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Well this is my last update from the East Coast. I'm flying out tomorrow morning to Berkeley to resume my life as an academic. These last few weeks have been a whirlwind. There were a couple of missed opportunities: a second mountain biking trip up to Mt. Killington (our ride had his cell phone alarm set to vibrate instead of ring), an American Analog Set concert at TT's that I was dying to go to (tragically, sold out shortly before I got there), a BUDA Good Cause ultimate tournament (hmm... missed for personal reasons). Regardless, I did get to do a lot of fun stuff. Wing, John, Jordi and I took Lee to Six Flags New England for his "bachelor party"... we had a blast going on all the coasters and the water park rides. Superman is still the best roller coaster I've ever been on. Then, of course, there was Lee's actual wedding itself. Elias gave me a ride down to New York, where we picked up Jeff and Wing and headed on to New Jersey. The wedding (my first ever!) was in a beautiful country club with lavish decorations and fantastic food. We were all very proud to see Lee and Lynn together at last. It was also a pleasure just hanging out with friends. I went home one weekend for the annual fantasy football draft with my high school buds. We made the usual Damon's run and then chowed down on pizza and engaged in our customary (hilarious) banter while doing the draft. Then there was a lot of hanging out with people in Boston and the guys in the house (they even took me out to dinner once!). Of course every meeting was bittersweet; I'm not sure when I can come back up to the northeast to see my friends again. I've had a fantastic time here and have to say I'm really happy I took a year off before grad school. My ultimate team played its season-ending tournament this past weekend. We had an amazing regular season, finishing 7-1. The one game we lost was by the score of 15-13, and the main reason we lost is that we only had three women that night, so they had to play savage (no subs) for all 28 points. So we headed into the tourney with a lot of confidence. James even arranged to stop in Boston for a day on his way back to Minnesota from DC to play. Turns out our confidence was well founded, as we were on fire: we crushed the first three teams we played, 13-1, 13-4, and 10-5. That last game was against the team that had beaten us during the season. It felt good to show them what we were like with a full squad :). Next up was the semifinal match, in which we played a team that bizarrely had never won a game the whole season... somehow they had been doing really well in the tournament. Well, it turns out that they had enlisted several ringers from local college teams. So they walked over us, which was very frustrating. At least it was good to know that we were the best non-ringer team out there. And playing with my team was a complete blast. Everyone is at least a solid player (some of my teammates were outstanding), and our collective sense of humor was laugh-out-loud nasty. I made a lot of great friends this season, and one special one. So I spent this past week at home with my family. I saw John for a day, and we spent it as we usually do, talking about girls and life (is there much of a difference between the two?). He's teaching English in China next year, so it may be a while before I see him again. Anyway, the rest of the week I hung out with my parents and sisters (who even helped me shop for clothes!). It's been very fun and relaxing.
The next time I update this webpage I'll be in California. It may be in a while, as my to-do list is about a mile long (register for classes, open a bank account, get a cell phone, go to all kinds of orientations, get a California driver's license, register to vote, blah blah), and my earthly possessions may be in transit for a while. I ditched about half of the stuff I own (which was really fun, actually), and the other half I'm shipping cross-country with some moving company. I don't even own a computer anymore! Hard to believe, isn't it? Liberating, though... So: it's been a great trip, kids. Talk to you in Pacific Time. |
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I only have two weeks left in Boston, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to simultaneously take care of moving details, tie up all the loose ends, and still try to have a good last East Coast summer. Dan and Matt (Bosse) stayed with us for a couple of days, which was a ton of fun; five Cheshire guys in the same house is always fun :). We talked and played a lot of ball. We're trying to schedule a draft day for sometime next month back in Cheshire, but if that falls through (which it may, considering that the eight of us are all over the U.S. right now, from Hawaii to Florida), this may have been the last time I see Dan for a while, as he's just moved from Vermont to Texas. More goodbyes: Jess had a going-away party for those of us leaving town: Kerry, Jeff, James and me. It's sad to see all of my friends (well, myself included) scattered to the winds in such a short period of time. Of course, I have to say goodbye to everyone who's staying in Boston too. Yes, I am already getting nostalgic ;). I saw two bad movies in the past week: Road to Perdition and Austin Powers 3. Neither is worth watching. On a better note, my ultimate team is doing well, although we lost our last game in the final minutes, 15-13. We're 4-1, though, and should head to the tourney with a lot of confidence. Pickup soccer is also fantastic... so many people show up these days that we always play 9-v-9 or more, full field with big goals. I had forgotten how fun it is to shoot at real goals! Saw the Tragically Hip at Somerville Theater on Saturday. The show was, as usual, full of enery and packed with Canadians. Even though they played for a good 100 minutes, as James put it, "I can't argue with their setlist, but I wish they had played another two hours." That's generally the sign of a good show :). |
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The title refers to an American Analog Set album (I'm listening to them right now) but of course it's quite appropriate for this time of year anyway. If you've been reading this site for a while, you may have noticed that my recent updates have been somewhat stilted. I basically kind of got sick of writing updates and just went through the motions. I've resolved not to do that again; if I don't feel like writing an update, I just won't, no matter how long it's been. So it goes without saying (what a stupid expression that is!) that I want to write one now. Hopefully you'll notice the difference :). Oops, during the first version of this update, I forgot to mention that Wing is back after three weeks in LA and China. We missed him -- welcome back, Wing! Boston's kind of going crazy now, actually. It's past 11pm and weather.com tells me that outside it's 89F but feels like 97F. Damn. The humidity is through the roof. I'm sitting here with my windows open and lights off, and I'm still boiling. Oh, what I'd give for a good AC right now... Tomorrow's supposed to be equally bad, but things are supposed to cool down a bit (read: mid-80s) later in the week. I certainly hope so. That aside, these past couple of weeks have been a blast. I've been hanging out with a lot of different friends after work. In fact, there was one 9-day period in which I didn't eat dinner home. I never thought I'd yearn for my own cooking, but after eating out that much, it was quite a welcome relief :). We also had two surprise parties, for James and Matt. Happy birthday, guys! The whitewater trip the weekend before last was a rousing success. Maine was beautiful, the weather was very bearable (chilly, even), and the rapids were in good form. We drove up on a Saturday afternoon and camped out that night, staying up way too late playing Taboo. Sunday morning we got up early and met our raft guide, Marta. She was incredibly experienced, having rafted on several continents. Her expertise proved particularly valuable during one huge hit, as they call them in the business, in which our raft smashed against a rock so hard that it was knocked perfectly vertical and we all hung on for dear life -- except for Jimming, who was thrown from the raft into the river. As soon as the boat stabilized, we strove to help him get back aboard, only to have Marta yell at us to paddle hard right. Sure enough, in front of us, forgotten in the confusion of the previous hit, was a sharp rock outcropping. Jimming managed to grab onto Marta's paddle as we navigated the rest of the rapids and narrowly avoided smashing into the rocks and causing Jimming serious injury. Phew. Further down the river we encountered some rapids that were apparently safe enough to swim down, provided you set yourself up in the proper formation: arms to the side and feet straight out in front of you. It sounded cool so we all jumped out of the boat. Strangely enough, even thought I was one of the last people out of the boat, I found myself flying past everyone else at a tremendous speed: I had somehow landed in a swift current. The waves were big and turbulent, and the next time I righted myself I glanced around me and didn't see anyone. Slightly ahead of me was another raft. The guide in that raft shouted back at me, "Get back on your raft! There's some serious rapids up ahead!" Uh oh. I was starting to get nervous. I craned my head around and saw my raft (and my raftmates) about 40 yards upstream. I was right in the middle of the river and the current was strong enough that I had to swim quite arduously just to keep from drifting further down the river. Luckily I managed to hold on until my raft caught up with me. Phew again. The rest of the trip was far more relaxing :). Shameless plug: my mom and little sister were featured in a New York Times article last week. There's even a huge picture of our living room in the print edition. I'm very proud of them! Check it out. Even though it's insanely hot I've been getting my fair share of sports in recently. My ultimate team is 3-0, which rocks. Summer soccer is brutal (we usually play in the afternoon) but a ton of fun. And I've even been playing some tennis recently. I feel like I might actually get into shape. Now that I don't have to wake up at ridiculous hours for the World Cup anymore, I feel like I'm in better shape, at least :).A few words about the recent Pledge of Allegiance ruling: I totally agree with it. Just replace "God" with "Allah" and it's pretty obviously unconstitutional. It's depressing how uninformed the general public is about the issue, and worse, how reactionary the Senate is. What a bunch of lamers. This whole attitude of "national pride at any cost" hearkens back to the days when "under God" was actually added to the Pledge, the 1950s. I thought we had outgrown that phase. It's just unfortunate that the judges' only course of action was to effectively ban the Pledge rather than motioning to remove the "under God" clause, thus making the decision seem more like an affront to American patriotism rather than the separation of church and state ruling that it actually is. |
