John S. Danaher? But I...

Too much BSG

2008-12-12T23:52:00.004-05:00

I think I've been watching too much Battlestar Galactica recently.

I just went down to take to take out my recycling. It's been a long time since I last did it, so I had several bags of bottles and cans, but when I got to the curb I saw that the bin was already mostly full. When I looked closer I saw there was some sort of large object half-buried in the usual bottles and cans. I turned it over out of curiosity, and I said to myself, "It's a fracking toaster."

I spent the next few seconds wondering why I felt the urge to swear at a kitchen appliance, until my conscious mind finally caught up with me.

(In other news, I've finished off all the BSG that Netflix has to offer, and I'm working my way through iTunes until I hit the ones still up on hulu. So yeah, no spoilers after Season 4, Episode 4 just yet.)

2008-11-05T02:25:00.002-05:00

Need to go to sleep. But I came through Union Square on my way home, and well, it's been a long time since I saw a bunch of left-of-center people my age celebrating by waving flags around. I feel like we took something back tonight.

Rather than summarize myself, I'll cheat and link to other posts describing what I saw.

Photos!

2008-09-21T00:19:00.002-04:00

There's not much point in uploading photos if nobody sees them, and I doubt anybody's compulsively checking my picasaweb page. So, for your potential amusement, links to my photos from New York's Pride Parade '08, and from my trip to London and Scotland.

Rereading Lord of the Rings

2008-09-19T00:23:00.006-04:00

I've been reading Lord of the Rings for the first time in years. For a while, I would reread it once every year or two, but when the movies started coming out, I decided that I wanted to go into them clean, without details from the books freshly floating around my head. This is the first time I've opened them up again since my freshman year at MIT.

The first thing I noticed is how slow the start is. I mean, really, it took me weeks to get around to finishing the first few chapters, and I even skipped the Prologue ("Concerning Hobbits") this time. I can understand how it took me three tries before I made it to Rivendell the first time I read them.

But once I was able to get back into it, Tolkien's voice is so much more measured and dignified than the movies. The movies were great, but they punch everything up with music, and quick cuts (especially in the non-extended versions), and the occasional dwarf joke. In the book, all there is is the words, and they just... flow. They set a pace, and it's a slower pace than the movies. When orcs appear, there's no de-duh-daaaaaa Da Duh Dum pause clang clang, it just happens. It sounds obvious, but it really struck me how much the movie depends on the music to carry things through, and how much the book, well, can't.

Relatedly, I was very relieved that I didn't hear all of the dialog in the actors' voices, or even really imagine the characters looking like the actors. Though I did notice every bit of dialog that got used in the movie, especially the ones that got moved from one place to another, or switched between characters.

Plotwise, the changes in the movie were more significant than I remembered. It wasn't just Tom Bombadil who got cut from Book I... it was everything to do with the everyday dangers around the Shire. In the movie, the entire trip to Rivendell only has the Black Riders as the opposition. In the book, they show up first, but then the hobbits wind up getting trapped by the Willow, from whom Tom rescues them, and again by the barrow-wights, from whom Tom also rescues them. Unlike every villain in the movie, they have nothing to do with the Ring... they're just hanging around waiting for hobbits to show up. (Kind of makes it understandable why hobbits don't leave the Shire much.)

The distances between places in general hit me harder reading the books, too. Part of it is that the passage of time is more explicit. But a bigger part of it is how isolated each outpost of civilization is. At one point, somebody mentions that there's hardly any travel between Lorien and Mirkwood anymore. But then you look at the map, and they're right next to each other! All right, the map says the elves live on the northern bit of Mirkwood, and Lorien is near the southern bit, but still. Even Rivendell, where everybody coincidentally shows up just in time for a Council, is a mysterious, distant, near-mythical place to the people who are arriving there, especially Boromir.

Book II diverged less than Book I did. I was surprised to see it observed that the Watcher in the Water went after Frodo first, suggesting that it wasn't just Peter Jackson's idea that it was after the Ring. I also noticed that the whole thing of Frodo blaming himself for Gandalf's death was invented for the movie (mostly for the extended edition), or at least I didn't notice any evidence for it in the book.

And now, on to Two Towers. Ooh, "The Departure of Boromir." I wonder where he's going!

Feats of Strength

2008-09-11T23:30:00.005-04:00

Apparently I've taken up running. The last time I ran any reasonable distance was in high school. (Assuming you don't count, say, the occasional jog from 26-100 to the LSC Office to get whatever item I happened to have forgotten that night--and even those were several years ago.) My main memory of running in high school was that it was painful, and that it was unfair that the people in better shape finished the mile quicker and got to rest while I was still stuck running and in pain.

And yet, I bought a pair of running shoes a few weeks ago, and have now taken them out four times in the past two weeks. I'm still seeing what my body can handle, so I'm doing 1-minute-run, 1-minute-walk for 2 miles. The weird part is that, aside from a dull ache in my shins that I've been icing, it feels good. As in, I actually look forwards to the evenings when I can get home early enough to go out running. Maybe that'll go away once I start pushing myself a little harder, but I'm still quite pleasantly surprised.

I've also apparently taken up conducting. I got roped into calling a quarter of Plain Bob Triples this morning. Luckily, I'd studied the composition last night (W 3H, W 6H, W 6H, where each 6 is --S--S, for anyone who cares). My usual studying technique is to write out every single lead end, with the calls and the coursing orders marked in. That confirms that what I think the composition is actually does come round, lets me verify that the coursing orders are what I think they'll be, and gives me a sense of timing for when the calls come. It's good to notice that the wrong is the lead after the home, for example.

Usually, that's about all it accomplishes. But this time, I also happened to notice that I (did I mention I was ringing the 7 of the back 8?) would dodge with the 4 the lead before the last Home in each group of 3. This fact turned out to be very important when I lost count of the number of Homes I'd called, and then the 4 wasn't where I wanted him to be. Putting the 4 where I thought he belonged seemed sure to make things worse, so I just put in one more Bob than I thought I needed and called the Single Home the next time. Luckily, it turned out that the 4 was right and I was wrong, and everything went as it should have. (I got to make up for it in the last few courses, by which time I was dead certain I knew where I was and didn't hesitate to shout at people if they weren't in their designated place. The 6 also helped me keep people straight.)

And finally, since it's been too long since I showed off the view from my apartment, a photo of tonight's WTC memorial lights.

Another year

2008-07-11T23:13:00.005-04:00

I've now been living in New York for three years. In the same apartment, no less. That means that after you subtract out the summers I was away from Boston, I've lived here for about the same amount of time that I lived at Random. Funny, it doesn't feel as long.

In the spirit of retrospection, I went over to Google Scholar to see how the JCilk papers. Aside from the usual incestuous citations, I was very excited to see that my thesis had been cited by people I'd never heard of. That meant that someone actually it! Well, okay, at least some of it, but still--somebody read my thesis! Then I searched through their paper for the reference. I quote:

The C implementation for a similar parallel system, called Cilk, introduce a similar overhead for this benchmark (3.63x slowdown [9]). Our system however, signiﬁcantly outperforms the Java version of Cilk (JCilk) which imposes a 27.5x slowdown for this benchmark [8]).

So they flipped through my thesis, found the biggest, worst number in there, and quoted it to make themselves look better by comparison. And in another paper, they used the analysis from my own Performance chapter to discredit our whole idea, ignoring my suggestions for improvement:

With the volunteer stack splitting mechanism, we avoid the synchronization overhead incurred by work-stealing, which can be signiﬁcant in a Java system [10].

The sad part is, I'm still kind of excited about it. Somebody read my thesis!

In making-me-feel-old news, the froshlings from my 6.001 class have now graduated. I looked up the graduating Course VI class on the alumni database, and was gratified to see that I didn't manage to scare them all off. I was especially happy that one of my students who seemed to be getting things by the end, but who still got a No-Record, tried it again and ended up graduating Course VI on time.

Of course, once one of my students starts working at my office, then I'll really feel old. It probably won't be long now..

A long-awaited update

2008-05-25T22:33:00.002-04:00

I have, despite all appearances to the contrary, been Up To Things for the past several months. They just haven't been especially interesting or blogworthy. But if I cram them all together, that makes everything more interesting, right? In no particular order:

My curtains finally got installed in mid-March, but it took two more visits by the "professional installers." In the first, they brought the curtains, strung them over the rod, put the rod on the brackets, and watch another one of the brackets fall out of the wall. After much discussion, they suggested putting them on a track instead, which required a second trip to actually bring the track. On one hand, I kind of wonder why they didn't just suggest that in the last time when they saw the brackets wouldn't hold. On the other hand, I do kind of like the way they ended up, and I'm relieved that I didn't have to deal with giant holes in my wall myself.

I finally changed projects at work last month. It took way too long to find something interesting that needed another engineer, but I am now on... Local Search Indexing! We're the ones who take the multitudes of business-related data and process it into the index that gets searched over when you look for a business on Maps. It's a very different kind of work, and I've had to switch from C++ to Java, but so far I'm enjoying it. (And yes, this does mean there's an entirely new realm of things that you can now blame me for. The plan is to still spend 20% of my time on Spreadsheets, so you can continue to blame issues with that on me too.)

I don't think I've mentioned it here, but I've been taking Mandarin classes at work for the past year. It's through Berlitz, so we've been doing entirely spoken work (no characters), mostly without a textbook. Then last month we got a new textbook, with pinyin dialogs! And instead of the Berlitz "here's five examples, figure out the rest intuitively" method, they actually have little sections about grammar! I'm very excited about it.

At some point, I finally signed up for Netflix. All the cool kids were doing it.

I saw a production of MacBeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featuring Patrick Stewart. It's practically within walking distance of me, so I couldn't resist, especially after I missed out on Ian McKellen last year. It was a very creepy production, set in Stalinist Russia. The witches, for example, were dressed as nurses, but they still got all the good "cauldron bubble" lines, not to mention rather demonic red lighting. And Patrick Stewart is, indeed, awesome.

On Easter Sunday, I called my first quarter. It was ten extents of Plain Bob doubles. It reminded me of when I first started ringing on handbells, when there was one time when I wasn't able to compute 2+4 because I was so completely occupied with remembering my place and where I was going next. Well, conducting is kind of like that, except that there's just so much more I'm supposed to be keeping track of. (I'm supposed to try a quarter of Plain Bob Minor next weekend... we'll see how that goes.)

