July 3rd I went to New York.  My bus ride took a half hour shorter than expected so I wandered Chinatown.  I was there for about two hours before I could meet Jennifer.  We then went to the stores to find a gift I could give my sister.  I eventually decided on a medium size plush turtle.  After some bubble tea, we went to Times Square.  Off to the Toys R Us store we went.  After a while of looking at toys we decided to go on the indoor ferris wheel.  My sister then came and met us.  We departed ways and I went back with my sister to her place.  The next morning we would go to Woodbury Commons and find some greatly needed clothes for me.  At night we went to Hoboken to watch the Macy’s fireworks.  It was quite a sight.  Sunday, we went back to Chinatown where I got a sketchy 5 dollar haircut in a basement hair salon where the entrance door was locked, the back room had four tables of people playing mahjong and the lady who cut my hair could not speak english.  At least it was cheap.  I then went back home to Boston.

The following weekend, Camille, Caroline, Cathy, Megan and I went to Downtown Crossing for a bazaar.  Booths were set up to sell cultural items from various countries.  Things varied from earrings to chopsticks to toys to bowls to clothing.  After we looked at the booths, we went to the frog pond and went wading with the little children.  We then walked to the Galleria where Megan got another piercing.  I then had dinner at Pika.  It was interesting to say the least.

Sorry for the bad quality post, it’s been too long since my last post and I just need to get something up.

Things that go boom are very fun to watch, even if one of the barges they are being shot off of catches fire.  Next year I need to try to watch the Boston fireworks.

A few weeks pass.  The date draws near.  The day before, Vivian almost pulls out claiming an overload of work, but after a quick reminder of her importance to the trip, she made time in her schedule.  One very last minute email around to people asking if they wanted to join, and we had our party.  Morning rolled around and we all were giddy in anticipation.  I printed out maps, studied the route, and went to grab the truck.  I looked back and realized, oh, the back is empty.  Ignoring this fact, I drove around to round up the group.  With one empty seat in the front, the others had to sit in the back.  With the entire group in the van, we took off in the direction of Costco.  We got there shortly and embarked on our journey.  I was hungry and focused on the food samples.  I went to one stand, picked up a small cup of Pom, and was asked if my parent were around.  ”Ummmm… I’m 19.”  Realizing his mistake, he apologized and I went on my way.  An hour later after shopping we reconvened near the entrance.  We checked out with a slight hassle, but not much problem.

Footlong hotdogs in hand (except the vegetarian Moose, who got herself a yummy looking berry smoothie) we returned to the van.  We enjoyed our meals in the back of the van and contemplated the idea of living in a van for Fall semester.  At twenty dollars a day, it would be cheaper than dorm housing.  As we discussed this idea, a Chinese lady came up to the back of the van and looked at us.  She then asked us in Mandarin where to get one of these vans as well.  We all stared at her before Cathy began to reply.  The levels of asianness went like this.  Moose was the least Chinese of all of us.  I can’t speak or understand Mandarin.  Vivian can understand Mandarin but can’t speak, but can speak Cantonese.  Cathy could understand and speak.  After this hilarious encounter it was decided we should return.  Another bumpy van ride back and we returned to our respective residences.

Fast forward to later in the day, at 77 Mass Ave.  A collection of 9 people gathered at the stairs to spend an evening together.  ”How will we get there?”  We point toward the white van parked down the street.  Well at least it doesn’t say “Free Candy” on the side.  They all pile into the back and are very skeptical of how this will work but we reassure that it is …reasonably safe.  Hiding in the backseat, I reassure them that the van is technically marketed as a 15 passenger van.  We take off in the direction of DoReMi, or so I think.  All I am told is to go toward Cambridge St.  I do and we end up at Harvard.  This was not the intended direction.  Yelling ensues about the sanity of the driver but I take charge, grab a map, and figure our route.  We continue driving and eventually make it there, in roughly one piece.

Upon entering the shop, it was deserted of people and zombies.  All we could see were the record player lined wall and LaserDisks.  The owner then arrived and placed us into a room.  Starting the Windows XP karaoke machine and turning on the lights, we were perplexed by the technology.  The music began and the laser lights moved.  After a good two hours of belching songs in a plethora of languages, including 99 Luftaloons (red balloons) (in German) we went home to relax from a night of fun.

More to be read on Vivian’s blog Here

Empty vans are a fun way to get everyone together.  I bet it could fit many more than 15 people.  Shall we try next time?

Rain is fun in limited amounts, but when you’re two miles away from home, it can make your life miserable.  Snow is much better.  You already expect your life to suck, so your expectations are lower.

Since then, we’ve been working to change around smaller details and design aspects.  They’re little things but it’s a few more than a few things.  Hopefully once we get through them, we won’t have to change much later.  This was definitely an experience in working with Wordpress, trying to tackle it to do what we wanted, and figure out why some things would work at times when other things wouldn’t.

Appreciate pre-made themes.  Those designers had to tackle Wordpress to get them to work.  In theory it should be easy, but really it’s not.

(That reminds me, I still need to make a design for my own personal page, and I’ll probably migrate my blog over there as well.)

Then my next goal was to make it work with an SQL server so data could be sent there to be saved.  The data needed to be able to be saved so it could be useful to us.  My goal tomorrow is to add a few more features to that and to write a Java interface to connect to it.  That will lead into my next project programming Java on mobile phones with bluetooth.

Sims 3 is great fun, except each family needs its own neighborhood.  But other than that, it’s nice being able to walk around to other lots.  One main complaint is that fast fast forward is not that much faster.  Oh well.  Maybe if I had a faster processor.

Working from home is nice.  Just make sure not to be distracted all the time.

I wake up every morning
And I head to my PC
To read about PS3
But when I check the gaming forum
Your mistakes are all I see
A grammatical catastrophe

I would like to chat but you just can’t spell, you should learn to spell
It’s not spelled like that, you should learn to spell you should learn to spell

I’d like to make suggestions…but I can’t read what you write, and I’m trying with all my might
When I posted some corrections, I didn’t mean to start a fight, but the thread flamed on all night

Well maybe you’re dyslexic
Or maybe you’re a moron

When you’re talking games you know who to blame if you just can’t spell
At your favorite site you should spell it right you should learn to spell
This goes for Wii and 360 and PC as well
It’s all hard to read so you simply need to learn how to spell
Gotta learn to spell

I know you’re probably thinking to yourself, that it’s just words on a screen
Everybody knows what I mean

But numbers aren’t letters
And U and R are words

Well your NeoGAF message made them laugh cause you could not spell
Over at GameSpot reputation’s shot cause you just can’t spell
And they agree at Quarter to Three and GamersHell
You might try again at IGN once you learn to spell

So it’s I before E except after C
And sometimes “its” does not need an apostrophe
But you don’t even care about “they’re,” “there,” and “their”
It’s like you learned to speak from texting on your cell

When you’re talking games we know who to blame if you just can’t spell
At your favorite site you should spell it right you should learn to spell
If a dictionary’s kinda scary, what the hell?
Then you’re a fool, go back to school and learn to spell

On the internet, this is what you get, people who can’t spell [you should learn to spell]
On the gaming boards, you will be ignored if you just can’t spell [you should learn to spell]
Do only fools use grammar rules where the gamers dwell?
The written word seems so absurd when you can’t spell [you should learn to spell]
I wrote this song cause you typed it wrong and you couldn’t tell [you should learn to spell]
It’s not much fun as the only one here who can spell

I still need ideas of what I want to do with my domain.  Anyone have any ideas?