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I'm leaving in about an hour and a half to go camping and whitewater rafting up in Maine with a couple of friends. I haven't packed any stuff yet so I better write this update quickly. The last couple of weeks have been pretty wacky. I've been watching a lot of World Cup games, which means that my sleep schedule is totally nuts: early bedtimes, hour-long naps between early morning games, and a general lethargy throughout the day. The Cup was a great success in some ways: both of my teams, England and the US, did very well, reaching the quarterfinals. The US finally managed to earn some respect from snobby internationals who thought that since most Americans don't care about soccer (which is true), the US team must be bad and any victories by the team were lucky. Some dynamite performances indicated otherwise. England, of course, were brilliant at times and completely lackluster at others, especially during their loss to Brazil. It was also great fun watching some of the other teams play. I was rooting for Spain this morning (figuring they had the best chance of taking out Brazil), but they were absolutely robbed by bad reffing. Hopefully FIFA will see the light and add a second on-field ref like I've been saying for years :). Last weekend I went home; Umesh was also back from California, so it was a little family reunion. We celebrated Father's Day, held a party, and did a lot of fun family stuff. Umesh, my mom, and I did the requisite soccer watching late at night (and early in the morning). Meera fell while rollerblading a couple of days ago and was injured seriously enough that she had to spend a couple of days in the hospital. Luckily she's back home now and getting better, which is a relief. Get well soon, Meera! I saw two concerts in the past couple of weeks. First, I went to the Avalon with Lee and Dodzie to see Ben Folds. I was initially surprised to see that he had no backup band, but he more than compensated with his energetic piano playing and hilarious stage banter. A top-notch show. Then I went with a bunch of people from work (Lonnie, Leo, Christine, and Martha) to see Beth Orton at the Paradise. The show started about 75 minutes later. At that point I was practically hallucinating because I had stayed up the night before to watch a World Cup match, so the show had an interesting quality to it :). She played some of my favorites, including an awesome version of "A Galaxy of Emptiness". Grant and I went out to dinner last night with two of our friends from Cheshire, Julie and Juhi. We ate in Chinatown and the saw Minority Report at the Loews in Boston Commons. It had a few weaknesses, most notably some gaping plot holes, but on the whole it was fantastically well done. Spielberg's depiction of the future rings true (as opposed to in "A.I."), the cinematography is spooky, and the story is riveting. There's a dirty, eerie edge to the movie, reminiscent of "Seven", that kept me tense through all 140 minutes. It's a difficult movie to get through, but the results are well worth it; I'd give it a 9 out of 10.Summer ultimate season has started, and my new team looks good. We won our first game and I can't wait till the next one. Oh yeah, we've started up summer soccer as well. It'll be good to get in shape for Berkeley in the fall. |
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The NBA Western Conference Finals just ended. Game 7 was incredibly, unbelievably painful. My stomach was knotted the whole time. I hate the Lakers passionately (probably more than you can imagine), and the Kings did just well enough to practically give me an ulcer going into Game 7. Of course, the Lakers won out in the end, in soul-crushing fashion, and it looks like it'll be another long year before I can start hoping that they don't win the championship. One upside is that I've gained a huge appreciation for the Kings during this series (we don't see many Western Conference games here in Boston). In particular, I've gotten a good chance to analyze Chris Webber's game, and I've come away totally amazed. He's an offensive threat, can pull down boards, has great passing vision, and is completely unselfish. Sure he's not flashy, and therefore won't get as many props as, say, Kobe, but I've always favored playmakers and team players over one-man shows. As Grant said, "When was the last time you saw Kobe set a screen for anyone?" If if ever got good at basketball, it's his game that I'd like to emulate. I think when I head out to Berkeley, I'm going to become a Kings fan :). Of course, this is the latest in a series of bad sporting occurrences for me. Earlier today, England put up a miserable performance against Sweden in the World Cup, and was ("were") lucky to come away with the draw. Doesn't bode well for the rest of the Cup. And on Friday night, in addition to the Kings's loss to the Lakers, the Celtics bowed out to the Nets in Game 6. Friday morning was good, though: James and I got up early to see the first game of the World Cup, and Senegal pulled off a major upset of France. Other stuff has been going well. I went home last weekend and enjoyed the home cooking and the company. Oh yeah, my Mother's Day present for my mom was tickets to a Sox-Yankees game -- and of course we got to see the Sox get beaten, 3-2. Great. The next day, my little sister Maya got sick so I also went with my mom to a Pink concert. My mom's a big fan. It turned out to be a fun show: Pink has a bunch of catchy songs, and she's got some major vocal chops. Then on Monday Wing and Lee stopped by for lunch on their way up from New York, which was fun. Yesterday was unreal. James and I went with Brendan, his girlfriend Frances, and an Extreme Blue alum, Alex, up to Mt. Killington to go downhill mountain biking. We rented some awesome full suspension bikes (they run for a couple grand if you want to buy one) and were off to the races. You take a gondola up to the top of the mountain and then bike down on one of several trails. I didn't fully anticipate the nature of the trails, though: they are very steep, very twisty and absolutely covered with gravel, roots, and huge rocks. Just holding onto your handlebars feels like you're operating a jackhammer. And then there's the added element of going insanely fast and constantly being on the edge of losing control and crashing on all of these unpleasant surfaces. And in fact, that's what happened to several of us: Frances totalled on the first run so badly that she had to eventually be taken to the hospital (but no serious injuries though!), James flipped off his bike twice, and ended up with lacerations covering his legs and all over his arms and shoulders, Brendan fell off while doing a jump, and Alex ripped two huge gashes in his shorts while trying to avoid sliding off the trail. I managed to remain relatively unscathed, but I'm sure I'll have something coming to me the next time I go :). Anyway, it requires immense amounts of concentration (if you even blink too long, you could go flying), which I'm generally not good at, but the combination of speed, chaos, scenery, and imminent destruction is ineffable. I guess "exhilarating" is a potential word, but it doesn't do it justice. I can't wait to go again -- it was the most fun thing I've done this year. Then yesterday night James and I rushed home, showered, and went to the Richard Shindell concert with Erin and Kerry. Lori McKenna did an excellent opening set and Richard was in fine form, playing a great set of songs. Also, as my guitar playing improves, I begin to appreciate that aspect of concerts more. Richard really is a top-notch guitarist, and I really enjoyed observing him play. Eek, it's nearly 3 am and I've gotta go to work tomorrow. Good night! |