I went down to Pittsburgh for my brother's graduation from CMU. When I was applying to colleges, CMU was my first choice for a while. I visited it twice about eight years ago when I thought I'd be going there for undergrad, so a lot of the campus was vaguely familiar. The commencement speakers were better than I ever had: Al Gore, who was surprisingly entertaining and upbeat given that he won a Nobel for basically predicting the end of the world; and Randy Pausch, who did the whole "what you regret are the things you didn't do" bit. (I actually thought it was a bit awkward having him speak last, since commencement is about the beginning of your life in the real world and his speech was in some sense about the opposite, but hey, I'm not really going to begrudge him that.)

I went down early to make it to the ringing practice on Thursday night, and scored a quarter of all the doubles methods I could think of. I also got to do touristy stuff around the city with my family, but my main impression was that in Pittsburgh, it's always either raining or about to be raining. (And I forgot to bring my umbrella.)

I suspect I've become the North American record-holder for Plain Bob Cinques, having rung in 4 peals of it, out of 47 ever anywhere. There have never been more than 5 at any single tower (a record I suspect Trinity will surpass in the near future), but apparently at one of those towers the same person conducted 4, so I'm not the world record-holder yet. Ah well.

RAM is now so ludicrously cheap that I just ordered 2GB for $50. That's about a factor of 8 less than the best per-GB cost a couple years ago. How am I supposed to resist that? (I also blame Spaces for increasing the temptation by making it convenient to leave about fifty windows open at any given time.)

I volunteered to help revise the NAGCR web site. So, after three years of avoiding it at work, I'm finally having to learn CSS and Javascript. Fun fun.

I went out to Loew's Journal Square on a work "off-site" a few weeks ago. It's one of the old movie palaces from the 1920s that's been bought by the city and is being restored by a nonprofit group. Once a month or so they show movies there with an all-volunteer staff, including the projectionists. So basically, it's LSC, if 26-100 had a balcony and a gilded ceiling. (Though honestly, I think 26-100 has it beat on acoustics.) They took us on a tour of the projection booth, which still has the back room that used to be full of the dynamos to produce the DC to drive the carbon-arc lamps.

I suppose that's enough. Perhaps it'll be less than four months next time.

Adventures in Home Decor

2008-02-22T22:18:00.003-05:00

Our story begins a little more than two years ago. I spent the summer taping old sheets in the windows when I wanted to keep the sun out, but my parents were visiting my apartment for the first time and I felt like I ought to have something more. So I went up 7th Ave to the little fabric-and-upholstery shop, picked out cheap inoffensive beige curtains, and hung them up.

Over the following two years, I came to believe that I didn't really want beige curtains after all, and even if I did, I'd want ones that looked a little less cheap. At the end of December, I decided to finally do something about it. So I went to Google Maps and found a bunch of drapery places in Chelsea, took the subway into Union Square, and wandered up Broadway stopping in shops.

At the first place, the guy was very friendly, but said things like "We have these books of fabric swatches, but we don't use them much, since most of our clients are designers who already have the fabric." He also quoted me a price, just for materials, which was about twice what I had in mind to pay total. So I politely said I'd think about it and left. The guy at the second place was also very friendly, and deigned to search through fabric books with me for the perfect shade of navy. I found a good one and checked the book out to see how it looked at home. At the third place, the the fabric guys had already left for the day, but they'd be happy to come by my apartment next week to pick out fabric and give a quote, and yes they'd honor that coupon I pulled out of the ValuePak mailing. Then I went home, satisfied that I had two reasonable options.

The following Monday morning, the second place called me and gave me a quote that was five times what I had in mind to pay. I wasn't going to go for that. But it meant that when the guy from the third place came, proposed something nicer than I'd had in mind, threw in "professional installation," and said it would only be four times my original price was, it suddenly sounded quite reasonable. He said he'd knock more off the price if I made the order that day. I felt like I was probably being taken, but I knew that angsting over it for a while wouldn't help anything (and hey, I could afford to pay that much, I just hadn't planned to)--so I signed the order.

That brings us to this morning, nearly two months later, when my curtains finally arrived. Well, somebody's curtains arrived, at least. They were definitely the same color I'd ordered. On the other hand, the professional installation guys noticed as soon as they walked in that the curtains they'd brought were a couple feet taller than my ceiling, let alone the top of the windows.

As long as they were there, though, they wanted to install the brackets to hold the rods up (the non-tension rods being one of the extra bits that the sales guy had tempted me with). One of them tried putting the bracket into the moulding the way I wanted. He really did try. But the moulding, being moulding, didn't present a nice flat surface, and while he was trying to deal with that, I could see a crack forming between where the two screws had gone in. He saw it too and pointed out that the moulding wasn't actually strong enough to support the curtains. We agreed that he'd put the brackets in next to the moulding instead.

And put them in he did. Unfortunately, he wasn't exactly from the measure-twice cut-once school of carpentry. When he tested the rod over the first window, it was just a bit crooked. He tried lowering the right-hand bracket by bashing it with a hammer, but no such luck. So he took he bracket down and did the only really stupid thing I saw him do, which was to try to get the screw to go in an eighth of an inch lower. Of course, the result was that the two screw-sized holes merged together into one big hole. He tried using a longer screw, but since my walls are apparently made of one thickness of drywall followed by two inches of air, that just made the hole bigger. He turned to me apologetically and pointed out that my wall sucked and he didn't know what to do. I didn't say anything, on the theory that maybe if I kept my mouth shut he'd figure something out.

He and the other guy talked it over for a bit, and finally came up with something. They plugged the hole with a metal disc attached to an expandy thing that I assume was gripping against the other side of the drywall, and that seemed to work, but didn't get them any closer to getting the bracket back up. After a little more discussion they hit on the idea of mounting a metal angle-bracket to the wall and then screwing the top of the wooden bracket into that. After a small amount of undoing what they'd done and redoing it with the angle-bracket involved, they had everything mounted. Voila, one window done.

On the other window, they again discovered the brackets were crooked. This time, though, they had a better idea than moving the screw in the wall: move the hole in the bracket! I'm really not sure why they didn't think of that the first time, especially since the first thing they did when they got there was attach the metal plate with the holes to the back of the wooden brackets. But anyway, this looked like it was going to go well. Except that on the first attempt, they moved the holes the wrong way and it was even more crooked. As they were fiddling with that, one of the guys put a little too much weight on it and the screws pulled out of my poor drywall, making another big hole.

But now, at least, they'd reduced the problem to one they'd already solved. Out came another expandy thing and another metal angle-bracket, and in a few minutes they were done. They were even nice enough to seal up the first holes they'd made in the moulding, before they left.

But now I'm back where I started, except with four wooden brackets mounted next to my windows. I've wiggled them a bit, and the non-metal-bracket ones are a bit wobbly. At this point I'm just hoping they don't fall down before my real curtains get here.

And now for some meaningless coincidences

2008-02-05T00:26:00.000-05:00

I grew up in a suburb outside of Washington, DC. During that time, the Redskins won 3 Super Bowls, making them the champions for 17% of the time I lived there. They hadn't won any before I was born, and they haven't won any since I moved away.

In the five years I lived in Boston, the Patriots won 3 Super Bowls, for a 60% success rate. They also hadn't won any before then, and they haven't won any since.

Now I live in New York, and the Giants have won one Super Bowl, giving them a score of 33%. Though to be fair, they did previously win two earlier ones when I was somewhere else. (It should also be mentioned that the New York Giants don't technically play in New York, but that's just a detail.)

Relatedly, there hasn't been a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan since 2000, because foreign dignitaries apparently don't like to ride slowly around in open cars anymore, and New York sports teams haven't been doing especially well recently. But there will be one tomorrow morning, and because Trinity is right on top of the parade route, we'll get to ring for an hour (with sound control completely opened!) as they all go past.

Debugging is fun!

2008-02-01T22:42:00.000-05:00

It's occurred to me in the past that one of reasons I watch House is that it's more about problem-solving (and making good guesses) than it's really about medicine, and that it has a lot in common with problem-solving in other domains, like, say, debugging software. In that spirit, here's an hour from my Tuesday afternoon, if it were an episode of House.

(It also occurs to me that this may be the first "creative writing" I've done since my freshman advising seminar. There was probably a reason for that.)

Scene 1

We see a man, mid-40s, at his computer. He's working happily with children playing in the background. One runs up to him and bumps his elbow, causing him to spill coffee all over his desk. It narrowly misses the keyboard. He wipes it up with a few paper towels and gets back to work, but a few moments later an error message pops up on the screen. He swears.

[Credits]

[Commercial]

Scene 2

House: So we've got a user with an error page.

Taub: Do we have any idea what caused it?

House: (Sliding folders across the table) Here's the stack trace.

Foreman: It's probably just left over from that bug we fixed last month.

House: Nope. This one was working up until yesterday.

Foreman: Then it's probably something related. The entries were probably written out of order.

House: Probably. Go see if the entries are out of order.

Scene 3 - In House's office

Thirteen: The entries were out of order. It looks exactly like that bug we fixed last month.

[Commercial]

Scene 4

Thirteen: It must be the same bug recurring somehow.

House: Am I the only one who's looked at the changelists? We fixed that bug. We haven't seen it in a month. This is something else. Ideas?

Kumar: Maybe they were written fine, and the server just read them in the wrong order.

House: But we read them again, and they're still in that order. You think we read them wrong twice? Either the data store has completely lost its mind and is out to get this one particular user, or we wrote them wrong. (Idiot.)

Thirteen: Maybe something weird happened at the same time as we were writing them.

House: Okay, go look at the debugging logs.

Scene 5 - In the lab

Kumar: Man, these sanitized debugging logs suck.

Thirteen: Yeah, but too many people have access to these logs. You know Cuddy won't let us keep anything juicy here.

Kumar: And there's all these interleaved sessions... I can barely even tell what I'm looking for.

Thirteen: No, look, if we just grep for the session we want... here! The timestamp!

Kumar: That's just saying that it wrote out of order. We already knew that.

Thirteen: ... you're right. It's normal.

Kumar: Told you.

[Commercial]

Scene 6

House: Well, if it doesn't look like anything weird happened... Maybe that just means nothing weird happened.

Foreman: Sure, the entries just wrote themselves out of order. Perfectly normal.

House: I mean, maybe these entries always do that. In which case, if we can write the same entries again--

Kumar: But the logs are sanitized! We don't know what data the user entered.

House: Which we would care about if the user had actually entered any data. But according to these logs, they just pressed four buttons.

Taub: You're saying you think it breaks any time a user pushes these four buttons. And nobody's ever noticed before?

House: Look at them! They're pretty weird buttons. Have you ever pushed them in this order?