So today I reinstalled Windows 7 RC because sometimes things just work better in Windows.  Mainly because I was hoping to have more native speed on some Windows only apps.  So far this morning, it has not been much of a success.  The Java ME application doesn’t want to work properly.  It was very difficult to find a RSS feed reader I liked.  Akregator is not included in KDE for Windows.  I might just switch back, try Kubuntu, and run XP in a VM.  But then I also have problems in linux where because I’m using a 64 bit machine certain other programs don’t work.  So, my decision is to try Kubuntu 32 bit.  Lose out on .8GB of my ram, but have more compatability for the loss of performance.

Computers suck.  I’m tired.  And oh lookey, I start doing work RIGHT NOW!

I went on a formal boat cruise held by my dorm.  My floor and Vivian and I dressed up and went to the Boston harbor to board the Spirit of Boston for an evening cruise.  The food there was delicious and the dancing was fun.  Dreamhost had a promotion after Geocities closed offering a free domain for two years so I got myself a domain.  I still do not know what I want to do with it yet.  Any suggestions?

Finals were brutal as expected.  The current C5 GRTs are leaving this year, and sadly Sarah and I were unable to attend their going away dinner, so we baked them a cake.  The cake making began at roughly 5AM and we ended up finishing just in time for Sarah to leave to go home.  This was an adventure, because we didn’t have any ingredients or anything, so we had to explore for some.  The cake batter was also meant to fill two circular cake pans.  We filled one pan and luckily it did not spill over.  It did rise out of the pan though, just slightly awkwardly.  As we were delivering the cake to our GRTs at 8AM, we saw a bird in the hallway.  It was just sitting there and didn’t want to move.  Kieran eventually got Ken who shooed it out of the building.  Then came the packing of the room.  So I didn’t realize move out day was Saturday.  I thought it was Sunday.  Friday night, I began packing up all of my things including all of the random things I had collected over the year.  Luckily I had gotten it done in time to check out and help a friend move into her new place for the summer.  On Sunday, I had my flight at 7AM back home.  Only it wasn’t directly home.  I had a layover, at LAX.  That’s right, I had to fly from Boston to LA to Denver.  Over 10 hours of travel, but it was worth it for only 250 purchased 3 days before the flight.

Since I’ve gotten home, Alex, John-Creig, Brenton, and I went out to the Elephant Bar and got some pretty good food for not that expensive.  We then went bowling where there were a few scores over 150.  I then went to see some other friends and we just hung out.  Then today, or yesterday? I got some books from the library for some reading to brush up on my Java, since that’s what I will be working in for my UROP.

So for my summer I will be back in Boston working in the Media Lab at MIT.  I will be writing Java applications for mobile phones with bluetooth.  I am quite excited and am looking forward to working and being back on campus where I have much more reliable wireless than here at home.  With so much free time over the summer hopefully I will be able to utilize it and learn a few things.  I hope to learn a bit of Chinese before I take the class next semester.  I hope to read a few books, and just do a lot of the things I haven’t been able to do the rest of the year.  I also think that I will try a few more Linux distros for a bit but return to Windows 7 with some KDE4 elements, especially Akregator.  That’s why I haven’t been writing in my blog because I haven’t been seeing other people’s blogs to remind me to blog.  But I promise that I will be better. I hope to just organize my harddrive and learn better time management and just everything.

This was quite the rambling, but hence the title.

Ramble.  It is good for letting things out.  It also gives you a record of what you’ve done in your life to reminisce about later.

Get little pets that like you.

5:10 Buzz, buzz, buzz.

5:30 Jason, we need to get up.
Bleh, it’s not even starting to get light outside.  OH WAIT!  I can sleep on the bus.
And so I get out of bed and get ready to go out for the day with my bag I packed the night before.  Kevin and I walk to the bus in front of McCormick and take our seats.  Mark sits with me, but I soon doze off.

8:30 I wake up in time to realize we’re there.  I look out the window.  That’s a nice hill, now where’s the mountains?  WHAT?!  That’s it?  It’s just like a little clump of dirt that I could walk over.  Either way, we go to the lodge and get our rentals.  Everything’s already set up so we take them and get changed.  So, Kevin, Zac, I think Jacob, and I head up to the lift.  This lift was a fairly longish ride, but it took us all the way to the summit.  I’m still used to needing about 3 lifts to get all the way up to the top.  We go down the gunsmoke trail, a blue, and I fall, quite a number of times.  My skis kept getting caught on each other.  Luckily, after a few more stumbles, I got my technique back and sailed down the rest of the mountain.  Back at base, we went up again.  This time trying a black.  We went up and down quite a number of times and got most of the trails done.  I just refused to do the ones with moguls because I still can’t do them.  I called up Caroline to see when her lesson would be over, and met her and Mark for lunch.  We ate our lunch and met back up with Kevin.  We were up at the summit where all the paths were blues or blacks.  Since both Mark and Caroline were beginners, we stayed with them so they could take their time getting down the mountain.

For our final run, they wanted to go to the sidearm.  Kevin and I wanted something a little more challenging, so we created a little challenge for ourselves.  Caroline and Mark would take the lift up to where the sidearm began, while Kevin and I would go up to the summit and meet them at the end of the lift.  Mind you, their lift only went up halfway up the mountain, but they had to walk to their lift.  Kevin and I got to the summit, and immediately took off down the slope as fast as we could.  To get to the end of their lift even included a section were we would have to walk uphill to get to them.  Finally, when we got there, we still had to wait about a minute for them to come up the lift.  I was so surprised at how quickly we got down.  The four of us went back down to base and returned our gear.  On the bus, I took another nap.

After getting back, the rest of the story can be read on Craig’s blog.  Link.

Go fast, be reckless, just make sure to know how to stop.  Introduce challenges that seem unreasonable, they may pan out and be the most fun part of your excursion.

And so began Mystery Hunt.  The ATS team retreated to our base in room 1-150 to prepare to solve puzzles.  We began with a little puzzle before everything.  Finding out the login information.  We quickly got it and began working.  The way Mystery Hunt is set up is after enough puzzles are solved, more are unlocked and those ones can be solved.  We went on our merry way trying to solve puzzles but became stuck after a while.  The puzzles were just so obscure.