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It's been pouring for the last couple of days, and it's been miserable. Rain is pretty much the most annoying kind of weather for me. Well, you know that old saying: April showers bring... May showers, apparently. Boston continues to have a great sports year. The Celtics are doing great, and the Sox have the best record, ERA, and batting average in the AL. Not bad. We're going to try to go to a Celts-Nets game, assuming they both win. That would be awesome. Two weekends ago I had a lot of fun: Friday night Percy and Brendan and I did our usual cards thing, chowing down on some good Chinese food first and then playing a bunch of games all night. Speaking of Percy, I checked out his piano quintet's recital this past Friday, and it sounded great. Anyway, that Saturday I went to Harvard's Springfest with Cy and Jess and co., where we went on a bunch of rides and ate the free food. The Verve Pipe was the band they got, and they were actually quite good. Maybe I should re-listen to that CD of theirs I picked up a couple of years ago :). I also scraped my head racing Cy through an obstacle course, which was pretty funny. That night, Grant, Matt, and I went to a party hosted by Sarah Wu (a friend of Grant and mine from high school) and Cat Ng (one of Wing's friends from high school). It was pretty sweet and we met some cool people there. I went to two concerts in the last couple of weeks: first, Belle and Sebastian, whom I have never seen before. I have all of their CDs, though, so when Ben Mathis-Lilley, a friend from school, emailed me that he had an extra ticket, I was all over it. It was a ton of fun, mostly because B&S's songs are so joyful, even (paradoxically) the sad ones. It's hard to explain, but each song is just imbued with a lot of vitality. Their best songs are gorgeous: catchy, insightful, well-arranged. And Stuart Murdoch is a great singer, which I wasn't expecting. Then this past weekend Kerry, Wing and I saw Luna at the Paradise. Their setlist was fantastic: they played only one song all night that wasn't a favorite of mine. Their new album is excellent, by the way. Saw Spider-Man on opening day with a bunch of the guys from work. It was a ton of fun, although, unlike many reviewers, I found the romance to be pretty trite. Okay, it was better than most action-movie romances, but it was pretty damn bad. That said, though, seeing Spidey web his way through New York is exhilarating. Last night I saw Monsoon Wedding with Jess and Kerry. The plot was predictable (usually a big negative for me) but the rest of the movie was so well constructed that it didn't detract at all from the experience. It was very inspiring and the best movie I've seen in the last year or so -- check it out! I have more stuff to say, actually, but I want to go downstairs and catch the rest of the basketball game. Later... |
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So it's spring, and I'm sitting inside updating my webpage even though it's like 70 outside. That's okay; I'm going to play soccer later today. Ultimate season has started too, and my team's second game is tomorrow. Man, I love that game. I've been doing some cleaning up of good ol' Splag, removing some more boring bits and updating the personal info crap. I actually added to the "Huh?" section for the first time in forever. Oh yeah, since I'm so criminally negligent about updating this page, I added an automatic update thingy (see above) so that you don't have to check to see when I've updated; you'll just get a nice email in your inbox when the time comes. I got the idea from Lee's site; thanks, Lee! SashXB, the project that Wing, John and I have been working on at IBM for the better part of a year, has finally been released. We were in the office for about 80 hours the week before release: till 10 pm M-Th, 4 am on Friday (!) and then 10-8 on Sunday. We each rewrote several major modules as late as the day before release, and hoped to bring all of our independent changes together in time. Anyone who's done software development knows that this is a recipe for disaster. Amazingly, all of our code worked perfectly together. It was insane, pretty much the best hack I've experienced. The release has been quite successful so far: SashXB has gotten some good press, we've received many emails from people inquiring about it, and the discussion list has been growing daily. Hopefully this momentum will continue. Saw "Panic Room" a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty good... had a lot of potential but didn't really capitalize on it. So the UConn women won the national championship, which was terrific. The championship game itself was one of their worst (of the ones I've seen, at least), but it nevertheless capped a ridiculously successful season. Congrats to them. The men had a very successful season, too; not many people thought they had the experience and maturity to get to the Elite Eight. All in all, a satisfying season for CT. So the Dream Theater concert I want to right after my last update was pretty awesome. Those guys have got chops: the concert was over three hours long and they had no problems playing through some epic tracks (many over ten minutes long) that I had previously thought were mostly studio concoctions. I left totally satisfied -- and nearly deaf. My ears were ringing for two days afterwards, enough to scare me into getting a pair of musicians' earplugs (the kind that defeats all frequencies evenly, unlike normal plugs, so that music doesn't sound distorted). Luckily the ringing finally went away and now I'm much more careful about my hearing; it's too precious to lose! This past Monday, Leonard, Lonnie, Brian and I saw Yo La Tengo at the Somerville Theater. They played a live soundtrack to several short underwater animal documentaries filmed by this French dude, Painleve. They did an admirable job accompanying, and the films themselves were fascinating. I've seen much more than my share of nature films, but some of the footage (especially the scenes with the octopi crawling around out of the water) were riveting. I have to admit, though, that I was hoping that YLT would come back at the end of the show and play a track or two from their studio albums. The title of this update, "You Can Have It All", is of course a track from their extraordinary album "And then nothing turned itself inside-out". I got a chance to try out my new earplugs at the Avalon this past Friday at the Beta Band show. Their set was pretty good (some of the tracks from their new album, most notably "Al Sharp", are awesome in any incarnation) but I was a bit disappointed by their heavy use of prerecorded tracks. Yeah, they're a sample and dub-heavy band, but they should have found ways to work around that rather than just singing and playing along to their studio tracks (which is what it seemed like they were doing). Or maybe it was just my earplugs =). Jeff came up last week for his spring break. Apparently the worst is over for him, so med school should be a piece of cake from now on, right? ;). It was great to hang out with him again, and as always he was an exceptionally courteous guest. We had a big party last Saturday night, and we got to see Kristen, who was up from Florida, in addition to the usual gang. We played Monkey Ball and Taboo, and it was a ton of fun. Speaking of Monkey Ball, it's about done. Super Monkey ball is a game for the Game Cube that involves manipulating cute little monkeys in clear balls. It sounds simple but it's addicting and really fun, and is our house's latest obsession. Before that was Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, which we (mostly Wing, with help from Matt and Grant) had to beat 22 times to unlock all the secrets. Once that was done, Monkey Ball became de rigueur. There are a ton of small games that come with it, each of which has surprising depth. Grant made it a goal of his to bowl a perfect 300 on Monkey Bowling, which he did, and he and Matt are dueling it out on Monkey Target (with Matt being the current leader). Anyway we beat the expert level of the main game at 2:30 on Friday night (after I came back from the Beta Band concert). It was very satisfying, but I think it's time to move on to something new =). Yesterday was a great day. The weather was beautiful and Wing, Jordi and his new fiancee Jen (congrats, guys!), and I went to the aquarium. Although I've been there a couple of times before, it was still lots of fun -- I love observing animals! Then Jordi and Lee came over last night and we all (including John) played poker. The reward was of course in the company, not in the dough, although I did make a bit of money =). For my little sis: hi Maya! |
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I've gotta leave in about 10 minutes so I better make this fast. Hmmm. March Madness. Ridiculously awesome, as usual (how many things can you say that about?). This is the first year in quite a while in which I didn't submit a bracket. I wanted to see what it was like to watch a game and pick who I wanted to win based on how I liked the teams, not on who I had picked in my bracket. Well, this was a great year to do it because there have been so many good upsets that a) had I put in a bracket, I would have been creamed and b) it's been tremendous fun to root for the underdogs and actually have them win. Particularly sweet was Duke's upset last night. We were all going nuts. Money! And UConn's been holding in there. The games have been close, which makes me worry, but of course before the tourney I was afraid they'd go out in the first round so I can't really complain. They're playing tonight against Southern Illinois but I won't be able to watch it (see below). My rationalization is that if they lose to an 11th seeded team whose mascot is the Saluki then I probably wouldn't have enjoyed watching it anyway, and if they win, I can watch them in the next round. In any case, go UConn! The UConn women play tomorrow and I'll definitely be around to watch them. The reason I can't watch the game tonight (and the reason I have to leave soon) is that I'm going to see Dream Theater at the Orpheum tonight. I've never seen them in concert and I'm quite excited. Other concerts.... oh yeah, Carla clued me in to the fact that Dave Brubeck was playing at Sanders Theater the Monday before last so we (and her roommate) sneaked in at intermission. We got what appeared to be the only three seats available in the entire theater. Talk about lucky. Dave Brubeck looks, walks and talks like he's incredibly old (well, he is), but his playing is astoundingly vital and virtuosic. It was a great show. Then this past Monday James and I saw Ryan Adams at the Avalon. He is a very talented singer and I really like his style of guitar playing. I was a bit disappointed that some of the songs were too over the top in an effort to be "rockin'" but they were counterbalanced by some great renditions of others from his two albums and some powerhouse covers, too. Work is going exceedingly well. The official release for our product, SashXB, is April 2nd, and we're working furiously towards that deadline. Components are falling into place and we're getting a bit excited and nervous. I'll keep you posted as to how the release goes. In other work news, we're having a (small) foosball tournament with high-low doubles pairings. So unfortunately my partner is the worst seed in the competition, but we've been improving and should make it to the playoffs. Eep, looks like it's time to go. Later! |