[Silence.]

House: Me neither. Go try it.

Scene 7 - In the lab.

Taub: This is stupid. We're just making this sequence of four edits, there's no way we could reproduce anything this way.

Thirteen: Wait! What was that?

[Dramatically zoom on their faces.]

Taub: It's a NullPointerException!

[Commercial]

Scene 8

House: So there was a NullPointerException, and you guys didn't even notice it in the logs because didn't include any context in the grep. (Idiots.)

Taub: But we still weren't able to reproduce the issue the user saw. The entries were all written in order.

House: Who cares? We found a bug. Go fix it.

Scene 9 - The cafeteria

House: How's that refactoring going? Still think that making your code into thirty small files instead of one big one will make it somehow better?

Wilson: Actually, yes. When I moved the code around, I found three subtle bugs that had probably been annoying users for months.

House: Moving the code... (stares into space with a satisfied look)

Scene 10

House: You weren't able to reproduce it because you were running the wrong code.

Thirteen: But we checked! The bug fix from last month was already in production.

House: Not that bug fix, the other one that I made because I was annoyed that NullPointerExceptions could cause entries to be written out of order.

[Team stares blankly at him.]

House: Here, move these four lines back down to the bottom of the method, then push the shiny buttons again.

Taub: He's right, it reproduces.

House: And that bug fix is already lined up to go to production, and the NullPointerException's fixed now too.

Kumar: So you're saying we're done?

House: Yeah.

Kumar: Well, that was anticlimactic.

Not a mystery hunt post

2008-01-23T10:42:00.000-05:00

Lessons of the day (and it's not even 11:00 yet!):

1) Those full-height subway turnstiles will sometimes jam, even if you swiped your card and it said Go, and even if the person in front of you went through fine.

2) Those full-height subway turnstiles have a spoke right at the height of my mouth.

3) My dentist's office is not open on Wednesdays.

(It's just a couple of small chips, and there doesn't seem to be any pain (yet), but still, it sure feels funny.)

Resolutions

2008-01-07T22:53:00.000-05:00

1) At least one blog post a week. I'm told that the posts I only write in my head don't count, so I'll even post them here.

2) Get to work at reasonable hours. Or, actually, leave for work at reasonable hours, since that leaves less room for weaseling about subway delays. So: leave home by 9:05 at least once a week, and later than 9:35 no more than once a week.

3) Stop wasting time reading stupid comments on new articles. And especially stop wasting time looking for the sane people who must be out there somewhere refuting them, because they're never really there.

The last one was prompted by an article about Ron Paul being left out of the Fox News-hosted Republican debate, though I can't find it now. A few pages down in the comments, someone pointed out that you can never trust polls, because many of them are commissioned by the same big media corporations that report them!

Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

Danger!

2007-03-16T00:49:00.000-04:00

Apparently I've been living next to a death trap for the last year and a half:

http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/03/14/streetfilms-one-way-is-the-wrong-way/

(The 8th Avenue scenes would have been shot right in front of my building.)

I'll grant that 7th Avenue is nicer to walk down than 8th Avenue, but that's because 7th Avenue is mostly full of shops, and 8th Avenue is mostly full of other people's houses. Yes, elderly people and families feel comfortable walking down 7th Avenue, but that's because they're on the sidewalk! I walk down the sidewalk on 8th Avenue every day and I have never once been run over.

On the other hand, the closest I have come to being run over is crossing Union St, one of the few east-west two-way streets in the neighborhood. And when I'm biking, sure the fast cars on 8th Avenue make me uncomfortable, but the narrow lanes and parked cars on 7th Avenue make me a lot more nervous.

I'm sure there are good arguments for keeping 7th Avenue two-way, but I really don't see that "Look! Fast cars scary!" is one of them. And I wish they'd stop picking on 8th Avenue.

Still not ring yet

2006-12-15T19:50:00.000-05:00

(The title, of course, being the answer to the question "So what can you do up in the Trinity tower these days?" Other acceptable answers include "Ponder the catch-22 of being forbidden to ring until the sound control has been tested" and "Notice with surprise that there's still no ladder from the ringing room up to the bells, or even a hatch cut in the ringing-room ceiling.")

Despite there still being no regular ringing at Trinity, I have finally been up the tower for a test ring. The Taylor's guys came out again at the end of November to fix up some of the sound issues inside the tower. Before they left, they absolutely needed to hear the bells actually ringing, so we got permission to ring all 12 very briefly.

My impression was that they're gorgeous bells, the back eight especially. They got the sound down low enough that I could distinguish the tenors, even in rounds, instead of having them all blend together like they usually do on larger numbers. They're tuned differently than, say, the Boston bells, so the sound will take a little getting used to, but I think I like it. The 11, tolling by itself, had a particularly doomful sound.

Ironically, they did such a good job muting down the back bells, and catching sound from the front ones, that the front four had become way too loud. Presumably they fixed that before they left, though, and we'll have a nicely balanced twelve once we're actually allowed to ring.

The bells also went quite nicely, at least the ones that I tried (the 8 and the 9). I rang the 9 inside to Little Bob Major on the back eight with no difficulty, which (extrapolating quite a bit) makes Trinity's back eight no more difficult than Advent. I can definitely live with that.

The other exciting news from Trinity was our first 5-day beginners' class. We only got a turnout of 3, but they progressed spectacularly, despite being limited to a 100ish-pound dumb-bell and handbells. By the end of the week they were ringing rounds on 12 on the simulator, and had made it through treble-bob hunting on 6. (My personal epiphany for the week was how incredibly easy it is to keep straight treble-bob hunting on 6.) We took them up to Brewster on Saturday and they were more or less handling bells on their own by the end of the afternoon.

So, we're making good progress, I guess. All we still need are some actual ringable bells...

Bells!

2006-11-01T00:35:00.000-05:00

Well, sorta.

There are, in fact bells at Trinity. I saw them myself a couple weeks ago, when we got to climb up the scaffolding up to the catwalk around the bellframe. At the time, they were all sitting in their pits, and all but one had the wheel attached. (The ringing room itself was apparently in all kinds of disarray and missing features like a floor, or stairs up to the bells, which is why we had to take the outside route up.)

We had plans for a quiet (publicitywise, not decibelwise) test of the bells last Wednesday. The idea was that would give the bellhangers a chance to identify minor problems and adjust according before the "actual" test on Friday with the peal band. Unfortunately, construction was a little behind schedule (something about the floor still not being in, according to the rumors I heard) so that got cancelled. It was rescheduled for Friday morning, which turned into Friday afternoon, and by the time it actually happened the peal band was already standing by.

So I missed that. I did stop by on Saturday for the second half of the commissioning peal, and again for the beginning of the peal on Sunday. I obviously couldn't go up in the tower during the peals, but Trinity's video folks had rigged up microphones and a couple cameras so everyone coming into the church (a healthy mix of tourists wondering what it was and neighbors wondering when it would stop) could watch the ringers and the bells. They also piped the sound of the bells into the church, where it would otherwise have been just slightly audible.

Anyway, it turns out that Wall Street has a lot of buildings. And buildings echo sound around. And bells are loud. I could hear them several blocks away, even without line of sight, and even over the noise of lower-Manhattan traffic and construction. You know, "loud". Unfortunately, combined with the fact that I'm not used to twelve, that made it tough to pick out the individual bells by listening.

More unfortunately, it turns out that the building directly south of Trinity is an apartment building. With single-pane glass windows. So at the 8th floor, about level with the bell tower, the ringing was apparently, shall we say, "loud." They (rightfully) complained to the church, and the church agreed that the current situation isn't tenable.

The good news is there are plans for sound control that didn't make it in before the peals. The bad news is that they won't be in for another month, so the first ringing by locals is now scheduled for the beginning of December. We'll go ahead with our beginner-training plans on handbells our 100ish-pound dumb-bell, and hopefully have a half-dozen bright-eyed new ringers by the time the bells are actually ringable.

(Huh, actual useful information made it into this post. Don't tell anyone.)

A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

2006-10-02T00:33:00.000-04:00

A couple weeks ago, there was an article in the New York Times (Call It Booklyn, but they'll make you pay to read it) about how there's no point in being a writer in Brooklyn anymore. There's just too many of them here already. Whatever witty observations you have to make have already been made before, and whatever great places you find have already had a half-dozen novels set in them. For example, the protagonist in Brooklyn Follies lives a block away from me. The cover photo was shot a block in the other direction. That's my local hardware store in the background, and I've eaten several times at the cafe next to it.

Anyway, I've decided that there's no point in my ever drawing a webcomic, because the guy who draws xkcd apparently lives inside my head. The ones that I wouldn't have written personally all remind me of someone else I know. It's kind of scary, actually. Let's look at the past five comics:

Turn Signals. I used to watch the blinkers from the back seat of my parents' car when I was little, and I still do it now when I find myself in a car. I always wondered why, however many cars there were at a stop light, there were never two that blinked at the same frequency. The best reason I came up with was that if two cars were exactly in sync, the drivers behind them might get confused and think it was one car. Finally I decided that it was completely unintentional and it just wasn't worth anybody's time to precisely calibrate the time constant.

Playing Devil's Advocate to Win This is definitely me after I've read one too many articles about the world falling apart.

Donald Knuth Okay, this is kind of a lame joke. But it apparently made Vikki laugh out loud.

Angular Momentum Fine, it's overly cute, but if I were ever to be overly cute it might be in a way something like this.

Accident I've only played Katamari Damacy twice and this still made perfect sense to me.

And then there's this one, this one, this one, this one, this one (which somewhat-inexplicably makes me think of mcain), this one, and this one (which he's made into a T-shirt). They're not all laugh-out-loud funny, but they all make me smile, and they're mostly eerily familiar.

And then there's Pi Equals. And my favorite, Pillow Talk.

Hot.

2006-08-02T00:28:00.000-04:00

It's hot here. I managed to escape the last heat wave by running off to Seattle, but this time I'm stuck in New York. Today made it up to 95 (which wasn't bad, considering it was forecast to hit 100) and tomorrow's forecast for around 100 again.

And so what did I do this evening, and what am I doing tomorrow? I'm playing softball. They scheduled our last two games of the season for today and tomorrow. We barely have enough people to avoid forfeiting, so I don't really have much choice but to play. (If we forfeit now, we hurt our chances of getting back into a league for next year.) Sure, it's kind of fun, but getting beaten soundly two days in a row (because that's what will happen--our league this year is well above our abilities) in 95-degree heat is a bit much.

