external logic was similar to what was eventually used in La Bastille. I figured then that we'd never do it, but that in theory, we could replace some the LEDs I'd planned to have as output with relays that would switch big lights on and off. Having this logic designed made it slightly easier to say, "We can do it if we really want to" over and over to the house in the late fall of 1999.