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Well, so much stuff has happened that I'm going to have to apply the "big events only" filter. Even so, this is going to be a long one. I watched a lot of the Olympics this time around. Before college, I used to be a huge Olympics fiend, watching far too much coverage. Once at school, though, faced with actual work and no television, my interest quickly declined. I'm back on track now, though. Of course, I've got to present my typical cynical take on the Games. It's amazing how much the Olympics are about depression and defeat. For every athlete who is thrilled to win, least two who are witnessing four years of intense training culminating in failure. And don't give me that crap about athletes who are "happy just to be there"; sure, there are a few, but on the whole, Olympic athletes are incredibly ambitious (that's how they got so far in the first place). Even the bronze and silver medalists generally wish they had done better. So that's a depressing thought. Also, the events are so specialized and esoteric that I have absolutely no confidence that the athletes at the Games are really the best in the world, in terms of potential. Of course, this is true for any sport, but at least for the Summer Olympics, many more people have tried the events. Every kid growing up in this country (for example) knows approximately how good a runner he is, but no one I know -- not a single person -- even knows anyone who's ever tried bobsledding. Heck, one of my co-workers could have world-champion skeleton potential, for all I know. These Games just seem to have a much greater emphasis on privilege and association than the Summer Games or (especially) the World Cup. That said (and I really had to get it off my back :), drama and courage were on display to an enormous degree at Salt Lake. It takes guts to put years of your life at stake for a minute-long race. Just being able to compete under such pressure (never mind attaining the skill to do a given event) is an accomplishment. I mean, I got butterflies when I lined up in high school cross country races. I can't imagine what Michelle Kwan felt when she stepped on the ice for the long program. I saw Cats again with Kerry. Cats is one of those love-it-or-hate-it things, like Billy Joel and spinach and, now that I think about it, Andrew Lloyd Webber in general. It has a very tenuous plot and mostly involves actors dressed up as cats dancing around to vignettes of individuals with weird names: Grizabella, Jenny Anydots, Rum Tum Tugger, Macavity, and so on. Either you dig it or you don't. I do: musicals tend to have thin, easily predictable, overly-melodramatic plots and Cats's approach is refreshing. Plus the lyrics are excellent and Lloyd Webber doesn't shy away from using inventive song structures to match T.S. Eliot's complex meters. Screw all this formal analysis; somehow whenever I watch it I find it incredibly effective, and this time was no different. My mom and I went to see Mamma Mia on Broadway as part of my birthday present to her. The show was predictable but funny. My main pleasure was to hear all those great ABBA tunes played live. The craftsmanship present in some of those songs is amazing. Very enjoyable. Went with a bunch of people to see Gorillaz play at the Avalon. The "actual" band members played behind a screen while they showed videos of the cartoon band. It's not as cool as it sounds because many of the videos were pretty boring and after a while you began to wish that you could see the real band for a minute, just to make sure it's really them. All you could see were shadows. All in all, an okay show. Big acquisitions: James got a new care (a Dodge Neon) and Wing bought Lonnie's 36" TV since he (Lonnie) bought an incredible 57" flat screen HDTV for the Super Bowl party. So now our house is pimped out ... sort of (foreshadowing, here). My brother Umesh turned 24. Happy birthday! Lee has put up his own web log. It promises to be a good read. Go Lee! I've been playing more soccer and basketball recently, and it feels good. I'm still hopeless at shooting a basketball, but I've been working on improving my passing and defensive skills so that I won't be such a liability all the time :). James and I went to see Over the Rhine this past weekend upstairs at the Middle East. They were very good, with beautiful, emotive singing and good arrangements. I think they should stay away from improvising solos, though... I'm trying to convince myself that putting this item so low will somehow render it less significant... fat chance. Turns out our house got burglarized on Monday while we were all at work. We lost over a thousand dollars worth of stuff. I personally got hit with about $250: $80 cash, my discman, and my camera. Wing's Dreamcast, 30 games, and a ton of accessories (~= $800) were all stolen. And strangely enough, the thieves went through each of our rooms and stole our cameras. The whole thing sucked big time, and it was profoundly unsettling. It could have been much worse, of course, and so I'm strangely thankful that all the items they took were easily replaceable, if costly. We're taking precautions this time around so that if someone tries break in again he's going to get his ass kicked, but once is enough to screw you up, really. Albums I've been especially "digging" recently: Gold by Ryan Adams, Rockin' the Suburbs by Ben Folds, and The Golden Band by American Analog Set. |
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... that I'm updating so quickly! I'm so proud of myself. My ears are still recovering: Rufus Wainwright at the Avalon on Friday, and the Freezepop CD release party at the Paradise last night at midnight. Both shows were quite good. Lifestyle opened for Freezepop and I enjoyed them very much, too. I might pick up one of their CDs. My ticket-buying woes are continuing, though: I'm still planning on trying to scalp a ticket to the Breeders concert this week, after trying to buy one more than three weeks ago and finding out they were sold out. Then yesterday I found out that the Indigo Girls concert on March 1st is also sold out. Oh well. This past week was quite enjoyable... we were down in Southbury, CT for IBM events from Monday through Wednesday. We drove down in Lee's car on Monday afternoon and attended a retirement party at corporate headquarters in Armonk, NY, for our boss's boss's boss. Then that night we stayed up late at the hotel playing the XBox that Lonnie and Brian brought down. Tuesday morning I got up quite late, around 11:30, and enjoyed a good buffet lunch at the hotel restaurant. Then Lee and I played some racquetball and table tennis, followed by an epic water polo match with most of the Cambridge group. That night we attended another IBM party and played a lot of poker (the bar had chips and a nice poker table). Wednesday we finally had to pay our dues by going to the Southbury IBM site all day for the Internet Technologies Kickoff 2002, which was just a day full of (often boring) presentations. Overall, though, it was quite a fun trip. I finally finished the Foundation series. I must admit that the last book and a half (4.5 - 5) was quite a disappointment. Asimov's plot twists were by this time either utterly predictable or so outlandish as to be humorous. Apparently the last two books were written about thirty years after the first three, which may explain the significant difference in quality, but it certainly doesn't excuse it. I think I'll get around to reading the preludes eventually; hopefully those will be better. I'm currently in the middle of High Fidelity (the book on which the movie was based). It's great reading, at the same time pleasurable and profound. One particular incident, in which the narrator notes that one of his problems is that he is both a "romantic and a cynic", resonated with me, as sometimes I feel that's my curse, too :). I used to talk about that with John Chin. I wonder if he remembers. Okay, I've gotta call home and then go play some soccer, for the first time in far too long. |