I've also been having power issues on and off all evening. I can understand power outages like the one in Queens that lasted over a week. They overload the equipment, the equipment blows up, and then they have to fix it. I'm sure it's really painful to be involved in it, but fundamentally the system is just broken and it takes time to get it running again. It's an exceptional case.

Brownouts and flaky power bother me more. Tonight, for example, my lights were noticably dimmer than usual. When I turned on another lamp, my little mini-UPS started beeping at me, even though the lights were all still on. Everything was just getting a little less power than it wanted.

Later, I completely lost power for about 5 seconds. Well, sort of. My flourescent desk lamp kept glowing a bit. And my computer (not actually plugged into the UPS, because it draws too much power when it turns on) stayed on for a couple seconds before it cut off too. And then it all just came back. Presumably, something somewhere in the system broke and failed over... but why can't they make it to fail over right before people lose power, instead of right after?

Ah well. Maybe once I finish fixing all of my bugs (not to mention failover procedures) at work, I can move on to fixing the rest of the world's bugs. Yeah.

Big, big news

2006-07-10T21:42:00.000-04:00

Well, my other big secret is finally officially out, though it's been something of an open secret for a while, and it's not as if I was really involved in this one.

Anyway, the front-page headline from the July 7, 2006 issue of the Ringing World:

Trinity Church, Wall Street, New York
The first ring of 12 in the USA

And from the end of the article:

Work is due to start very soon in New York, the bells will be cast in Loughborough in July and then installation and commissioning is scheduled for October.

Now I just need to drag some people to practice from my office...

Life in the big city, part II

2006-06-30T01:56:00.000-04:00

I just called 911 for the first time.

I was about to go to sleep, but somebody was shouting really loudly right outside my apartment. Normally I ignore them and they walk past, but this person wasn't going anywhere. Finally I opened the window to hear what she was saying and it turned out to be "Let me go, let me go." While I was trying to decide what to do about it, she shouted "Somebody, help," which sounded unambiguous enough for me to call for help.

Of course, she stopped shouting while I was on the phone. I couldn't really see what was going on when the police showed up, but it looked like they ID'd the woman and the man she was with and let them go on their way. They ended up walking away together. After that, the cops (five of them, at one point) stood around chatting for about 10 minutes.

I was generally impressed with how smoothly the whole thing went, even though I was calling from my cell phone. It took about 30 seconds to give the operator my address, and it took literally a minute for two cars to show up. Somewhat comforting in case I ever have a more urgent need for them.

But now I need to get to sleep.

Now you know

2006-06-17T23:10:00.000-04:00

"From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical notation has been defined, that 1+1=2."

In the pages leading up to it, they introduce the cardinal numbers 1, 2, and 0 (in that order) and finally they prove that "0 and 1 are the only numbers less than 2."

(I found this on Good Math, Bad Math, which is surprisingly interesting when it's not talking about category theory. But then, I'm still blaming category theory for everything that was wrong with 18.904.)

Time flies in the real world

2006-05-31T23:23:00.000-04:00

It's been more than a year now since I got my thesis signed. It's been a little more than a year since I signed the lease on my apartment. (Which, incidentally, means it's time to sign another one.) It's coming up on a year since I moved to NY and started work. I've had a cell phone for a year!

My (first) graduation was nearly two years ago. I last visited my family in Virginia six months ago. Mystery hunt was four and a half months ago, which was the last time I saw a lot of people. (Which, incidentally, means they should come visit me.)

Every day this month when I've flipped the page on my calendar, I've had a little moment of panic when I realize that 2006 is almost half over already. What happened to time? I'm sure it didn't use to go this fast.

Part of it must have to do with the sudden lack of landmarks--there's no midterms, finals, major projects anymore. There's annual and mid-year reviews, but six months apart is too much, and anyway I've only been through one so far. Other than that the weeks more or less fade into each other. The slow sense of accomplishment isn't enough to tell me that months are passing.

On top of that, I've spent most of the past several months on a two-week cycle, where I spend every other weekend up in Boston. As much as I enjoy doing that, it means I only get the option of lie-at-home-do-nothing days every two weeks. Whatever sense of time I get out of that is a factor of two off from where it should be.

At least I can tell it's summer now. I can almost believe it's March as I walk up the street some mornings, but that still gets me within two months of the actual time. And then it thunderstorms and I feel like it's July, but still--just a couple months off. As long as there's regular seasons, I can't completely lose track of time. Good thing I'm not living in California, I guess.

Summer!

2006-05-27T22:37:00.000-04:00

Apparently it's summer. I remember, now, why I bought that air conditioner last year. It only hit 80ish today and it wasn't especially humid, but it was enough to make me feel sticky and lazy all evening.

Around 10:00 tonight it occurred to me that 1) I'd probably feel less completely unmotivated if it weren't so hot, 2) if I put my air conditioner back in the window, I could make it cooler, 3) putting the air conditioner back in would require a lot of effort, and 4) I really didn't feel like putting any effort into anything. I'm not entirely sure how I broke the loop, but the end result was that I have A/C again, and I have a little bit of motivation left over. So that's good... except for the noise, the power fluctuations when it turns on and off, and the impending doom of my electricity bill.

Before that, when I was still pretending it was cool out, I did the grand tour of my end of the Eastern Parkway. The first stop was the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where I got in free courtesy of Bank of America. I've been meaning to visit it since I moved here, and the free-ness finally gave me an excuse to go spend a few hours there. It was bigger than I expected it to be, somehow, even though I'd seen it on a map. Lots of plants. Lots of flowers. They have a rose garden that opens June 1, which meant there were people crowding around its edges admiring the ones poking over and through the fence. I did, indeed, stop to smell the roses.

The next destination was the Brooklyn Museum, where I made my first visit since I bought a membership. The nice thing about being a member is I don't feel awkward about stopping in for half an hour to see one special exhibit, visiting the Rodins and a couple paintings up on the 5th floor, and then just walking out again. I should do it more often.

After that was the library. I should go there more often too, but I haven't had a whole lot of time to read lately, and when I do I've been going through the random books I've accumulated but never read. But I was walking past it, so I stopped in and got a couple things.

And then I walked through Prospect Park on my way home. It was full of people picnicing and playing frisbee and such, though not as much as I expected given that it's Memorial Day weekend. After the Botanic Garden, it looked much more open and much less constructed. And all of the plants didn't have little identifying tags.

Plans

2006-05-19T09:12:00.000-04:00

Going up to Boston for the weekend. Bringing my umbrella.

A long week

2006-05-15T00:39:00.000-04:00

Last week was a long week. I had a deadline Tuesday evening, so I got in earlier on Monday and Tuesday than I had since last summer, and stayed later than I ever have. And it was tiring.

In principle, I like getting into work early. It means that I have time to catch up on my email and still get a meaningful chunk of work done before lunch. On the other hand, it also means waking up. The only time I've ever been able to keep it up for more than a couple of days was a couple winters ago when I was in Singapore, and that was only because I was so jet-lagged it didn't really count. And sure enough, this week, by Friday I was almost back to my my usual time.

And yeah, there was lots of stuff about stupid-but-fatal bugs (mostly mine) and discussing maybe actually launching someday, but I probably shouldn't go into too much detail about that. Instead, you can go play with Google Trends, which I had absolutely nothing to do with but is a great new way to waste time.

In other news, I went to the Bowery lighting district yesterday. By "lighting district," they mean "20 stores selling lamps and chandeliers crammed into two blocks." I counted 17 of them that I went into, but that counts two on opposite sides of the street that had the exact same inventory. I ended up getting a new lamp for my nightstand, but I didn't find anything I liked more for my living room than the one I saw at Macy's a while back. And the whole experience was generally a lot less sketchy than I expected considering it was only a couple blocks away from Canal Street, the heart of sketchy-retaildom in New York City.

I've also been reading Seth Lloyd's new book, which I picked up on a whim last weekend at the MIT press store. It's good, and makes me wish he'd been teaching 2.111 when I took it. More on that later.

It's like he's following me

2006-05-11T20:07:00.000-04:00

They're building this about a 20-minute walk away from my apartment, and if I'm still living here when it's finished, it'll be the biggest thing in my view towards Manhattan. I like it a lot more now that it doesn't look like it's falling down.

Physical activity!

2006-05-01T00:47:00.000-04:00

All of a sudden, I'm getting exercise. In the long run, I suppose it should make me feel better, but for now it mostly just makes me sore.

Tuesday night was our first softball game. I'm on the "just for fun" team from the office, as opposed to the "play to win" team, which meant that we got plenty of people (like me) who clearly hadn't played in a while or had never played much at all. I was impressed that I was still able to catch the ball (and even caught a pop-up in the game), but let's just say that my hitting hasn't improved at all in the N years since I last played. I also apparently haven't used the swing-a-bat muscles at all in that time. Oops.

Thursday I finally bought my new bike, to replace the one that was stolen about a year ago. It's a decent dark red hybrid, which wouldn't have been my first choice in color except that it was what they had in stock. (Also, the only other color it came in was a kind of ugly pale green.) It's light (about 26 pounds, according to my bathroom scale), which means I can carry it up/down the stairs with one hand and still have the other to hold the railing and not fall down the stairs.

This afternoon was my first chance to go riding, aside from the trip back from the store. I went over and did a lap around the park, which took about twenty minutes, and was apparently over 3 miles. Adding in the trip to and from my apartment, including detours to avoid going the the wrong way down one-way streets, and it came to over 4 miles. In comparison, the trip to my office would only be a little over 6 miles. I'd like to be able to do that comfortably by some time in the summer.

The loop around the park is a generally nice ride with lots of greenery and lakes and horses and such. The roads around/through the park are closed to traffic except during rush hour, so it's just joggers and bikers--a lot of joggers and bikers, but that's still nicer than having to deal with cars. My only complaint was the far half of the loop being continuously uphill, but I should be able to handle that fine once I get closer to in shape and I figure out which gears I should be using. In an ideal world I'd get over there before or after work semi-regularly, but that would probably mean competing with cars during rush hour, so we'll see.

Cars still make me nervous. There are more cars on my quiet residential avenue on a Saturday afternoon than there were on Broadway in Cambridge at 10:00 weekday mornings, which probably says something about either the two times or the two places. There seem to be enough bike lanes around (about as many as in Cambridge--not many, but enough to find one if you're going a reasonable distance) that maybe I'll be able to mostly avoid the cars.

I still need to get a printed bike map. I also need a new lock. The fact that the 5-star lock Kryptonite makes is called a "New York Lock" makes me worry about trusting my measly 3.5-star lock in, y'know, New York.