My least favorite puzzle in particular was the charity work puzzle.  It was fairly simple,  just follow a set of directions that the page tells you to do, and it will come up with a solution.  I think we had about 7 different people work on this one and and still fail to get the right answer.  After a while, we did get an answer, not entirely sure who did it.  The next puzzle I greatly disliked was the Plutonian Transport Agency.  On the page was given a list of cars and addresses.  We found the makes and models of each of the cars, and mapped the addresses.  They all happened to be in Cambridge.  It wasn’t until after hints were allowed that we found out it had to do with the street sweeping schedule in Cambridge.  So we sorted the cars by the order the addresses would be swept, took the first letter of the models, and got the message “CAR THAT IS A TREX SINGLE.”  Trex happens to be a band, and so one of their singles was the answer.

These were only two of the many puzzles this year.  I will be excited to do this again next year.  It was fun sleeping in random places in our base room.  ATS had an event scheduled for Sunday night.  We had a Karaoke night that everyone left puzzle hunting to go to.  It was quite the nice break from staring at a screen and not knowing what to do…albeit looking at Chinese lyrics doesn’t help much either.  The coin was finally found by the team “Beginner’s Luck” 63 hours after the hunt began.

Don’t be logical with puzzles.  Think the craziest things you can do with them, and that is probably what the puzzle maker did.

The third class we play with timers to do things like turn off an LED after a calculated time.  The professor also plugged in a capacitor the wrong way into a breadboard.  Although we were prepared for it, the sound was still surprisingly loud from such a small object.  Charging a polarized capacitor the wrong way will quickly make it explode.  The fourth class we learned about digital circuits and how to use gates to do boolean algebra.  We also moved from the small lab we were in to the 6.111 lab with their larger, better equipment.

For the last class, we only made one final circuit.  It was a digital lock where depending on the sequence the switches were depressed, the LED would turn on.  We used a combination of NAND gates, AND gates, and shift registers to make the circuit.  It took me almost the full four hours to make the circuit because first, I wanted to make the wires look nice, and second, because the LAs would refuse to help if the wires were not multiple colours.  We got to take this circuit home to be able to show off.  I’m quite glad I made it pretty.

Be anal about the appearance of things you can bring home to show off.  Pretty things are more fun to present.

I also eventually installed Ubuntu and Kubuntu because I wanted to see if I still hated it as much as I did previously.  For the most part, most things worked.  The main problem was that because it was set up so the Xorg server would determine the screen resolution, it would default to a quite small 640×480 screen.  VMware can resize its “screen size” so there is no actual default resolution that it will send other than a regular vga size screen.  At least this was easily fixed with RandR.  My next step was to install Debathena.  After all, this was the main reason I was willing to try Ubuntu again.  MIT SIPB all use Ubuntu and does not support the other distros very well.  On Ubuntu I ran into some troubles with it not resolving dependencies well, but for the most part it has worked on Kubuntu.  The last struggle I have is getting zephyr to work.  Currently it says it times out when trying to get a location.  Not sure what that means because a quick google search does not lead to any help about zephyr nor does the the documentation.  I have not tested that thoroughly yet, but most stuff seems to be working.

My problems include a variety of everything from general system lagginess (to be expected, but not this much) to sound skipping to everything still not working perfectly.  Overall on all of the systems, they’ve been slightly laggy when transitioning between my host OS and the guest OS, but once I’ve been inside the guest for a few seconds, the mouse works fine.  The keyboard lags and may occasionally drop keys or repeat one.  The sound has also been choppy on the systems.  I looked up suggestions to change sizes of some of the settings, but that didn’t help much.  My networking is still sometimes spotty and does not work as well as I would hope.  Maybe VMware will fix this in Windows 7 soon.

When emulating things, do not expect them to be as fast as they would be on their native hardware.  Be ready to wait in frustration.

Get everything done early, especially if they depend on your memory.  Your memory will fail you.

Deep inside the Windows 7 Public Beta: an in-depth tour

I cleared my entire hard drive for Windows 7.  This means I removed my linux(es) and Vista partitions completely.  I wondered if I would regret my decision of not having linux running natively on my machine, but so far, Windows 7 has not disappointed (much).  The only problem so far has been getting internet working with VMware, but that has been partially solved.  I have also only had 1 BSoD so far.

Windows 7 as “Linux killer”? How times have changed!

Windows has finally released another good operating system, but that actually is pretty and I might use.  Everyone go get Windows 7 beta now, before the trial period closes.

The next day, I woke up fairly late and realized it was about time to go join ATS and do a practice Mystery Hunt.  I went out to the Student Center and found Wei in the PDR.  I pulled out my computer and began working on the first puzzle.  I was invited to a Google Docs file where we were collaborating on answers.  I invited Vivian in to help out as well.  Even though she was still in Texas, it would be good to practice.  After a while, not many were focused on puzzle solving anymore, and were doing other things.  There were cards flying around everywhere and Nick finished folding his flower.

Free time is precious.  Abuse it.

An update on reuse machine.  It is working with Windows XP now, and works with the TV in the lounge.  Slowly everything is coming together.  I am happy.

Monitors are EXTREMELY heavy.  Unless you want to be masochistic, don’t carry it alone.  I guess there are those people here at MIT who truly are masochistic.

Great, just great.

By the way, the new Macbook Pro 17″ was just announced, and the 7-8 hour battery life sounds amazing.  If only the price weren’t so expensive.

While speaking of 17″ laptops.  Lenovo’s Thinkpad W700ds looks amazing with its second monitor as well.  That would be so useful to keep windows to the side while I worked, just to keep me distracted.

Enough of my product advertising.

• 6.091 Intro to EE Lab Skills
• Mystery Hunt with ATS
• Make a successful install on my reuse machine
• Nuke my computer and start fresh
• Spend more time with friends
• Eat healthier
• Learn to cook
• Exercise more
• Try to find time to visit friend at Yale
• Charm School
• Learn Dvorak keyboard layout
• Many non-credit classes
• Spend more time in Boston
• Find a normal sleep pattern by the end of IAP
• Relearn violin?
• Read a few books
• Enjoy MIT

Overall, I am fairly displeased with the number of problems in this version.  Many problems are probably because of incompatibilities in the config files from different versions.  So, since I need to clean my machine anyway.  I am going to nuke my entire machine and start fresh.  Install Vista with a smaller partition.  Install a clean OpenSUSE 11.1.  Leave some space for Gentoo.  Install VMware and install XP with hardware 3d acceleration so I can still play games like Age of Empires 2 which won’t run under Vista.

Nuke everything before trying new software.  Being clean is good.

The next few days were taken up by me visiting a few friend’s houses playing a few games like Munchkin.  I went to Newnan’s on Sunday and had a nice catching up in his hot tub.  It is much more painful to run to the hot tub in the cold than to run from it.  We then played Gears of War until we finished it quite late into the night.