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Of course, it's been far too long since I've updated. I've been meaning to for the last two weeks, at least, but when I sat down to do it I just had nothing to say... probably because I had too much to say and didn't know where to start. I finally admitted to myself that obviously the situation isn't going to get any better and that I might as well write this thing already. So here I am. There hasn't been any big news -- just a lot of small stuff. India was quite an experience, a much more pleasurable one than I had expected. While there were some downsides (mosquitoes, the general filth, etc.), there were so many positive aspects that I came back feeling quite thankful that I had gone. The weather was pleasant, the scenery was beautiful, the food was fantastic, and I really enjoyed visiting my relatives. And there is no other food on this earth quite as delicious as a baby coconut. Yum! If you've read my previous updates, you might remember that Maya came up to Boston in October to film a commercial. Well, it's finally been produced and it looks great. It's currently airing on public television and will hopefully be shown on major networks soon. I'm really psyched for her. My parents came up to Boston a few times this month for various conferences and meetings and we had dinner several times. We relished discussing our respective situations. (Mine mostly involved whining about how painful grad school fellowship apps were -- thank god they're done.) I think I've finally reached the age when their lives seem as big a deal to me as mine does :). A couple of weeks ago Lee's parents came up to Boston and they were kind enough to invite Wing, Grant and me to see the Harvard-Princeton basketball game that weekend. It was actually the first Harvard bball game I'd ever been to, and it was surprisingly fun. In the last decade, Princeton has been by far the dominant team, but this game was incredibly close. It was sold out, and when Harvard forced a turnover to get the last possession of the game with Princeton up by two, the house was going nuts. Of course, Harvard blew it and Princeton won, 50-48, but it was still a great game. A few of my friends came to visit this month. Jeff was up here for a weekend, on a break from med school at Columbia. We watched football, relaxed, and generally had an enjoyable time discussing life. Jeff was hilarious as usual, easy to commiserate with (something we all love doing with each other, haha), and also a gracious guest -- I already miss having him as a roommate. We've just got to get him to come up here more. The following weekend, Dan, one of our (me, Matt, Grant) best friends from high school, came down. He went to college at Cornell with Grant and now coincidentally works for IBM in Burlington, Vermont. We, hmm, watched football, relaxed, and generally had an enjoyable time discussing life. Heh, I seem to have similar relationships with all of my friends :). Oh yeah, he did accompany Wing, Grant, Matt and me down to Ashland to see the high school girls' basketball team that Matt coaches beat the living snot out of one of its opponents. Matt's team is pretty amazing: they're 11-1 and their average margin of victory is something like 20 points (these are games in which the winning team usually scores about 40 points, by the way). And we found out that Matt got voted Teacher of the Term by the students at his high school -- congrats! Anyway, I'm really glad that Jeff and Dan came to see us... unfortunately it's just another reminder of the friends I'll be missing when I go to California in the fall. I'm starting to get better at guitar again, following a three week hiatus around winter break. I finally strung up the old Fender Prodigy (American-made) that I found in the basement and fooled around with it a bit (using my computer as an amp since I don't have a real one). I was quite surprised at how much easier it is to play than my acoustic-electric. It's tempting to switch but I know I'll develop better technique with the acoustic. Wing and Lee have been bugging me to read the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, which I'm finally doing. I'm halfway through book four. So far it's been quite excellent. There are a few quirks to Asimov's style: his characters don't often interact with each other naturally, instead conversing in these ultra-logical statements that further the plot much in the same way a lemma furthers a proof. Luckily, the plot itself is exceedingly well constructed, with cliffhangers and surprise twists aplenty (although I'm afraid I've finally begun to figure out his technique, as I've successfully predicted the last few surprises), which makes the books quite gripping. Recommended. Okay, this is getting to be too long, so I'll be terse. We're having a Super Bowl party this weekend at Lonnie and Brian's. It should be especially fun since the Pats are playing. I'll unashamedly admit that I've become a bandwagon fan this year, since around week 3. Go Pats! :) I'm going to a bunch of cool upcoming concerts: Rufus Wainwright, Freezepop, the Breeders (sold out but I'm going to try to scalp), Mamma Mia (taking my mom to Broadway), Gorillaz, Dream Theater, and maybe Dave Brubeck and Nick Cage. Looks to be another great spring. |
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Well, I don't have much time: I have to leave in about 45 minutes to take a bus to the T to South Station to a bus to New Haven to Meera's dorm room. And I haven't eaten yet... so I'm going to type quickly :). So I'm staying with Meera tonight, and then tomorrow morning we're taking a shuttle to JFK, where we're going to fly to Madras via Frankfurt, which is basically a two day ordeal, when you consider the 10.5 hour time difference. We'll be in India for two weeks, enough time for me to see my grandparents and relatives, and to enjoy the warmth (it's 80+ degrees over there right now). This last week was totally awesome. I just gave up any pretense of doing fellowship applications and had a good time. Last Thursday Brian, Jordi, Lonnie, Elias and I drove down to Southbury, CT for an office party. The party was fun, but the insanity (and hilarity) that took place on the ride down and back was ten times better. I love those guys. Then Friday I went to Lee's birthday celebration with Wing and John. Well, actually, Wing and I went to Lee's house beforehand and played some PS2 first :). Anyway, the party was at Jake Ivory's, a pretty cool place on Landsdown Street. They have two pianists who can play pretty much every popular song of the last 40 years on request (it was terribly impressive to watch) and basically just perform all night. That was cool. Then on Saturday Kerry and I went to see Martin Sexton at the Somerville Theater. I had been looking forward to the concert for several weeks, as Martin is just an electrifying performer. If you're a longtime reader of this page you'll remember my previous Martin Sexton concert experiences... so I won't throw out too many superlatives here. The man is ridiculous: he's the single best live performer I have witnessed (and that includes people like Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, etc.). You have to see him live. I can't wait till he comes around again. Sunday, John, Wing, Kerry and I went to see Freezepop at the Middle East. They were opening for another band so they only played for 30 minutes. Still a great show -- and the Duke was wearing his ultra cool "graphic equalizer" shirt again. It has an LCD display on the chest that matches the music being played. And afterwards, they remembered me and gave Wing and me free signed posters! Tuesday I went down to Providence with James and stayed at Erin's place. We went to Bob's, where I cashed in my $10 gift certificate that Bob's mailed to me for my birthday. It was quite a relaxing trip, and we came back up to Boston the next morning. Wednesday night a big bunch of us went to the Fellowship of the Ring opening night show. While it wasn't perfect (I had some issues with the pacing in the middle -- it seemed like a whirlwind tour of Middle Earth, and I was dying to see the places in the time frame the book had allotted -- which kind of brought the story out of its epic scope and into a narrower, more limiting adventure-style story, I felt; and I wish they could have done with less of that wood flute or panpipe or whatever the hell it was in the score that kept on reminding me of Titanic), it was very, very well done. The casting was spot-on and the last hour, from the Balrog on, was spectacular. I can't wait till next Christmas :). Anyway, I don't have much time left, and I'm hungry. Happy holidays! |