Trapeze!

2006-04-19T23:46:00.000-04:00

I went to a flying trapeze class for the first time last night. There's a small but devoted group at the NY office, led by one of my old officemates, that does circus type things every so often. For me, that means juggling on Thursday afternoons (I'm slowly learning clubs) and now trapeze.

After we all signed the waivers (saying that they'll do everything they can to keep you from dying, but, really, they can't make any promises), they took us over to the low bar (only about 7 feet up in the air) to try doing a knee hang. As you might expect, this involves tucking your legs up over the bar, and then letting go with your hands and dangling from your knees. It reminded me a lot of the gymnastics I did way back in the first half of elementray school. (And I got to chalk up my hands again, too!)

After that one of the other teachers went up on the actual trapeze. It's worth noting that the actual trapeze is big. Really big. The net was about 8 feet up, the bar was probably another 20 feet up from there, and the ceiling was, say, another 20 feet up. So it's big. She swung out, dangled from her knees a bit, and then did a backflip off. We all applauded, and we all laughed when the guy told us that was the routine we'd be starting with. But he was serious.

A few minutes later, I was up on the platform, toes hanging off the edge, holding the bar wath both hands, and not falling only because the spotter was holding me from the back of my harness. (And, yeah, I suppose there were safety ropes too.) Then she said "Hep!" and I jumped off the edge.

There's something deep inside you that knows you're just not supposed to jump off of platforms 30 feet up in the air. When half the people in the class jumped for the first time, they didn't quite make it off the edge and ended up still on the platform. It looked really silly watching them, but then when I was dangling off the edge platform, I realized Oh, this is absolutely terrifying, that's why they couldn't jump!

But I did jump. That left me plummeting through the air, with this bar thing trying to pull me in an arc. It felt vaguely like waterskiing, actually, in the sense that you just have to hang on to this bar or else you're doomed. On the other hand, when you're waterskiing, there's not somebody on the ground shouting "Knees up!" at you. When I completely failed to react the first time (because jumping into thin air didn't actually help with the abject terror), they helpfully shouted it again the next time I hit the front of my arc. And when I finally managed that, they told me to let go with my hands, and by that time I'd just given in to doing whatever the voices told me to do. By the time they got to "Kick forward, backward, hands to your knees," the fact that putting my hands to my knees meant letting go of the bar and plummeting to my doom only vaguely crossed my mind. Luckily that safety rope was still there and they let me down slowly.

So that was my first time around. It reminded me a little bit of the first time I went shafting during my freshman year, and wasn't really sure I wasn't going to fall. That time, I decided that abject terror was a great way to forget about everything else I might have been worrying about. But it got a lot more pleasant and less scary as the class went on, and by the end, when I was able to dangle from my knees and reach my hands out by the front of my second arc, they deemed me "catchable."

That meant that I got to do basically the same thing, except there was somebody on the other bar to reach out and grab my arms at the front of my arc. The first time, I missed completely, for various mysterious reasons that boiled down to me being too slow. The second time, I did everything perfectly. I stretched out my arms, hit the top of the arc, and... there was nobody else there. So I hung out there for, oh, five or ten seconds until finally the catcher appeared, hit the top of his arc, grabbed my wrists, and pulled me off my bar. Then he stopped swinging, and I dropped back down to the net.

For whatever reason, after the catch, the whole thing didn't seem so scary anymore. I think I'll go again next time the group goes.

Oh, and on the way back, I mentioned bell ringing without giving the whole spiel. I was very proud of myself.

A very useful service

2006-03-04T15:13:00.000-05:00

I should see if they can move up some of next week to give me a long weekend.

Wrapups

2006-01-20T00:55:00.000-05:00

My athena account went away last night. Well, as much as athena accounts do nowadays, which is to say that my locker and email address are gone. And I can't ssh into the dialups anymore. But other machines still let me in, and I can still get my kerberos tickets, so it's not so bad.

Someone probably would have sponsored me, but I decided to let it go. Really, I've only used my account for three things recently: zephyr, email, and logging in when I visit campus. Zephyr still works fine, email should (philosophically) not be going to jsd@mit.edu anymore anyway (since I'm not "at MIT" anymore), and I can use my cell phone if I really need web access on campus. So I'll survive.

I did one last inc last night for old time's sake. It brought me up to 123,316 total emails since I got to MIT. That's a lot of email, even if most of it is spam (which it is). It's kind of scary to look back and see the proportion of spam grow over the past 5+ years.

In other news, my 6.001 Underground Guide review was posted a while back. They gave me a 5.9/7.0, which is pretty good as TA ratings go. (But apparently my "blackboard technique and clarity could use a little work.") Several of the other 6.001 TAs managed 6.0s, but I got twice as many reviews as most of them, so my 5.9 is more statistically significant. So there.

In other other news, my thesis is now the most-cited reference on JCilk, with three whole citations. One of them's even hosted on a server not at MIT. It's just a matter of time before everyone's using JCilk, and they'll all have to cite me, because I wrote about it first. Muahahahaha. Cough.

Major purchases

2005-12-08T01:05:00.000-05:00

I made two major purchases last Wednesday. First, I bought a new pair of sneakers. It may not seem like that big a deal, but I hate buying shoes. My usual strategy is to pick out four generic-looking pairs on display and ask if any of them come in size 7. The salesperson usually comes back and says "No, of course not. We only have two pairs of size 7 in the entire store. Pick one." But this time it went surprisingly smoothly, and I ended up with shoes I liked. Maybe now my feet will stop hurting.

Fresh off that success, I took the subway down to Prince St and visited the Apple Store. I had a list of exactly what I wanted in my new PowerMac printed off of the web site, but I wanted to buy it in person for various reasons. I went in expecting to pick it up in 3-5 days, since that's when the web order would have been shipped. But it turned out that 1) they don't stock the 500GB internal disks in the stores, 2) it's not at all clear whether you're specifying the total memory or just the amount you want to add, and 3) they were out of wifi/bluetooth cards, so the machine I ended up getting had none of the additions I'd originally asked for. On the other hand, it was cheaper and available instantaneously, assuming I didn't mind installing the extra memory myself.

So I said sure, I can do that, and went to pay. After much negotiating (I now know why everyone pays by credit card instead of check nowadays), they agreed to take my money and give me my computer. I lifted it. It was heavy. Looking back, I probably bought one of the two or three heaviest things they sell there. But I was down some side street, so I decided to walk the two blocks to Broadway where I might be able to catch a cab. I made it with only a couple rest breaks. But then the subway entrance was right there. "Why take a cab from here," I thought to myself, "when I can take the subway to Brooklyn and take a shorter cab ride from there?"

That was the first stupid thing I did. I did several more just like it when I had to change trains twice, and when I got out the other end and started walking home instead of waiting for a cab to stop. I had a couple peopple help me for a couple blocks each (one of the nice things about my neighborhood is I felt comfortable with that), but still, by the time I got home, I could only make it about 15 steps without stopping. I rolled it up the stairs end over end (luckily, it was packed quite nicely), slid it into the living room, and left it while I collapsed on the couch to recover. I think my arms have finally healed from their trauma as of today.

So that's the story of how I got a really heavy box home. I did eventually discover that there was, in fact, a computer on the inside of the box, instead of the pile of bricks and lead that it felt like. And now that I haven't had to move it in a week, I'm getting to like it.

On the train again

2005-11-24T00:49:00.000-05:00

Another trip on the train today. This time it was the Metroliner to DC, and miraculously, it left on time. I saw on the board that the 94 to Boston wasn't so lucky, but then, it never is. Out of the five times I've taken it so far, it's been at least 45 minutes late three times, and 15 minutes late the other two times. And it's only a 4-hour trip to begin with.

And yet I keep paying money to keep taking the train. Why? Because I like the train. This bus is fine if I'm travelling with someone else, but I get carsick if I try to read on the bus, which limits the entertainment possibilities when I'm alone. And the train is so much less hassle and less constraining than flying... you can get up, walk around, buy food, or whatever, and half the time you even get two seats to yourself to spread out on. (There were a couple times when I tried to lie across two seats to sleep on the late-night Boston-Washington train, but I don't recommend it unless you bring a pillow. The armrests are hard.)

Getting on the train at Penn Station in New York is always exciting, especially when the train is running late. There's one giant hall where everyone waits for all of the Amtrak trains (and probably the commuter rail trains too), with a giant board hanging from the ceiling in the center. They never post a gate until the train actually starts boarding, which means a mob always forms outside the gate the instant they do announce it. It's a little bit of a game, trying to guess where to stand so you'll be closer to wherever it is they tell you to go to. When the train is running late, it's even worse since everyone's just standing around waiting, so they post "Stand By" on the board between 2 and 15 minutes before they start boarding. To, you know, give you warning.

Not that it bothers me or anything. Hey, I keep taking the train, right?

Life in the big city

2005-11-16T23:58:00.000-05:00

After all of this time, I've suddenly started doing things in the city besides working and furniture-shopping.

Saturday night, Vikki and I saw Serenity. It's only open at one theater in the area, and that one theater only had 8:20pm and 11:25pm showings, and for whatever reason they stopped selling online tickets to the 8:20 show. So we went to the late showing, which meant we were getting there (where there is 42nd St, near Broadway) just as all of the shows were getting out. Lots of people. The movie was good, too.

Then, Tuesday night, I went to see a talk by Morgan Spurlock at the Oxonian Society. I was invited through the MIT club of NY, but the talk was on the 4th floor of the Cornell club building. I was there in, of course, jeans and a T-shirt, so I went as quickly as I could through the lounge with the "business casual attire is required" sign by the door. The talk itself was good. I was disappointed with the interviewer, but the audience had some interesting questions for him, and he was able to go off on interesting tangents all by himself anyway.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I'll go to the Google Print debate at the NYPL tomorrow night. The office has a bunch of tickets they'll be giving out first-come, first-serve starting around 8:30 tomorrow. This means I'll be getting up early tomorrow. (And if I can't get in, at least they have a webcast.)

It's also worth noting that all of these things have been within a 15-minute walk of my office.

Assembling an apartment

2005-11-07T21:52:00.000-05:00

It's strange how much of a difference the little things make. I've been living here for four months now, but there were a couple small framed prints I'd never gotten around to hanging. When I bought another one on Saturday, I it as an excuse to hang all three up, two in the kitchen and one in the hallway. And suddenly the kitchen and hallway feel... mine. The table and chairs, microwave, and all the other stuff in the kitchen wasn't enough. I needed something at eye level, I guess.