Monday began with me waking up quite late and my parents yelling at me to get packing.  I arose and ate a lunch of noodles and took my clothes downstairs to wash.  As I wait for my clothes to wash, I return to my computer to watch some Simpsons and talk with my friends.  As the last of my clothes finish washing, I begin packing them into the suitcase.  My mother had already packed a great deal of food so I had to search around for places to put my clothes.  I finish up packing and soon after we leave for the airport.  I get to the bag check and see my bag weighs 65 pounds.  Much over the 50 pound limit.  Luckily, I had anticipated this and brought two suitcases, one within the other.  I stepped aside to take the little one out and reweighed the bag.  35 pounds.  Much better.  They send off my bag and I walk toward the security checkpoint.  I pass through the metal detector and my suitcase is pulled aside.  They ask to look through the bag.  The pudding my mom packed needed to be thrown out, and the buns my mom made were also almost thrown out, but were deemed okay.  Relieved that everything else was fine, I went toward the trains to the concourse.  I get there and very quickly hop on my computer to check things one last time.  Luckily Denver International Airport has free wifi.

We all climb aboard the plane and strap in.  I sit next to the window and have an empty seat next to me.  There is a crying baby in the back of the plane, but I just shut them out with my headphones.  Since JetBlue has DirecTV and XM radio, I pass the time easily as my redeye flight goes through the sky.  We touch down safely at Logan airport at 4:40 AM and I quickly go to baggage claim 4 to pick up my bag.  I stand around watching everyone waiting for the bags to start to come down the carousel.  As I look around, I notice a distinct light blue button on a backpack.  MIT ‘10.  Yes!  I’m not the only one heading to campus.  I walk up to the lady with the backpack, inquire as to how she plans to return to campus, and ask if she might split cab fare with me because the T has probably not yet started at this hour.  We retrieve our bags and take the taxi back to campus.  We do our introductions in the car and I find out her name is Tammy/Tammi(SP?). The cab drops us off in front of BC and we each head home.  I get back to my room and notice that my beaver I received from Vivian is missing.  I interrogate my roommate and Harvard Girl about his whereabouts but the two of them seem to be very vague.  I yell at Tim until he searches the room and I am reunited with my beaver.  All is good.

Never mention your other friends when you’re with one already.  Plans will be ruined by those named Sarah.

I guess I should summarize what I’ve been up to.  On Christmas Day, my parents and I went to our cousins on the other side of the city for a birthday party.  We didn’t make it home until after midnight.  The next few days were uneventful, although I began trying to find an alternative for the broken Xbox360 and Rockband.  I found FretsOnFire and Unsigned.  They both work with the console instruments and are both free.  The problems are that FretsOnFire doesn’t support vocals yet, at least that I can find, and Unsigned seems to have less of a community to help.  I was able to obtain all of the Rockband and Rockband 2 songs for FretsOnFire and will hopefully be able to play it on the reuse machine that I got.  Yay for IAP projects.

Monday was an MIT Club of Colorado meetup for alumni and current students.  It was nice to see how many alumni there were and how successful they were.  Later that day, I went to see Benjamin Button.  Warning: that is a 3 hour long movie.  Get comfortable.  It was a very … interesting movie.  Especially when the old man who was 7 could definitely be seen as a pedophile going into a little fort with a little girl.  My break has not consisted of much besides trying to fix OpenSUSE and its wireless problems.  NetworkManager doesn’t want to work properly.  And playing Pokemon with Vivian.

OpenSUSE had a festive GRUB menu for Christmas.  The penguins were animated too.  ^_^

Okay, now I need to get ready to go out with a Yalie and watch New Year’s fireworks.

Don’t be lazy and do nothing.  Your friends will yell at you.

If you want a happy time here’s the way
Pick your classes so you always get an A
You big nerds, all in course 6
Have no free time, we both agree
While I play bingo and pickup sticks
We’ll both still get a Tech degree

MIT is easy when you study biology
Or course 13, or course 13
Planetary science is the ultimate party scene
Just like 15, just like 15

My one problem set is due the first of May
If it’s past or late I’ll go find my TA
Bat my eyes and act real ditsy
Say he’s cute and flirt in class
I hope that med school will be this easy
I’ll get an A, and I will pass

MIT is easy when you study biology
Learn about proteins, examine genes
Imagine if you never had to hand in a problem set
Get lots of sleep, that’s what you’d get

My TA speaks real good English
We look at the zebra fish
There’s no math or calculation
It’s easier than mastication

My exams are a fiesta
Grades are on an A+ scale
And in class there’s a siesta
You never fail, you never fail

MIT is easy when you study biology
We party lots, others cannot
While you’re dressed to study, we run out to get our booze
Or hit the snooze, or hit the snooze

MIT is easy when you study biology
Intense premeds, four-color pens
All you have to do is have a pulse and you’ll get an A
Class is a laugh don’t need no math

MIT is easy when you study biology

Awesome song.  BTW, VLC currently has a santa hat on it.

I wake up the next morning and go to my high school.  Sadly I get there after the faculty skit (I forgot about it) where they usually parody  the students.  All the faculty are at their White Elephant Gift Exchange and half the students are off campus getting lunch.  I arrived at the worst possible time.  Wandering the halls, I do find some of my friends there and eventually everyone returns.  I greet everyone and EVERYONE asks how’s MIT.  I try to best represent the pain and anguish the classes have caused me.  At home, I try out the new OpenSUSE release.

The next day is an alum meetup.  Everyone gets hugs including the short little asian senior girls.  It is nice to see much of the class again and we all talk of our adventures in college.  Many of them involve drunk people, naked people, and everything.  We all go to the upper school to look at our class photo because rumor has it someone was cut out.  We look closely at the photo, remark about how we’re all touched up so much and find our missing classmate.  He was standing separate of everyone in the photo, so they decided he needed to be taken out to make the picture look better.  Although it would be very awkward to have him standing alone, I still find it awful how they did that to him.  We go to the Spicy Pickle for food, and had found some of our classmates leaving, going to the mall.  We eat and try to join up with them, but just as we get there, they are about to leave.  They only needed one thing and one of them had to go babysitting.  We all head our own ways and I go visit my friend from middle school.  She needs to go hang lights and I choose to fill the “management” position.  That was quite fun, maybe I should think about course 15.

Today I had to ship my sister’s charger she forgot to pack.  My sister and I missed each other by mere hours.  She left before I got into Denver.  Since it was Saturday, the post offices have shorter hours, so I searched online to try to find one that would be open.  I find one in Littleton and head there to try to mail off the package.  When I get there, I drive around but can’t find the post office.  This is a small problem.  I need to ship this off sooner than later.  I go for one of my new toys, a GPS unit, (my other is a new camera), search for a post office, and head on my way.  I get there and it is closed, but luckily there is a machine I can use to purchase postage.  I send off the box successfully.  I head to the library next to pick up some books so I can start hacking away at my booklist.  I also buy some strings to get my tennis racquet restrung so I can play again in Boston.