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So I've dedicated this afternoon to doing stuff I've been putting off for too long: re-applying to Berkeley (they need this to admit me after my deferral), working on some graduate fellowships, finishing off the CD of the brass quintet concert we did in May, and, of course, updating this page. Since this requires the least brainwork, I'm doing it first :). Lonnie, Brian, Wing, John and I saw Ocean's 11 last night. It's not a particularly deep movie, but it's good fun and certainly worth checking out. A bunch of us have already purchased tickets for the opening night of Lord of the Rings, December 19th. I'm nearly done re-reading the books, and they are magnificent. The amazing thing is that the movie has been getting fantastic reviews as well (... at least the reviews were great until a few days ago when I forced myself to stop reading them). And it's supposed to be three hours long, which is a positive sign too. I'm trying not to get too excited :). Jess celebrated her birthday with us on Thursday by going candlepin bowling. It's not quite as satisfying as real bowling, but still fun nonetheless. Happy birthday, Jess! Actually my birthday was last weekend, too: I'm 22 now. One more year till I'm in my "mid-twenties"... eep. I went home last weekend to see Meera performing in an Indian dance show; she did a great job, despite never having done Indian dance before. (It's one of those rediscover-your-roots-after-leaving-home things). Then on Saturday, my birthday, I went with my parents and Maya to New York. We dropped Maya off and Juilliard and went to check out the WTC area. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and mid-70s, and the weather provided a bizarre juxtaposition with the sorrowful tributes left all around ground zero. That evening Maya played the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at a benefit concert. She sounded awesome, and got a standing ovation. The cool thing is that Saturday was also her birthday (she's exactly six years younger than me) and so the concert was a great treat for her. My job was the carry the multi-hundred-thousand-dollar violin she played that night, on loan from an NYC violin company. I've introduced myself to a lot of good music lately: The Magnetic Fields's "69 Love Songs", Band of Gypsys (Jimi Hendrix), Dave Brubeck's "Nightshift", and a few others. I was a bit disappointed with Luscious Jackson's "Electric Honey"... it didn't have quite the inventiveness that I appreciated in their other records. Anyway, the album I've been obsessing over is The Flaming Lips's "The Soft Bulletin". I have an earlier album of theirs that is quite good, but somehow I didn't pick up this release when it came out two years ago. Anyway, Lonnie clued me in at work a few weeks ago, and since then I've been hooked. It's one of the best albums I've heard in the last few years, and it took a great effort of will to pull it out of my CD changer today after possibly the longest stay in there by any CD in recent memory. Check it out. Speaking of music, the Martin Sexton concert is next weekend. I'm psyched! Then, after that, I'm off to India with my family for two weeks. I haven't been there in about eight years so it should be an interesting experience, provided I don't die of typhoid (don't worry... I got a vaccine for that two weeks ago). I get to see my grandparents and also some of the fascinating wildlife in the country. Coolness. |
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So this is going to be a mammoth update. I hope I have enough time to finish it before Matt gets home from work and we head home to Cheshire for break. A bunch of my friends have online journals now, and they're all interesting, and updated way more often than mine, and that's kind shamed me into updating more often. I will definitely try to add to this thing once a week. It's only fair since I get to read their new updates all the time :). So: sports first. The Diamondbacks won the World Series. What an amazing event... I watched games 3-7 and was so sure that the Yanks were going to win. You've gotta give them some props for pulling off the (nearly) impossible over and over again. So when the end of Game 7 came around, and they were in a great position, with Rivera pitching and the bottom of Arizona's order at the plate, the conclusion was all but foregone. They weren't in some ridiculous come-from-behind situation (out of which they had pulled themselves twice already) so I (and 80% of the people watching the game) practically handed them the victory. Hoooooly crap. The bottom of the ninth was one of my best baseball moments ever. Ultimate season ended with a tournament at the beginning of November. The weather was outstanding again: low 70s! My team did quite well, going 2-1-1. The team we tied was the #1 team in the tournament, and the game we lost was by one point (and we were up 9-7 before blowing it, too!). Incredibly, that means that every game we lost this entire season (that one, and the three other losses) has been by one point! If a few things had gone our way, we could have been undefeated. Anyway, I had a great time and can't wait for the spring season to start. Conveniently now that ultimate's over, indoor soccer has started. It is a ludicrous amount of fun and each week I can't wait for our games on Friday and Sunday. Wing and I went to two concerts in the last few weeks. The first was They Might Be Giants's annual gig at the Avalon, which they played with their characteristic energy and goofiness. Always a great show. The second was Cake at the Orpheum. The concert had sold out so we went there an hour early to try to scalp tickets. That turned out not to be too difficult: after rejecting some crazy offers (like $125 for an orchestra seat), we got two tickets a few rows apart for $40 each (everyone stood up during the concert so we got to stand together anyway). The difficulty arose when we tried to get in with Wing's digital camera, which he had inadvertently brought. They were checking everyone's bags, and then frisking everyone, and they wouldn't let you check anything in. So, faced with either dropping the camera off at work (a 40 minute round trip, at minimum), or trying to sneak it in, we opted for the latter. It was quite amusing. This is how things played out. Pretty pathetic, huh? :) We found our lame-brained antics hilariously dumb. But even though I ended up going through security four times, we still got in with the goods and had a great time at the show. Wing even took some pictures! Score. In other news, Wing and I submitted our paper on Gnarli to SIGMOD. Its chance for acceptance is pretty low (after all, it's the biggest database conference in the country) but we're happy to have gotten it off our backs. This past weekend was the Harvard-Yale game. James, Jeff, William, Jess, Jen, and Kristen all crashed at my house on Friday night and we had a great time hanging out until the wee morning hours. Saturday was the game. The sky was blue and the temperature was mild. It was a well-played game, and Harvard won, finishing the season undefeated for the first time in nearly 90 years. I ran into a lot of people at the game that I hadn't seen in a while, which was cool. Then on Saturday night we went to this new Chinese buffet place that we'd never been to before. It turned out to be pretty bad, but that wasn't a big deal. Saturday night, Jeff, Jen, William and I watched "The American President." Jeff and I had seen it already (I think it's a great movie), and William, despite all his snide remarks at the beginning of the movie, had to given it some grudging compliments at the end. Then on Sunday morning we woke up at 5 am to see the meteor shower, which was beautiful and quite surreal. Anyway, this is getting way too long. I'll leave you with three things: first, I'm still very happy (see my last update). That's good. Second, William is a total stud. At the end of last school year, it was Jeff's turn; now, William has the mantle firmly in his grasp. Yeah! Third, here's a great quote, pointed out by Old Man Murray, from a recent Deus Ex 2 preview on pc.ign.com: "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.It's quite hilarious, once you stare at it for a while. |
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The weather's still great: mid to high 60s at the end of October! I have vague memories of being bundled up in layers and layers of winter clothes around Halloween time, at times enduring freezing rain. Well, I'm not complaining. This is my last New England fall for a long time, and it's been just about perfect so far. My right knee is still really screwed up. Of course, it took me three doctor's visits (starting in July) before I could get a referral to an orthopedist -- and then they set up the appointment for December 3rd! I'm definitely going to call and give some kind of sob story to get it moved up; I'm definitely worried that I've done something serious to my knee and I don't think an extra month and a half of walking and running on it is going to do much good. To supplement my screwed up knee, I also twisted my ankle very badly this past weekend at an ultimate frisbee charity tournament. The tournament itself was great fun (went well with the great weather), and all proceeds and entrance fees went straight to the Red Cross so that was cool. But during the last game of the day I slid on a rut in the field while going full steam and collapsed "like a sack of corned beef", as Paul Simon would say. So my ankle swelled up to literally twice its normal width and I had serious trouble walked. Wing lent me his aircast though so it's made things a lot easier. I have a league game today, and I hope it has improved enough that I can run on it! What else... oh, last Monday I saw Tori Amos at the Wang Center. The concert was pretty good: some of the songs were outstanding (including an awesome cover of Led Zeppelin's "Thank You"), but some were overplayed and overemoted, too much bombast and not enough... song. Of course there were about eight gazillion women there going nuts over her every nuance, so maybe I'm just missing something ;). I really did appreciate when she played some of her older material, though. Her first few CDs (well, first, second, fourth) are outstanding. Then this past Saturday Wing, Zach (one of Wing's college roommates), and I saw Freezepop at TT the Bears. They played a few songs from their upcoming EP, and all of them sounded really good. I can't wait to get it. They have such a true pop sense that they can write a little pop gem -- and then subvert it just enough with a twist of phrase or melody to keeps things interesting. Go check 'em out. Maya and my mom were up in Boston again, this time because Maya was being featured in a commercial for From the Top that's going to start airing on TV after January 1st. Pretty cool! On Monday Grant sent me a short email that convinced me that complaining about life is a waste of time (this coming from one of our generation's greatest complainers, I might add). But he was dead on and I've been very happy as a result. Those of you know know me and my cynical nature might be spectical of such a claim, but it's true. Life is good. =). |