It carries over to the living room a little bit, too, but that was already doing okay. I've had a couple pictures on the wall in here for a while, not to mention a bookshelf full of my books, and my random stuff on the mantlepiece, and my mexican blanket on the couch. What this room still needs is... a coffetable. Ever since I decided I was going to get one, there's been a coffeetable-shaped hole in the middle of the room where I keep wishing I had something to take up space and to put my things on. Ah well. It's supposed to get here next Monday.

I do like how open the whole place feels. The bedroom has wide open space. The living room has furniture, but most of it doesn't go all the way to the ground so it feels a little less... solid, I guess. Unmassive. And the completely unadorned windows (with an unobscured view) help too.

(Someday I'll be done putting this place together. Until then, I'm going to keep talking about it.)

Halloween

2005-10-31T19:19:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn is a very civilized place, assuming that the ultimate measure of civilization is whether it knows how to celebrate halloween properly. (I think that's a fair assumption.) Not only is it possible to get a pumpkin without having to buy it two weeks in advance (Cambridge, I'm looking at you), but there's also some serious trick-or-treating.

Getting home at 6:15, I was worried that I might have already missed the peak of the ritual. Ha. My first batch of candy was gone in 20 minutes. I dutifully went over to 7th Ave and bought another three bags of candy. They were gone in 10 minutes--an average rate of about 6 kids a minute.

I wonder if there's anywhere where the trick-or-treating balance is really maintained. I know that when I was growing up, there was always a big bowl full of candy left over, usually more than I took in myself. There weren't enough trick-or-treaters to cover all of the houses there. Here, on the other hand, there's a lot of kids. (I had no idea how many until tonight.) But with nobody else on my block on handout duty, I felt like they couldn't possibly be earning as much candy as I used to.

Clearly someone should study the economics of halloween and figure out what's going wrong. On the other hand, the kids seem to be having a good time either way.

My apartment

2005-10-03T22:43:00.000-04:00

I could tell long stories about how hard it was to get all of my furniture, but it's easier to just give a quick tour, and besides, the stories aren't really all that interesting.

But I did learn that "the Ikea way" involves giving absolutely no help to customers whatsoever and strictly following the letter of the rules. That cuts both ways... In the 15 items they would deliver for a flat rate, they counted the $3 plastic pencil tray as one "item," and the 8-drawer dresser (delivered in two boxes) as another "item." Ah well. It was fun putting it all together.

Anyway, I now have a recognizable kitchen, living room, and bedroom (complete with bed). Still working on a coffee table. And blinds.

"There is now."

2005-09-27T20:06:00.000-04:00

The Nine Billion Names Of God. Well, maybe, but it's a good thing that it still needs acolytes.

Travel

2005-07-17T19:58:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm already moved into my new apartment in Brooklyn, and I start work tomorrow. But I'm also behind in my entries, so you get this one first.

The week after term ended, I went down to visit New York with Vikki, Molly, and Oliver. We used Molly's soon-to-expire military ID card to get cheap rooms at the Soldier's, Sailor's, Marine's and Airmens' Club on Lexington Ave, near Grand Central Station.

I had this plan that I would somehow use the trip to look for an apartment, so as soon as we checked in, I called a few phone numbers I'd found on Craigslist. One said the apartments in the listing weren't even built yet, and one tried to fit me in a couple days later, but another one was able to see me that afternoon. So we rushed over to Brooklyn on the subway (my second trip on it ever, after my first that afternoon) and she showed us around to a few places. I liked one of them enough that I called her back that evening to say I wanted it. I (with Vikki) met with the landlords in the Empire State Building the next afternoon, and put down the deposit the next morning. So within 24 hours of arriving in New York, I'd gone from having a couple phone numbers to signing a lease. Not bad.

We found time to fit in more interesting things on the trip, too. We visited Toys 'R' Us, the New York Public Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We saw The Producers on Broadway, which was a really good show. And we played on a couple playgrounds.

A couple days later, Vikki went of to California for the summer, and I spent a week at home in Virginia. I visited the dentist a couple times, and got my back tooth put back together (again). I saw the Lord of the Rings Symphony put on by the Fairfax Symphony... It was pretty good, but either the first half was better than the second, or I was just too tired to pay attention all the way through. (It's kind of scary how much of the movies I can remember from just the music.)

I saw the Nationals win 3-2 to kick off their 12-1 homestand (which I take full credit for, of course), and I even agreed that home run should have been called a foul (though apparently it really should have been a home run).

And I lay around and read a lot.

Then was back up to Boston with my parents and my brother for commencement. Not much to say about that, except that the weather and the speaker weren't all that bad. I commenced.

I went down to New Haven for a day, with some old friends from 21L.703 last year, to see a performance of Travesties. They made the play lighter than I remembered it, but then I was writing essays about it and they were trying to keep people entertained for three hours, so that makes sense. And it was good to see people from the class again.

While I was in Boston I also had a couple graduation/going-away parties, from the Supertech group and from the ringers. I got a towel.

I went to the Aristocrats sneak at MIT. Funny, in a very very obscene kind of way. And I worked my last ever (probably) shift, subdirecting Good Will Hunting.

I rolled all my change and ended up with over $120.

I visited Vikki in California for a weekend. Mostly it was just good to be with her again, and I got to meet her parents. We also went hiking a little bit, saw Howl's Moving Castle, and had my brother (who's also out there for the summer) over for dinner. And played video games and watched Star Trek.

And on the way home, I learned that flying through Phoenix is a generally bad idea. We sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting for a reroute due to weather, but before we got it, an engine overheated because it was 110 outside. We finally left on a different plane, three hours late.

I went to the 12-bell ringing in Toronto, and did (surprise!) a lot of 12-bell ringing. (And even a little bit of Suprise.) I got my first quarter of Maximus (Plain Bob), and my first quarter of Grandsire Cinques in three years. (Not to mention a few quarter attempts that went nowehere.) It's always strange to ring on that many bells, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.

I went on a bar crawl for Molly's 21st birthday. The only ill effects were when I got home and tipped over a water bottle onto my keyboard, but I could see myself doing that sober too.

And in my free time, I finished writing all the code I said I'd written in my thesis, and I revised my thesis to talk about the complicated parts that I didn't forsee when I was writing it the first time. So I got it signed again, and went and swapped the new for the old with the department. And with that, I was really done. (Except for bug fixes, and helping Angelina figure out what my code is supposed to do, and revising that conference paper...)

It's not just me

2005-06-09T11:19:00.000-04:00

I think Mexico City and cameras just don't mix. See? (That's the same place we went last year, though we didn't have time to go up the cathedral.)

A Long Term

2005-06-08T17:23:00.000-04:00

It's been a long term, with much hosage. Looking ahead from the start of the term, I knew there would be three things taking up all my time, and I was right. But it's all over now.

The first project to suck up my life was the HMMT. I was the, um, Chief Coder again this year. That meant it was my job to make the "Abacus" scorekeeping software work. Yes, this is the same software that I made work last year, and made work again for my AUP last May. Like the masochist that I am, I keep coming up with more improvements to make to it, and then I have to make them actually work. This year I added support for sign-in and registration, so that registration could happen at a reasonable rate and the contest could start on time for once.

I was mostly successful. The contest did, in fact, start on time, and we even managed to track down most of the weird cases and missing papers. (Yeah, the Guts round started late for the third year running, but that wasn't supposed to be my job anyway.) Of course, there's still plenty of improvements to make for next year. Maybe I'll do them this summer, or maybe I'll just put my code up where other people can get at it. Letting someone else deal with it seems easier, somehow, but I do have time... we'll see.

So that was the first three weeks of February. While that was going on, the term was starting up (funny how it never waits until I'm ready), and that meant I had 45 little 6.001 students expecting me to teach them something in tutorials. Every Monday and Tuesday. For 8 hours. And that doesn't count the hours of tutorials preparation Sunday nights, and the four hours a week sitting in on lectures and recitations, and the 10 hours grading projects every two or three weeks... Yes, that all is as much time as it sounds like.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it. Once I figured out what to say for each week, it was pretty satisfying to go through it and see the ideas clicking in my students' minds. I remember my 6.001 tutorials often being the highlight of my week back when I was a froshling, and I tried to make them fun and interesting for my students too. (One week I brought cookies, and another week we all got to wear funny hats.) I don't know if I succeeded or not, but hopefully it was at least a little more interesting than it could have been. I don't remember anyone ever falling asleep, at least.

I still feel a little bad that I wasn't able to help the students as much as I wish I could have. I tried to have extra office hours before the quizzes and whenever anyone asked for them, and I tried to answer emails as quickly as I could, but I still feel like I could have been more proactive helping the students who didn't know to ask for help. Ah well. I had too many other things going on to pour all of my energy into the class.

"Other things" mostly means "writing my thesis," the third wheel on this term's Tricycle of Hosage. (Apparently MIT thinks that just passing a bunch of classes isn't enough to give me a Master's.) As far as the actual work is concerned, we ended up with a basically complete implementation of the JCilk specification as it currently exists. It's horribly inefficient so far (or, more accurately, Java is horribly inefficient at doing some of the things it needs to do), but it's there, and it works. For the cases we've tested so far. We think.

As I thought way back last fall when I started implementing it, its exception-handling mechanism is what makes JCilk actually interesting. In short, handling exceptions in a parallel program is nontrivial, and it's not even obvious exactly what the right way to do it is. (Relatively recently, it wasn't even obvious what the right way to handle exceptions was in a serial program.) Our solution is--well, I think it's a clean and elegant way to do it.

Hopefully, someday our conference paper will get accepted and everyone else will think so too. Oh yeah, the paper. That's what I did over spring break: I worked on that paper. Unfortunately, we still don't have any solid "evaluation" (say, non-toy sample programs or non-slow performance numbers), so it's not going anywhere yet. Maybe soon.

It did at least give me a good starting place when I starting writing my thesis in April. One chapter of my thesis came entirely from the paper, and a couple other chapters started there before I hacked them into the bits and pieces that I wanted. I filled in the rest and had a draft of the full thesis by the end of April, right on target. Then, two weeks later, I had another full draft. Somewhere in between, I gave a 12-minute thesis presentation at the EECS department's MasterWorks program. (I finished talking with 3 seconds left.)

I spent the last week of the term just going thorough and revising, page by page. It amazed me just how long the thing was (95 pages by the end) and what it meant to work on something five times as long as anything else I've ever written, and much longer than the 5-page papers I've gotten so used to. Just reading through it with a red pen (I'd dried up my green pen grading 6.001 projects) took a whole day, and entering those changes back into the text took another. But at 10:00 on May 18th, I finished it, printed it, and left it for my advisor to read the next morning.