Make friends, be social, don’t be depressed all the time, your school might disown you

I wake up and reboot the machine.  The first time I booted it hung for a while.  I thought it was just fsck-ing but I went from the pretty framebuffered screen to the terminal and saw it hung on something.  HAL (Hardware abstraction layer) crashed somewhere and was displaying a stack trace.  Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with this error (should have sent a bug error), and hit ctrl+c to get out of it and try to start the system.  At least it wasn’t a fatal kernel crash.  My /home wasn’t mounted so none of my settings could be loaded.  Ahh crap.  I already broke something.  I rebooted everything hoping somehow it would all be better.  It was.  Weird… two hiccups, I never had this before.

I boot up and everything is running smoothly.  KDE4 compositing is on and everything is pretty looking.  I try to get online and realize I’m not connected.  I try to connect to the wireless with knetworkmanager/kde3 but nothing happens.  Why doesn’t this work?!  Wireless was working fine on the live cd.  I eventually go into Yast again and change it so the network is not managed by networkmanager.  It works.  This could be a slight problem trying to connect to obscure wireless networks that I’m not familiar with.  For the moment it works.  I try to search around on the wiki about how it normally uses networkmanager but find nothing.  After a bit of searching, I find a widget for Networkmanager and try that.  I eventually get it to work after a few restarts and a few setting changes.  Maybe this is a remanant of having an old ~/.kde4.  Three hiccups.  This is a little disappointing, but at least I was able to get past them.  It is a slight disappointment how there are these small problems, but  I know it will be better.

The desktop itself is very pretty.  Compositing is enabled by default and my machine takes advantage of this.  Transparencies and rotating cubes and more eye candy everywhere.  I still love OpenSUSE even with the few problems I ran into.  My only disappointment is the networkmanager widget.  It is less straightforward than the kde3 version, but that version doesn’t work anymore as far as I can tell.  I have yet to test the suspend to disk/ram, but they should work.  Will report back when I do.  I still recommend OpenSUSE to everyone who wants a good linux distro.

New releases of software will have slight problems.  Work through them and everything will hopefully work.

I studied all of Sunday at Next on 8.01 Physics Mechanics not for Masochists.  Took the test Monday morning 9-12 and did not think it was utterly and completely horrible.  It began with a post-diagnostic test, which should be 26 free points, essentially.  Then the real exam began.  Luckily we were allowed to drop a question so I dropped the one about a gyroscope in a car.  The rest, I thought were decent, and I just hope I get a passing score on the test.  Then everything will be good.  They STILL haven’t posted scores.  The other physics have their scores already.  Anyway.  After the test, I found Rachel and we got ourselves some soup from the LEM (Luteran Episcopal Ministry).  I went to the student center to get some more food, and found the group of 8.012 people.  We got food and moped around about our physics tests.  I returned to my dorm to “study” for my 3.091 exam.  We calculated it and I needed only about 4% to pass the class, so I worked so very hard to understand every little bit of information that I could absorb.

I walk in to Johnson Tuesday morning and find a seat in the back.  Sadoway is dressed in a tux again and he begins the test.  I quickly go over what I do know, skip over all things amino acid/lipids/organic and try to maximize my points before I leave an hour early.  I return home, sleep, and try to start studying for 18.01, which I know decently well enough to pass enough without studying too much.  Wednesday morning, Vivian calls me to remind me to meet her early for an quick cram session before the test, so I head out to meet her.  We take the test and I passed the final with a 76/120.  Yay.  Afterward, we go to Anna’s to grab quesadillas and head to the Coop.  We find Moose (yes, Moose) and all head over to Kendall where I obtain myself a MIT umbrella.  I find a little stuffed beaver and cuddle with it for a while.  A while being the rest of the time we are in the store.  We look at the toys and see a dreaded gyroscope.  Vivian wants it so I pick one up for her.  We finish shopping and I drop the beaver in Vivian’s basket.  After we purchase everything, Vivian and I exchange gifts ^_^.  She got a gyroscope and a magnet saying “never never never give up”  and I get a stuffed beaver.  I think I win this trade.  After all, the beaver is SO MUCH cuter cuddlier softer BETTER more stuffed than the giver of the gift.  Hehe.

Vivian and I wander campus, visiting the physics department… and wandering a little in tunnels.  We head back home because I need to start packing.  I finally begin at around 3, finish in like 10 minutes, and decide I need to clean my desk.  I do so and there is SO MUCH more room now than there was 25 minutes before.  I make my bed, and my side of the room is clean and made.  I just wish it could stay that way.  I head out to Kendall to get to the airport. As I drag my bags along, I write a text to send to everyone.

Goodbye all! I am now leaving this dreaded place called MIT.  I am going to a place where everything will be better.  Goodbye.  You will all be worse without me.

When I get there I find some other MITs waiting at gate C33 to Tampa.  Their flight was delayed because the plane was simply circling the airport.  Apparently Logan went into a ground state.  They finally get on their plane, and I get onto mine a few minutes later.  The flight takes longer than expected because of headwinds, and I make it to Denver around midnight.  I am currently writing from my bed in Denver,  it creaks a lot.

When you coddle a stuffed animal long enough in a store, eventually someone will buy it for you.  Take advantage of this!

We all clamored onto Chao’s bed and tried to take a break from 8.01(2) and all got tired.  It was becoming dark but was only 3:30.  Vivian went to her room to take a nap and I kept on studying my 8.01.  I slowly came to understand the material but would need a better source of learning.  I stole myself a Kleppner book and read about central force things.  I kept studying and eventually crashed on Chao’s bed.  Chao’s yelling at me to study instead of blog, so I go return to that.

Take advantage of free food.  It is yummy.

After everyone was done with their game, we all went around crufting.  We wandered the tunnels collecting things.  Cathy got two drum lids and a wooden box.  I got myself a hex wrench.  We then returned to EC after collecting our things and collected in Kevin’s room all with our laptops each doing our own thing.

Avoid Windows.  And old Windows games.

I make it to class.  During my lunch break, I find Vivian in the green lounge and we go to math together.  It’s review so the both of us are bored and just on our computers.  By the end, Vivian was so dead she was falling asleep on her computer.  Aww, Vivian, I know you’re tired, but you can work through the tiredness.  I make it to my pistol class where we actually score our targets.  Of 20 shots, I got a score of 174.  Pretty good!  Good enough to get me second place in the class.  Yay!

At home, a good number of wings found their way down my throat at the dorm-wide study break.  After that, Vivian and I watched (a show that shall not be named in such a public forum)(one of my least well kept secrets) and all I have to say is WAHH!  I got bored and wanted to play on the Xbox, but it has been Red Ring of Deathing, so games have been a vailure recently.  The Wii also needs an update to be able to play Wii Music, which I don’t want to do.  I should stop writing before my writing keeps going further down the drain.

Looking nice because a girl made you is quite nice.  Everyone give in to the wishes of the women in your lives.  Wait… I didn’t just say that!