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Things are pretty much back to normal now. I saw Maya and my mom yesterday: Maya played a concert at the NEC for an NPR show, "From the Top". It was fun to see them... I think I'm going home next weekend, too. Barry Bonds breaks the HR record. Tony Gwynn (one of my favorite players) retires. Ichiro and his Seattle teammates tie the all-time win record. And so on. At least statistically, this baseball season was awesome ;). I saw Tool in concert a few weeks ago. The security was insane: they frisked and metal-detected everyone, and even though it was raining they wouldn't let anyone bring umbrellas in. Also it was at the Tweeter Center, which is about 40 miles from Boston, and I had no way of getting back. I ended up meeting some other concertgoers at a gas station after the show and with them paying a local guy to drive us to the nearest commuter rail stop, a few miles away. I got the last train into Boston, then the last T to Harvard Square, and got back home around 1:30. Quite an adventure. The show was cool, too :). The following Tuesday I dragged Grant, Wing, and Mary to see the Black Eyed Peas at Axis. The performance was quite awesome: there was a ton of much-needed energy and excitement in the wake of Sept 11. I'm beginning to start worrying about grad school stuff: re-"applying" to Berkeley, finishing gNarLI, applying for a bunch of fellowships. The latter promises to be particularly painful. Well, I guess there's more to be said but I'm too lazy to say it. Perhaps if I forced myself to write about a particular topic every time, rather than just the general "goings-on", I might have more success. Writing about my life can get pretty boring... I don't even want to think about what it's like to read about it ;). So, next time: abortion, assisted suicide, the death penalty. ....... yeah right! Oh, I forgot. I tried to get tickets for the U2 show in Providence on Oct 30th, but failed miserably. I guess that's not so bad, since I can see TMBG instead at their yearly show at the Avalon, this time in support of their new album, Mink Car. It's very eclectic and pretty good. Other upcoming concerts I'm looking forward to: Tori Amos, Freezepop, the Nields, and Martin Sexton. (ahem. "to which I'm looking forward".) Okay, the zaniness (zanity? as opposed to "inzanity", which is I suppose the opposite of "insanity") ends now. Toodle-oo. |
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So I had planned to write about many things in this update: the PJ Harvey concert, moving (it was twice as bad as I had feared), the new house, fall ultimate season, etc. Of course, the events in my life have been trivialized by the events of this past week. It was surreal, then shocking, then outrageous. Much of what I would say has been said (more effectively) by others. I have one fear that merits mentioning, though: our country offers unparalled freedom, and it is partly because of this very freedom that such terrorist attacks occurred. Unless we become a police state, there's not much we can ever do to stop the damage caused by someone who's willing to kill himself, or by someone who has enough money. So airport security increases; what's to prevent a terrorist with the appropriate wherewithal (such as bin Laden) from leasing or timesharing a large private jet and causing nearly as much mayhem anyway? It's a scary idea. No more depressing thoughts. The tragedy gave us enough of those already. I'll leave you with this. |
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A succinct title for a far from succinct operation. We're moving in two days. I've found out that the only thing that moving in the real world has to do with moving in the fake world of college life is that you have to pack and unpack your stuff. Everything else is ten times more annoying. We have to cancel utilities at the old place and start them up at the new one; we have to clean up our current apartment or suffer exorbitant "cleaning deductions" from our security deposit; I have to change my addresses with a host of magazines, banks, credit cards, and so on; we have to deal with UHaul, one of the worst companies ever (making a "reservation" with UHaul does not guarantee you'll get a truck at the time you requested, or even the place; in fact, it doesn't even guarantee that you'll get a truck at all. The only thing that's guaranteed is that UHaul has your money); landlords are anal and we have to put up with the paradox that the only legal time for us to move is midnight on September 1st, and that someone will be pissed off when we necessarily move at a convenient time; and finally in this case, we have to furnish the whole place. I'll be sleeping on the floor for the first few days. So yeah, I'm a bit stressed by it all. But up till this week, things were great. I went home last week, slept a lot (although on a bizarre schedule), and went to a lot of Pilot Pen tennis with my parents. We saw Lindsey Davenport, Kim Clijsters take out Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, and finally a great match between Venus Williams and Jennifer Capriati. We also saw the "Beach Boys" in concert, which was actually two Boys and a backup band. So that's three Beach Boys I've seen this summer... not bad ;). Oh yeah, the Radiohead concert the week before was pretty good. The crowd was huge. Problem is, Radiohead's newer stuff is more sit-down than stand-up (I think) so the atmosphere just felt wrong... although the songs they played from their earlier albums rocked. I haven't played any sports (or done any physical activity, really) in about three weeks, and I'm feeling it. I guess I'll be doing a lot of heavy lifting this weekend, at least :) Packing up my books today, I thought about whether it's worth it to reread books. I mean, on the one hand, if you really like a book, there doesn't seem to be any harm in enjoying it a second time. But then I got to thinking, I've read probably less than a thousand books in my life (as have most people, I'm guessing), so does it really make sense to read one of those select few again rather than delving into one of the millions of others out there? There is a deeper philosophical point there, but it's (paradoxically, kind of) a trite one. |
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The fact that I haven't updated in a month means either a) I've been really busy or b) I've been having too much fun. Well actually, it's both. Work has been pretty intense but exciting; The piece software on which we've been working is nearly ready to be released, and that's a relief. There's still another month or two smoothing out the edges but the framework is there, and it's good. I know I repeat myself, but summer in Boston is just ridiculously fun. I'm dreading the start fall and cold weather. At the last minute I decided not to take that MIT class, which is retrospect should be an excellent decision :). Ultimate frisbee has been great as usual; I went to a tournament last weekend and had the most fun I've had in years. I also ripped up my left knee laying out, so it now has a big wound to complement my screwed up right knee (which has a more serious problem). Concerts were sweet, too. Paul Simon was fantastic, and he played 8 (!) encores, including Hearts and Bones, which he said he hadn't played live in 10 years. Also he did a new rendition of I Am A Rock that was just awesome. Tricky was nuts. Radiohead's coming up just over a week from now, and I just found out that PJ Harvey is playing at the Orpheum in September... I'm there. I've also been to a bunch of movies, ranging from bad to good: Legally Blonde, Jurassic Park, Sexy Beast, and Final Fantasy. I had pretty low expectations for Final Fantasy, and yeah, the plot was pretty cheesy. But the visuals were outstanding and as far as action movies go, it was quite exciting. Definitely better than most of the other movies I've seen this summer. Kerry has been nice enough to let us visit Alex and the other parrots at her lab, so I've seen them twice this summer. Not only are they pretty adorable, it's fascinating to see how the react to people and, well, talk. Once when I was there, Alex started blurting out answers to the questions they were posing to another parrot. He also tried to court me... apparently he only likes male humans. A gay African Gray parrot? :) I've started learning how to play guitar. Over the past two weeks I've built up the calluses on my fingertips so now the physical pain is gone, but I had forgotten how mentally tiresome it is to learn a new instrument. I've been playing trumpet for so long now that when I try to learn a new technique, I can focus on it and with some practice, it's there. But with the guitar, everything is so foreign (even tuning strings, I found out, takes practice when you're used to tuning a wind instrument) that when I want to learn anything, I have to concentrate and pay attention to so many details. Such diligence is good for someone as lazy as me, I guess :). My friend Andrew Wu did a cool and funny project. Gotta love that guy :). Okay, I can't waste any more of this Saturday... later. |
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As you can tell I've moved this website yet again. Okay, I admit: it's a desperate gambit to rid me of my massive readership.... shyeah right. Actually, I just got sick of that stupid domain name -- sending emails from "aj@ajshankar.com" was kind of disgusting. Luckily Dave Krinsky was nice enough to give me a shell account here (thus ridding me of my dependency on pop mail) and so all is well with the world again. That is, if anyone can actually find this site to read it.