The final steps were complicated by the 6.001 final also being the next morning. So I went to Johnson to proctor all morning and give back the last papers that the students hadn't picked up. (Unfortunately there weren't enough lambda-pins to go around, so we didn't hand them out this year. Sigh.) It took me a couple tries, but I finally got my thesis signed and turned it in.

Then came grading, all afternoon. Three hundred and some exams is a lot of exams, in case you were wondering. But I got to break out the Abstraction Violation stamp that vikki gave me, leading to much amusement when it was most needed (about four hours into grading). Vikki even showed up later to help grade. Since the two of us had (free) tickets to go see Star Wars that night (it was May 19, remember), and she threatened to kick me if I had to stay and keep grading instead, we got let out of grading a little before we were actually done.

So, yeah, we saw Star Wars. I liked it, mostly. The Jedi death scene was well done, and the last two duels were good considering that everyone in the audience knew nobody was going to die. And more than six years after I downloaded the Duel of the Fates mp3, they finally put that music to good use. I just wish they hadn't had to give away that Leia is Luke's sister... ah well.

I guess I did find the time to do a bunch of other things this term, too...

I tried taking 6.972, a game theory class, as a listener. That lasted until about the end of March, when I missed a lecture to work on the paper. That put me just far enough behind to completely confuse me at the next lecture, so I gave it up.

I went ice-skating once or twice, and only once nearly killed myself by falling flat on my back.

I saw the Vagina Monologues (at MIT), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (at the Chelsea Theare Works), Company (at MIT), The Phantom of the Opera (at the Opera House in Boston), and a stealth seminer by Douglas Hofsteader. I was too late for a talk by Michel Gondry, but I got to yell "The room is full, go away" down the hall since nobody else would. I saw a bunch of movies. I read The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossed.

I finally walked the Freedom Trail (with Vikki), all the way to the Bunker Hill monument (and all the way up it) and then to the Constitution. We got there just as the museum was closing, but we took the ferry back to the blue line instead of having to walk back the way we came.

My bike was stolen. I guess it was my fault for leaving it out for two weeks with a cable lock, but it's not like it was really even worth stealing. Ah well. I'll probably get a new bike sometime.

I did ADITL.

We managed to keep the handbell group together for long enough to have a concert, despite people being too busy to practice, and the CAC taking a lot of pestering to actually give us rooms. But they did, we had a semi-successful concert.

I got myself not-elected to any Guild of Bellringers office, for the first time in four years. This probably has something to do with the fact that I'm leaving MIT.

And the last task of the term was the 6.001 grades meeting on the morning of May 20, when we all got to see how our students did on the final and (mostly futilely) argue to change their overall grades. And then, that was it. There was nothing left. I was done.

Thesis done.

2005-05-18T22:28:00.000-04:00

6.001 tomorrow.
Star Wars after.
Update later.

IAP, belatedly

2005-02-25T01:36:00.000-05:00

Pretend this was posted two or three weeks ago.

The second half of IAP went past fairly uneventfully. With Vikki still off on Asia, and my group gradually trickling in from Singapore, there weren't a whole lot of people around. But the chance for solitude was nice for a while, as was the option to stay home for a day without anybody caring.

I played with my iPod some more. It has actual music on it now, which definitely makes it more useful. The next step is getting rid of the music I don't like and finding more that I do.

Scifi Marathon happened. So did a blizzard. Conveniently, they were scheduled for the same time. "Wherever you are this evening around 7 PM we recommend you be prepared to stay there through at least noon tomorrow," the weather report said. That's kind of the philosophy of the marathon to begin with, except that we only goes until 7am.

I ended up sleeping through the last movie on a couch in building 32, then going ringing in the morning through the blizzard. Unfortunately, the T was Moving With Delays Due To Weather-Related Conditions, so I got there later than I meant to. Still, only two of us made it at all, so I counted it as a moral victory.

A bunch of people came ringing all three Saturday mornings, despite the cold and impending/lingering snow. A few even seem likely to stick with it. As always, we'll see.

I got a new watch and an iPod case, but not new sneakers.

Then Reg Day happened and term started. Oops.

From the Post

2005-01-24T23:34:00.000-05:00

washingtonpost.com: At Google, Not Quite Partying Like It's 1999: "Google still throws a mean party."

Two feet of snow.

2005-01-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

One of those times I'm glad I don't have a car.

2005-01-24T12:46:00.000-05:00

Snow!

Singapore and back again

2005-01-20T11:36:00.000-05:00

Twenty-four hours is a long time to spend travelling on planes and through airports. After the first couple naps, I completely lost track of what time it was, and my watch telling me it was three in the morning while it was still light outside didn't help matters. I had short layovers in Chicago and Hong Kong going both ways, so it's not as if I was stuck in my seat the whole time, and I had plenty of reading material, so I wasn't particularly bored. But the immensity of the time it took to get from A to B was just kind of draining.

And what did I do there? Mostly, I worked. My main accomplishment was giving a presentation to 30-ish National University of Singapore people on the work I've been doing, and the design issues that still need decisions. It seemed to go over pretty well. I got a little less feedback than I would have liked, and a a lot of what we got was about the fundamental decisions made 5-10 years ago that we're building off of, but Charles jumped in to answer those so I wasn't on the spot.

Just writing the slides was probably helped me more than the presentation did. Now that I've been forced to crystallize and clarify some of my ideas, it's easier to think about what's left to do. Charles agreed that I can use presentation's outline to start writing my thesis, so by the time he gets back in about a month, hopefully I'll have a draft of something written up.

That was last Monday. For the rest of the week (while everyone else was busy with their presentations), I just worked on coding. Lots of coding. And debugging. And thinking. But the artificial deadline of my flight home put me under pressure to focus and keep working, which was a good thing.

I also learned that 4:10am is very early to leave for the airport, but I could have guessed that beforehand. I was lucky to even have a cab--when I tried calling the night before, it turned out the call wasn't free like I'd told it would be, and I didn't have a phone card. I asked the first NUS student I saw what I should do, and (after he lent me a phone card and I got to hold for ten minutes) it turned out his dad is a cab driver and was working the early morning shift that night. So he called him instead, and I got my cab reservation. (The driver even knew where the dorm was, unlike every other driver I had.)

We did get off campus a few times while I was there. Once to the bird park, where I took a few nice pictures (and a lot of bad ones). Once to the East Coast Park, which was the only time I saw the ocean (or at least the harbor). We ate at a seafood restaurant where they pulled the fish out of the tank right in front of you, and we rode the most satisfying bumper cars I can remember being in. We also went out shopping one morning, where we got lots of obscure fruits and a package of durian wafers (which we tasted once and then left sealed in a bag), among other things. And I got a laptop mouse so I wouldn't have to use the thinkpad eraser-head for two weeks straight.

And that's it for adventures in Asia. I got back Friday afternoon in the middle of Mystery Hunt. There's not much to say about that, besides that we finally won. I was too tired and off-schedule to help with too much, and mostly just stared at the same metapuzzle for the 16 hours we were stuck on it. Now the people in charge of the team get to figure out how to put together a writing team with people who will actually write a good hunt, and at the same time not kill each other.

Since then I've been mostly taking it easy. Some work on campus (though everyone else is still in Singapore), some work at home, some unpacking and laundry, some reading. A lot of playing with my pictures in the new Picasa. I may even post a few of them sometime.

A quiet break

2005-01-02T01:50:00.000-05:00

I've been at home in Virginia the past couple weeks. Resting, mostly. With the Singapore trip coming up, I don't feel obligated to go out and Do Things while I'm here, so I've spent more time just sitting around than I have in a while. And it's been nice.

I did go out and see people a couple times. I went into TJ the Wednesday before Christmas, for the alumni reception. It's the first time since I graduated that it's been after MIT got out, so I thought I'd stop by and see who would show up. Unsurprisingly, the majority of people there were from the past couple years, but I did see three other people from my year. And of course I went and visited teachers up and down the Math hall (and ran into a bunch of other mostly-MIT people doing the same thing).

Chirstmas came and went, with my big presents being a new battery for my laptop (30-45 minutes with the old one just wasn't enough) and a set of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming.

I got down to the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. to see their Gehry exhibit. He's designing their new wing (due in 2009), so they put on an exhibit of other museums he's designed. They all looked basically the same as Stata--big shiny jumbled wavy silver shapes. But I still kind of like that look, and it was interesting to see all of the models together.

Today, I went and visited some friends living in D.C. and lost at Illuminatti, again.

I actually got a lot of work done here too, in small fragments at a time. I finished off the LSC job descriptions I started revising in May, just in time for my term to end on December 31. There was also time for a few small fixes to jCilk, but nothing substantial. And I, um, looked at the HMMT registration software...

But mostly, I rested. Read a lot, played with the new iPod that Google sent me, watched some movies on tape. And slept. I feel better than I have in a while, and I'm motivated to go get some work done over the next few weeks. We'll see how long that lasts.

2004-12-17T18:07:00.000-05:00

Well, as of ten minutes ago, I've accepted the offer from Google. So I'll be working in New York City, with a tentative start date June 20.

That was fun.

Done.

2004-12-15T01:55:00.000-05:00

Classes are finally over for the term, and possibly forever for me. Sunday night, I submitted my final project for 6.866 (Machine Vision). It was on using photometric stereo [edit--fixed link] in the real world, where there aren't handy infinitely-far point sources of light to use. I got to run extension cords down to the basement and lie in the dust, and I even got some almost-decent results at the last minute. More impressively, the last minute only came on only 4 days' extension, instead of the three months it took me last fall.

And the next morning, I took the 6:20 (AM) train out of South Station down to New York to visit Google's office there. It was small, especially compared to the Mountain View office, but somehow bigger than I'd imagined. Lots of good people there, but still small enough to actually know everyone. They also gave us lots of time to explore the city, which I spent walking semi-aimlessly and then napping in my hotel room. (Staying up late and getting up early don't mix.) Then there was a Brazilian dinner with "meat spigot" cards to flip over when you wanted them to start or stop throwing meat onto your plate.

Google also announced that libraries are getting in on Google Print too. I personally think this is the exciting part, since (I assume) Amazon would never bother scanning out-out-of-copyright books because they would be out-of-print too, so nobody would be selling them. But libraries have lots of them, and if Google can show them, it's an immense amount of Stuff that nobody else has.

(As an aside, it turns out that my page-numbering code was probably rewritten twice after I left. Ah well. I still did it first.)