I asked this to Vivian on Saturday.  It seems like this weekend I have been with her, Chao, and Lindsey this entire weekend.  It all began Thursday night when Sarah and I went over to Next to work on our respective psets.  Vivian and I BS’ed our way through 18.01 We stayed up all night long scraping along trying to get as many points as we could on the assignment.  I made it back to Burton Conner and tried to work on 8.01 and eventually went to Baker to work on it.  I successfully finished with a little time to spare, so I wanted to visit Kathy’s room which is supposed to be very festively decorated.  I called her up and she immediately yelled at me to get to the student center for the FUP party.  Oh no!  I forgot about that.  I ran to turn in my pset then meet everyone from FUP again. I got there in time to see Santa come in and play with all the little children.

After all that was done, it was time for the MITSO concert.  There were three pieces, one by Beethoven and the middle piece, which I will only say was… quite unique.  After the concert, we all waited around to greet the musicians.  I saw Vivian and Chao running off.  I intercepted them and walked with them for a little until I decided I was hungry.  I went to the student center where Craig was serving waffles.  Craig is a SaveTFP wannabe, so they got him to do all of their menial labour and serve everyone.  I found Vicky in line and went to talk with her.  Yay for Coloradoans.  A great desire to visit EC came over me, and I walked with her and her mother back to EC.  I found Cathy and we played Rockband.  We got to talking and she tried to convince me to move to EC.  But I like living at BC!  I have nothing against EC, it’s just BC is closer to more people. ^.^

I woke up on Saturday at around 2 and was in a quite depressed state for some reason.  I was moping around and just did not want to do anything.  Kevin had left the room to go see the CrossProducts concert so I felt I needed to get out of the room as well.  I decided to visit Vivian and brought her a large greasy pizza from Cambridge Grill.  We just talked in her room for a while until Chao came and was begging us to go with him to the Galleria.  We got on the SafeRide at 9:30 to try to make it at the Galleria before it closed at 11:00.  We took the Cambridge West to 84 Mass Ave to get on the Cambridge East.  I could tell Chao was getting slowly angrier and angrier at Vivian for losing time to shop.  We finally got there at 10:05 and immediately went to Express.  Chao got his jeans at quite a large discount and we proceeded to shop…. for me.  To Aeropostale we went.  They picked out some jeans and sweaters for me to try.  We went to the changing rooms where we found out the glass was clear.  Uhh… am I supposed to change behind a clear glass pane?  Well… when I went in, the glass fogged up, which was really cool.  I came out with my jean and sweater combination and the two of them were overly giddy about how I looked so I got the clothes.  (Will be wearing on Tuesday.)  After shopping, we made it back to Next where we played Rockband until 3.

I woke up at 1:30 and Tim began to cook pancakes.  Sadly, I had to head out to Kresge to see Concert Choir.  After the concert, I ran into Vivian (who sang) and Lindsey and Chao.  We ate at the Cambridge Grill and headed to BC to show Lindsey around.  We tried to play Rockband, but we got the Red Ring of Death, so we were going to go to Next.  When we were about to make it tot he elevator, we found Sarah who joined us going to Next.  We ventured to Next and played Apples to Apples, which was a … interesting game.  Quite decently fun.  Sarah and I had to leave to get our hockey gear to play the last game of the season.  Sadly we lost to B1 B3 B4.  It was still fun.

This entire weekend has been music and Nexties.  I am even about to head back over to keep playing some more games.  Even though I was moping around earlier Saturday, going over and spending time with people made my day so much better.  I will let you all take from that first quote what you will.  Oh, right, I changed my theme because it finally snowed… WIMPY snow.

Have fun.  That’s a command.  Go now!

As I walk, the weight of everything begins to weigh down on me.  I need to take a break at every bench I see.  This is ridiculous.  I’m never going to make it to Burton Conner at this rate.  As I carry this, I remember that there are carts at BC desk that I can check out.  How could I forget?  I set the boxes down in lobby 7 and rush to desk to get the cart.

I make it back to building 7, load the boxes onto the cart, walk back to BC, and get there right as the mailman arrives with a package for me.  I get to my room and offload the cart, text my roommate and open the package.

“I got two computers.  Yay” I send to my roommate.
I open my package and on top of everything I find a note from my kindergarten buddy!  He’s now in first grade and he’s such a cute child.  His note says:

Dear Jason
What Is your favorite sport?  Whats your favorite Class?  I had My Berthday on SepTember 17.  My fend George came over and We playd Moreo Kart Wii.  Please Write Me back.  love Matthew.

Awww, cute.  The rest of the package was a care package from my high school with many cookies.  Must have cookie now.  Today was such a great day.  Was, until tonight, 18.01&8.01 psets FTL.

When carrying large items across campus, it would be helpful to have other people to help carry, or better yet, wheels.  Someone out there in the world needs to build a collapsible cart everyone can carry everywhere.

Jojo (sister’s boyfriend) left around 8 to pick up his niece to join us on our trip into New York.  He got back and we walked to the Path into NYC.  Getting off at 33rd St, we transferred to the subway, took the Q, and got off on 55th Street.  There’s a big crowd already.  I guess it is 9, it would have started already.

We couldn’t get nearer the front, but at least we could still see the balloons.  It all began with a Macy’s balloon.  I was at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Yay!  We were there for a while, and at one point, I looked up not expecting anything and saw a floating pumpkin!  I thought I was going crazy, but then realized it was another balloon.  We left at 10:30 to head back home.  Taking a fairly round-about way we made it to Brooklyn accidentally, and had to turn around.  We got off the subway at City Hall and walked to the WTC site.  We got on the Path and went home.

A nice nap later, it was 3.  I was hungry and wanted sustenance.  We got into the car and went to Jojo’s parents for dinner.  I had some delicious foods there.  One of his relatives was amazed that I went to MIT and had to shake my hand.  I was a little celebrity to him, haha.  After dinner was done, we drove around and made it to this hill that had a nice view of the New York City skyline.  Sadly, the photos I took were blurry and would not make a panoramic picture well.  I need a DSLR!

There are more pictures.  I promise.  I just need to upload them to picasa.  I will do that … eventually.

When trying to make it to something you expect a crowd, make it there early.  Camp out a few weeks in advance if necessary.

Edit: I still need to write about Black Friday a month after it happened, so I don’t think it deserves its own post now…  So here it shall be.

T’was the day after Thanksgiving, and all through the city, every store was crowded, especially B&N.  The three of us went into the city to do a bit of sightseeing.  We wandered down Wall St. and saw the NYSE.  At least the building is a bit sturdier than the markets.  We then went to South Street Seaport to TKTS to try to get tickets to a show but there was a long line.  We waited in line for an hour to get tickets.  That was a long wait just to get to the booth.  Then we wandered into Chinatown where my sister took me to get my hair cut.  We then went sightseeing around NYC.  We made it to Grand Central Station, the New York Public Library, and the Rockefeller Center.  We had dinner at TGI Friday’s  and walked down Times Square.  At around seven, we went to Broadway, went to the Golden Theatre, and got in with our tickets to AVENUE Q!! ^_^

Such a great show.  We head home and crash.  The next day is a relaxing day where we don’t do much except celebrate my sister’s birthday.  We go out for dinner in Newark at this nice Spanish restaurant.  After dinner, we head into the city to try to see a movie, but it was sold out, so we went to billiards.  The next day my sister and I trekked through the rain to the Port Authority Bus Terminal to get me on a bus back to Boston where I found Alina and Eli.  We sat together on the bus which took two hours longer than expected because of traffic.