In other job-hunting news, Oracle's now out of the picture. First, the recruiter called and said they would make an offer, and I said I'd consider it if it was competitive with Google (which was true at the time). When I called my potential future manager, though, we both agreed that I wasn't especially interested in the company, and he said they wouldn't match Google's offer, so that was the end of that.

... Which leaves Microsoft. I went out and interviewed with them in Seattle (they put me up in a two-story "executive penthouse" hotel room) and was actually quite impressed with what they had to say for themselves. Looking back on it though, I feel more ambivalent about the people I talked to and the projects they're working on. (This may have to do with my visit to Google yesterday.) Ah well... they say they have an offer for me but they haven't said what it is yet. If I can win the phone-tag game, maybe I'll find out tomorrow.

In other job-related news, I'm going to be a 6.001 TA in the spring. Yay. Adding in my time as an LA, I'll have 6.001 in some form for 8 out of my 10 terms at MIT.

And that's about it. This is my week to do all the things (like, say, research) that classes and job-hunting have pushed to the side, plus to watch the extended RotK that arrived today. Then comes a trip home to Virginia, then following my advisor to Singapore for two weeks, then back to Boston for Mystery Hunt. Maybe I'll even update before then.

October. Oh, and November.

2004-11-29T01:43:00.000-05:00

It turns out that nothing much happens to me in any given week, but by the end of a month there's too much to write about without taking a while. Apparently I need to find some happy medium. So:

The big story in my life over the past almost-two-months has been job interviews. I had two on-campus interviews with Google, then a couple weeks later they flew me out to California and interviewed me again there. There were 60 students from all over interviewing in one day, so it was a little hectic. And I got to be one of those people who has friends to visit and, well, went and had dinner with a couple friends from my internship there. It was fun to be out there again, though I'd probably rather work at the New York office, which they've promised to let me visit sometime soon.

The hardest part of the day was actually talking to my manager over lunch. He told me a lot about the current state of my project, most of which I can't repeat, except that it turns out my code was mostly rewritten after I left. Ah well. At least it sounds like they kept my ideas. After that, he asked me to explain my thesis research project and interrupted after the first sentence to ask "Why?" I spent the next ten minutes trying to explain what it does that makes it any better than other, more obvious ideas. I think I finally came up with a good answer, but it was discouraging how long it took me.

Next up (a couple weeks after those) were the interviews with Oracle. I was on-site at their Nashua, NH office, so it was just an hour-ish drive away from Somerville. (The drivers could never find their way into or out of Somerville--now I know how to get to my apartment from the highway.) It looked like a good company to potentially work for. This particular office was originally the Digital office that they bought out about ten years ago, so the culture (they told me) was a little different from their headquarters in California.

Between my first and second day of interviews, I got an offer from Google. So that kind of dampened the second day, especially since most of the people I talked to seemed to think as highly of Google as I do.

I still haven't interviewed with Microsoft yet. I'm flying out this Thursday to interview on Friday. I have my doubts that they'll be able to convince me to work for them, but I told that to my recruiter and he still wanted to fly me out there. He already put enough effort into convincing me that Microsoft is less evil than it used to be that I feel like I should give them a shot. So I'm going.

I saw a bunch of movies at LSC, and liked most of them. I ran a few sneaks, which mostly didn't get enough people, except when they did. And I got someone else elected Night Director for next year. Yay.

I also went to the Orson Scott Card lecture at MIT. The thesis of the talk was that what happens to Israel is the great test of how history will judge us, and if we renege on all the promises the world made after WWII then civilization hasn't lived up to what it should be. I agreed with a lot more of what he said than I expected to, but it still left me with a little bit of a bad taste. (Maybe it was his conclusion that civilization-loving people should vote Bush.) He also signed my copy of Maps in a Mirror, so of course I've been re-reading stories from it in my free time.

I bought a printer. It's a Canon i560, which not only is the bottom of the line, but it's the bottom of the old line that just got discontinued. But it was cheap, and is supposed to better text than any of the others, which is mostly what I use it for anyway. And it does decent-enough photos for my purposes.

The Red Sox won, but Kerry lost. You win some, you lose some, I guess. If only one some wasn't a lot more important than the other some... But I did get to see the victory parade (for the Sox) as it passed by Government Center. I didn't recognize any of the players, but I did see the trophey.

I gave a research presentation to my group. Well, half of one. Well, half of one that was about three times as long as a normal one, so I think that counts as giving a presentation. In retrospect, it probably should have been divided up into two parts anyway, so that me and the PhD student working on the project wouldn't have had to switch back and forth and stress about each other taking up the time.

I went to a USACO problem-writing session. It's been way too long since I've done that kind of thinking, and coding up the test solutions took me a lot longer than it would have four years ago. On top of the problems getting harder, it's probably a good thing I graduated when I did, but it was still fun getting back into it for a
day with no pressure, and seeing all those people again.

We had a halloween party at MathHut. Lots of candy, lots of people, way too much fudge. There are pictures up on ofoto now. Ask me if you want to see them. Or if you want some fudge.

I visited MIThenge, the one day it wasn't cloudy or snowy. Yeah, it snowed. About 4 inches. In the middle of November. I didn't bike to campus that day.

And I came home for Thanksgiving, and saw my brother for the first time since he went off to CMU. Apparently he's doing well, making friends, passing all his classes, and still has time for a ridiculous number of activities. Ah, to be a freshman again.

And that's about it, I guess. Well, no, it's not, but that's more than enough for one entry. Maybe I'll update again less than months from now.

What I did last summer

2004-10-06T09:44:00.000-04:00

Go look at Google Search: books about ihtfp. Now.

See the nifty book result link at the top, with the little bookshelf icon?

See how when you click it, it knows what page number it's on?

That's what I did. :)

Weeks, Months...

2004-10-06T02:17:00.000-04:00

Shrug. I'll start keeping up with regular updates someday. Exciting things that have happened in the past month...

We got a bunch of freshmen for LSC, so people only have to work the right number of shifts this term, at least on Night. And for bellringing, so the guild won't wither and die, which is good. They seem excited about it, and hopefully they're going to stick with it. Unfortunately, they can only come once a week because the nave ceiling is collapsing at the Church of the Advent. It's not the bells fault, the engineers say, but something about all that shaking back and forth makes the water-damaged masonry fall off, and the church doesn't really want that to happen while there are people inside.

And I'm finally not in charge of practices at Old North. I get to spend my breaks sitting on the side and not thinking about anything, just like everyone else. Ironically, I've been more on time in the past month than I was all summer and I still haven't skipped a Saturday yet, because I've been bringing the freshmen over. Ah well.

Classes started. Taking 6.896 again, but this time it's Sublinear-time Algorithms. (It's a "special subject," so the same number was Parallel Hardware when I took it last term.) Basically a lot of approximate randomized algorithms--"if you squint at this graph, it would probably look not-connected," for example. But it's interesting, and will hopefully satisfy my algorithms craving enough that I won't have to take 6.856 (Randomized Algorithms) in the Spring, which is supposed to be hard. Also taking 6.866, Machine Vision, since I've done enough of it in summer jobs that I feel like I should learn something about it. Oh, and it meets my last MEng requirement besides thesis.

As far as Thesis goes, still working on jCilk. We're getting closer to an actual language specification, and I've got a prototype implementation that doesn't go that much slower than it should.

I bought a nightstand.

One Friday morning I woke up and heard a mini-bulldozer (I'm told it's called a bobcat) in the backyard. My first thought was that the back tires were going to do awful things to the grass. Then the front part scooped up a mound of grass and dirt, and I realized they weren't really worried about the tires. That evening, every scrap of dirt or green was gone, and we had a gravel pit completely surrounding the house. The following Monday, I woke up and they were paving it. I panicked and tried to call the landlords, but to no avail. The house now has an asphalt moat. (It's not very effective at keeping anybody out.)

I tripled my laptop's memory, and installed XP on it. Overall I think it still goes faster than it did before.

The career fair happened a couple weeks ago. It was a little disturbing how many people I knew on the recruiting side of things. I threw my resume at a bunch of companies... we'll see what comes of it. Interviews on campus should hopefully be happening over the next month or two.

Went to the Ig Nobels ceremony last week, for the first time. It's always on a Thursday evening, but since there's no ringing on Thursdays for a while, we took a field trip there instead. It was amusing. If you haven't seen the basketball video yet, go read the directions and then watch it. After you've tried to count, go look at its citation under Psychology.

I woke up this morning and read that my 8.022 recitation instructor from freshman year won the Nobel prize. I don't know that many professors in the fields that Nobels get given for, so this is probably the closest I'll get to knowing a winner (at least for a while).

And my Google project's still not out yet.

I'm back

2004-09-06T02:15:00.000-04:00

Right.

A semi-public way to stay in touch with a bunch of people at once would be useful right around now, and I've already got this blogger thing sitting around just waiting to be used. Expect more posts in the coming weeks, maybe even with more actual titles. (Unless I keep being lazy.)

2003-12-30T23:37:00.000-05:00

For those who wondered about my tragic flaw...

To be, or not to be?

What is Your Shakespearian Tragic Flaw?
brought to you by Quizilla

2003-09-25T22:24:00.000-04:00

The Atlantic | March 2003 | Caring for Your Introvert | Rauch: "We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say 'I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.'"

2003-09-04T18:25:00.000-04:00

Properties of 17 (seventeen): "One of the earliest mentioning of the number 17 was by the Egyptians."

2003-07-18T03:45:00.000-04:00

Weather Underground: Palo Alto, California Forecast: "Friday Night
... Chance of thunderstorms 20 percent. "

There's hope...

2003-07-16T04:02:00.000-04:00

Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary

Such a decline, from #1 to to #14 over 100 years. But that just means less confusion for me, right?

2003-07-11T02:32:00.000-04:00

A Teeny Weenie Fine (washingtonpost.com): "At 8:30 a.m. yesterday, Simon met for two hours with Deputy District Attorney Jon Reddin, who said he also grilled the hot dog, Italian sausage and one independent witness. "

Right...

2003-06-26T23:46:00.000-04:00

Er-jokes

And where else but in the MIT humor locker?

2003-06-26T21:13:00.000-04:00

Google Toolbar

It's so satisfying when it captures the popup and makes a little popping noise. (If Kesandru had had a well of captured popups instead of souls, maybe he would have gotten home...)

2003-06-26T21:09:00.000-04:00

Said I'd never have an online journal, but this is a blog, right? Completely devoid of any personal information. Right? Oh.

Well, we'll see.