Know that the internet is for porn, and that we’re all just a little bit racist.  It will get you through life.

“What river runs through the Grand Canyon?”  The Colorado, of course!  Yes.  Easy questions.  This is going to be fun.  I sure was wrong about the easy questions.  They got hard, weird, and obscure.  They were also hard to hear.  In the entire restaurant, there was only one speaker, and we were around a corner from the speaker.  Lots of people were talking also so we couldn’t hear over them.  With these problems, we were getting tired of trivia and left halfway through.  We didn’t want to struggle through another hour so we headed home. Free food is always good and delicious.

When you’re trying to do a trivia thing with people reading the questions in a loud restaurant, make sure everyone who’s trying to play can hear.  Add more speakers!

At 5:50 I headed out of my dorm to turn in the masochistic pset and head to South Station to catch the bus to New York to visit my sister. It was dark and no one was around, except for a lot of taxis. A few came up to me and asked if I needed a ride. One even claimed that Kendall was closed for the next three hours and he’d be able to take me to wherever I wanted. Needless to say, I turned him down and turned in my pset.

I get to Kendall and catch the Red Line to South Station where I get off and walk around trying to find the bus terminal. The place felt oddly like an airport, but maybe that’s because I’ve never been to a bus/train station. I follow the signs and finally make it to the bus terminal. I find the signs for Peter Pan buses to New York and get in line. I could not believe how many people there were waiting to get on the bus. I eventually got on and took my seat. We left Boston and I tried to unsuccessfully go to sleep. So here comes my blog post.

Don’t always trust taxi drivers. They’re just out to make money with your best interests not necessarially at the top of their priority list.

Holiday dinner begins at 5 in the conference room.  I visit Caroline to see what she is making for dinner and find her making cheese stuffed croissant things.  She is excited because it is her first cooking experience and she is already experimenting.  They all quickly cook and we try some.  We sample them and they are quite good.  At 5, we start bringing the food down to the conference room and set up the room for everyone.  Kristina and I carry tables from Porter Room to try to make room.  The food all looks delicious.

Mark is elected to cut the turkey and begins to hack away.  There is so much food on the table I don’t know where to start.  The first thing my fork makes it into is the glazed ham sitting in front of me.  Everything was quite delicious.  I eat so much that I feel full, and I keep eating.  Food is still on my plate before I can’t fit anything else into my stomach.  Everyone seems to have finished so Kristina announced the superlatives.  I won three: most like a potato, most likely to be asleep in the lounge, and least likely to go skydiving.

When everyone on the floor cooks a dish, there will never be a lack of food to eat.  So much food too many times will make you fat.

So I felt I should do this piece because I haven’t done a piece of stream of consciousness since junior year.  It was in Junior Writing Seminar where we had to do this.  We began every class with a 10 minute writing session about anything and everything that came to the pen.  The difference was that it didn’t have to be intelligible so I could write anything.  Often it got bad enough that I couldn’t even read what I was writing.  I really need to learn to type faster and type with less typos because I keep making mistakes and that slows me down.  I should also learn Dvorak keyboard layout.  Then I can type faster without being slowed down by qwerty.  Tim is rustling.  I think that I might be waking him up by the clacking of my keyboard.  But it’s 8.  So he should be around waking up time anyway.  I haven’t gone to bed yet so I can’t wake up yet.  Oh well.  Crap.  I need all of today to study for 3.091 test tomorrow.  I don’t know it at all.  And today is holiday dinner.  That means that I won’t be getting much work done.  This is bad.  I will have to squeeze in work time before and after everything.  Should I go to the xifan breakfast thing with ATS?  I don’t particularly like it too much, even when I had it at the restaurant.  I don’t like how the soggy rice tastes for some reason.  Maybe it’s cause when mom and dad made it, they made it really plain.  That was boring… I lost any train of thought I was supposed to write on.  I learned to just keep writing during this stream of consciousness because then the pen will still be moving and be writing something down.  I need to learn how to spell consciousness well.  It is very much slowing me down.  The sun is so bright.  It is reaching my bed.  It gets so dark so early here! I don’t like it.  I like being able to see where I’m going at 5 still.  Crap.  5.  That’s when the dinner is.  Okay, I should really start studying after I finish writing this thing.  Oh, and I’m hungry apparently.  Stomach noises.  Oo I have salt and vinegar chips in my desk.  That will be so healthy… great.  Salt and vinegar chips are good, except when they burn off all the taste buds from your tongue.  The only ones I found that do that are the Lays Stax ones.  Those are good though.  So much flavour.  Kevin is kinda waking up.  He is turning around in his bed.  He took his blanket over him. I think I’m too loud for him.  When I turn my face it feels warm for some reason.   I don’t know.  Oh junior writing seminar.  Sitting next to Brenton and Robert.  That was fun.  We made fun of Brenton all the time.  It was easy too, because he just took it and didn’t fight much.  That was funny during ultimate when someone, I don’t remember who, but they found out they could push Brenton over at any point of his body.  They pushed him over at his ankle.  Brenton needs to get some weight on him.  Weight.  I may have already gained my freshman fifteen.  My ten minutes are up.

I enjoyed this.  I will have to do it more often when I know that I have 10 free minutes that are being useless for anything else.  It is a good practice of typing speed and proficiency.  During IAP I’ll learn Dvorak keyboard layout (hopefully) and be faster.  I’m still writing in stream of consciousness so I guess I’ll try to finish as soon as I can.  I’m really looking forward to IAP.   It’s going to be so great.  Having free time to do whatever I want and doing battlecode with Vivian.  Okay.  I’m done.

At 4:20 my timer went off telling me to put the clothes in the dryers.  I head downstairs to put them in.  I open the first washer, and to my surprise, there was water still.  Had it not spun out any of the water?  I check the screen.  It says: reselect cycle.  I do so and have to frustratingly wait another 40 minutes for those clothes to finish washing before I can dry them.  The clothes in the second washer are better, so I take them to the dryer.  Everything is good.  I go to the techcash machine and I swipe my card.  “Please try again”  I swipe and swipe, and it finally reads my card after about 40 swipes.  Frustrating, but at least it works.

Don’t depend on laundry to follow a tight time schedule.  There will be problems.

Well, I woke up just now, not kidding.  I checked my phone for what calls I had and called Sharon(Yalie).  During the conversation, I realized… The past 24 hours, I did two things.  Rockband and sleep.  Yes, that is all.

It all began when I finished my 18.01(single var calc) test.  (Yay pass)  I got home and went online where Craig invited me over to MacGreggor to play some Wii RockBand.  I went over with Tim(roommate) and we played for a while.  Then it was nearing 9.  It was time for the RockBand Tournament!

The team was Kevin, Sarah, Tim, and me.  We all gathered in the student center with SaveTFP.  It took them a little while to get everything set up, but it was all eventually working.  We eventually went up and played Say It Aint So.  We rocked the song,  Problem was, the other team rocked the song better.  Luckily, this was a double elimination tournament.  The second song we played was Ballroom Blitz.  We hadn’t played this song much before, and so were inexperienced in this song.  We played half decently well throughout the song until (not pointing any fingers) our drummer died and we failed the song at 98%.  We were eliminated.  Oh well, it was all in good fun. 

Most of the other teams were absolutely amazing.  Most of them were in the very high 90s, like 99%.  It was a spectacle to watch.

If you can’t read that, it’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl with 1,200,502 points, 5 stars, 98%, 96%, 93% 99%.  Wow.  401 note streak.

For the rest of these past 24 hours, I slept.  I didn’t have any reason to wake up any earlier, so I guess I didn’t

I go to Anna’s to get a burrito for dinner, and in line, I receive a text.  It’s Najah.  She’s asking if I’m going to go to the carnival.  I had completely forgotten about that!  I finish getting my burrito and walk to Johnson.  I find a Cathy on the phone as I walk, and we go to the 2012 carnival together.  We make it there and find Omar getting some cotton candy.  The cotton candy is a nice sugary purple.

In the actual gym, we find lots of inflatable bouncy things like human foosball and slides, but not that many people.

Disappointingly we leave.  Cathy has her pistol session soon after so I walk with her to the range.  She goes and gets ready to shoot and I head home after a good distraction from my 18.01 studying.

Luckily I had my camera this time to take some pictures.  Camera is a necessity at all times.  Also is learning how the gun works before shooting.

On Tuesday, we had an IM hockey game against BTB (Burton Third Bombers).  Everyone was looking forward to the game including yours truly.  After classes on Tuesday, I thought I’d take a nap and be well rested for the game.  I went to sleep at around 4, and didn’t wake up until I received a text message asking for help on the Mastering Physics.  This was at 11:30.  The game was at 9.  I overslept!  This was very disappointing and I missed out on an opportunity to use my camera to share with you all.

Make sure to be well rested well before anything important, not just immediately before.  Sleep can bite you on the ass.

I need to read more often, especially including powerful pieces like this book.  See Booklist.

How is it that the person who went to sleep latest woke up earliest?  When your roommate is kind and yells at you to wake up, you should wake and at least try to make it to your next class.  Don’t just go back to sleep until he comes back to yell at you to wake again.

If you’re a girl, never run into a crowd and ask for help on a Warcraft game.  You will be ridiculed.

At 1:00 we all met in the Burton-Conner lobby.  All of us except for maybe two are freshmen.  We walk all the way to the Kendall T stop and Itaru is surprised.  “Never have I been in a group larger than like three where everyone had a CharlieCard.” All of us climb on the Red Line and change at Park St. to change to the Orange Line where we get off at the Wellington stop so Itaru can call the people to ask for a shuttle.  We wait there for probably a good 20 minutes before Itaru calls again only to find out we missed the van.  We wait another few minutes and a green minivan pulls up.  We clamber into the van.  It’s 10 of us plus two more people and the driver trying to fit into a 7 passenger van.  No need to say it was a tight squeeze.  We finally make it to MetroRock.

We head into the rock climbing facility and sign the waivers.  (Edit:)Unnamed(16) is of course “18 years of age” so she doesn’t need the parental consent and can sign it herself.  We all get our gear and suit up and head to the little section upstairs where they will give us the belay test.  I pass easily having belayed before for my high school interims.

The place is crowded and everyone is watching the dyno competition.  Dyno is a maneuver where you are not in contact with the rock for a time.  Think of the jump Leonidas did in 300.  THIS IS SPARTA! Speaking of Leonidas, there was even a guy who had the exact same beard and everything.  I watch a few jumps, but am more interested in climbing myself.  Caroline and I begin a simple climb and quickly finish that.

Going to another climb, Caroline begins.  She tries to go up but wants to give up four feet off the ground.  I refuse to let her down and make her go up all the way.  During the climb she gets progressively angrier at me refusing to let her down.  It takes her a little while, but she eventually makes it all the way up. Of course, after making her climb, I let her down only after she sings a Disney song.  We eventually get to this one climb.  I again force Caroline to do it, but this was a very easy climb.  I want to have fun with this climb and just scramble up as fast as I can.  It probably took me less than a minute (probably 20 seconds) to make it to the top.  For my last climb, I try the hard climb Caroline took earlier.  I find the climb hard, mainly because the wall comes out toward me and the handholds are far enough apart to make it a challenge.  I fail a few times and joyfully sit in my harness regaining my energy.  I eventually make it to the top and see why Caroline struggled with it.

We finish up climbing and decide to get food.  After all, we had another hundred or so in our IFAF budget.  Everyone is hungry so our group goes to Pour House.  We make it there at around 6:05 and wait until 6:45 to finally sit down and order.  Andrew, Stephen, Zach, and I each order a double Texas burger and a Frap.  That’s 4 burger patties with bacon, fries, and chips, with a milkshake.  We finish all the food except for Stephen who still had most of his Frap to go.  I was so full after that meal, but it was well deserved after an afternoon of climbing.

When belaying, never let your climber down even if the crazy asian girl on the other end of the rope will bite your head off when she finally makes it back down.

We venture back up to the fifth floor and set up the game. Itaru gives me a quick lesson on how to play and we begin. Other people from the floor watch us for a bit and Kristina even asks if there were animals other than sheep. We didn’t hear her and continue playing. Jeremy, Mark, and I plot how to defeat Itaru who takes a quick lead but who ultimately ends up winning the game. I enjoyed playing.

Know what I took from this? Do Not trust random new people who will use you to try and win the game.

The BPL is amazingly beautiful, and is a great remanant of old architecture mixed with a new wing, all filled with books, books, books. (I’ve got to start reading more) There are all sorts of literature here, especially of a different nature than the MIT libraries. I.E. Anne of Green Gables, for Caroline. There is even a microtext section where it’s on film and you project it onto a screen so you can read it. They even have art exhibits here. I really like this library. Only complaint is slow internet…although anywhere is slow compared to MIT.

I will need to bring my camera next time to document. Now time to finish writing my first post and design the blogsite.

Continued: A quick introduction to me: My name is Jason, I’m 19, and I’m a freshman at MIT. I plan to be an electrical engineering and computer science major I began this blog for two main reasons. It will be a good outlet for anything i need to get off my chest, and well, everyone else is doing it, so I thought I’d join in on the fun. I enjoy many things and dislike few. I may rant. Who am I kidding? I will rant. I will present everything as I see fit, but will stick with the truth. I will blog.

I hope you enjoy this and I hope I keep my motivation to continue blogging.