I really hope I don't have to move anymore. I'm thinking about taking a grad CS theory class at MIT this fall, courtesy of IBM. On the one hand, it'd be fun, I'd learn stuff, and it would keep me sharp academically. On the other, this is my year off, after all, and I'm afraid I might be doing too many things in the fall as it is. Of course there's work, and I also want to play some trumpet, if not in a group, then at least by myself. On top of that Wing and I have to get gNarLI ready for publication (no small feat), I'm planning on learning guitar, there's this piece for brass quintet I've been planning to write for some time now, and I'm thinking of doing a fall soccer league. Oh yeah, and also I have to apply for grad school fellowships. Jeez, just typing that out, that list is a lot longer than I thought it would be :). So I dunno. Looks like learning vs. having a life. Send me your thoughts. William flew up here on Monday before heading out to Europe. He'll be there for a good five weeks, visiting most of the continent via Eurail. I'm sure he'll be very successful scoring tons of European chicks with his American charm :). It looks like Jeff may join him in a few weeks -- very cool. I saw AI last weekend. I did not like it. Oh yeah, also last weekend, Jeff, Kerry, Kristen and I went to Cape Cod. We lay on the beach all day. I'm getting very good at relaxing these days. I also finally got to see Office Space, after hearing about it for approximately forever. Thumbs up. July 4th was cool. The Extreme Blue guys did the usual 5:30 am thing so we got great seats in the Esplanade. The weather was perfect, too: while there was danger of a thunderstorm, it never showed, and we enjoyed cool temperatures for most of the day. League ultimate game tomorrow, and Brian Shaffer is in town so we're gonna get lunch. Yeah! |
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Yep, I'm in the real world, if only for the next year. The apartment is great. I've even been cooking a bit (well, "cooking": eggs, pasta, frozen stuff, etc.). We've put the deposit on leasing a house in the fall. It'll be me, Grant, Matt, James, John, and Wing -- pretty awesome. Work is going well: the guys in our group are very talented, but we have a lot of tough problems to hurdle before the end of the summer. Of course, as mentors, John and I get all the credit -- or all the blame. I've been trying to make the most of my off-hours. The BUDA Ultimate league is great, loads of fun. As soon as one week's game is over I start anticipating the next. My team is 3-1 and we're starting to play really well together. I'm excited. Hmm, let's go back to my last update. The weekend after that, Jeff, James, William and I did a last roommate thing and hit New York, which was great. We saw Shrek there: a surprisingly good movie. After that was the U2/PJ Harvey concert, at which James and I were front row on the floor (outside the "heart" thing), which totally rocked. Then, graduation. Bono's speech was much better than I thought it would be. I got my "piece of paper and tassel", as a friend put it, and I was out the door. After a weekend at home (saw Yankees/Braves), I came back up to Boston for good. And Boston just kicks some major ass in the summer. I hit a few more concerts: Luna (outstanding; the guitar melodies were beautiful) and Air (didn't know much of their stuff other than the new album but was very impressed), saw the US National team play Trinidad and Tobago in a World Cup qualifier, saw E.O. Wilson speak, and took in a few movies along the way. Oh yeah, I finally got around to seeing Memento, which was great. I finally broke my CD-buying moratorium after a painful two months. I still have a backlog of CDs to listen to, but a few days ago while waiting for the T I heard an awesome Latin singer/guitarist and had to pick up his CD. After that, the floodgates opened. First on the list were the big releases I'd been holding back on, Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, Radiohead, and Tricky. The Tricky album doesn't come out for another two weeks, but he's playing in town on the 20th so I hope the CD arrives by then. My Harvard telnet account is about to expire. It's going to be so sad. I'm going to be relegated to lame-o POP email. I don't know how I'm going to manage! RIP, fas. And this new (narcissistically-named) domain seems to be up and running. I wonder how many people will find their way over here. |
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So I've been a bit lax with this page lately. "It's funny how time flies/ I'm just havin' fun watching it fly by," as Dr. Dre says (such eloquence, no?). I finished school over a week ago. My graphics project turned out well. My only final was pretty painless. I've been doing stuff pretty much non stop during Senior Week: some real work, like moving some of our stuff into our summer apartment, and looking for housing for the fall (still). Apartment hunting is a major pain in the butt, let me tell you. Mostly, though, I've been doing fun stuff... BoSox, Freezepop (again), Blue Man Group, Last Chance Dance, Six Flags (Superman is an amazing coaster), Swing (a "musical"), Karaoke, etc. And it stays pretty packed. Tonight is the Moonlight "Booze" Cruise on the harbor. The BUDA summer Ultimate league starts tomorrow. I'm excited, but terribly out of shape. We'll see how it goes. Tuesday my mom and brother come up, and I'm seeing U2 and PJ Harvey. Wednesday and Thursday are filled with graduation ceremonies and packing/moving. Then I go home this weekend and catch a Yankees game with the fam. Next Monday I head down to Armonk, NY, for an IBM brainwashing session, and when I come back to Boston on Wednesday I start work for real. Another Ultimate game that night, and a Luna concert the day after, and so on. I never thought that relaxing could be this strenuous :). Looks like this webpage might live on, after all. I found a cheap hosting company. Jeff is a total stud. I can't say much more than that. |
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I've had a good few weeks. I sleep a lot, I don't do much work. Somehow I still feel busy all the time. I haven't been playing as much sports as I'd like (and I'm still trying to shake this nasty allergy-related cough) but I've been reading an incredible amount, and it's been so much fun! It's been decreasing my already-limited productivity even more.
Not that I've been good about it otherwise. Wing and I started our graphics project on Wednesday (the day it was, technically, due). It went something like this: The coda here is that after that, we worked for another half hour, ate dinner, and then went down to game night, our weekly (although this may have been the last!) gathering in which we and a bunch of friends play Dreamcast on a 90" screen. It's pretty sweet. Then late last night (after midnight) Wing, Brian, Forrester and I tossed the frisbee around in the Quad, trying to avoid the sprinklers. See, so my days do seem busy, huh? I guess by reading this over it seems that in addition to reading, I've taken to playing video games a lot more -- something I never used to do. I'm sinking into a mire of antiproductivity. And the best part is, I don't care! ;) My quintet gave its concert on Tuesday. Thanks to everyone who came! It went pretty well... there were some really good parts. I also had some issues with concentrating, because every time a hard part was approaching, I'd think "Oh crap! This is the last chance I'll ever have to play this correctly -- I can't screw it up!" And of course the very act of thinking that made me lose concentration and screw up. But on the whole it was good, and my parents even came up to see me, which was cool. Douglas Adams died. I didn't think I'd be so affected by a famous guy's death, but I was. He was a brilliant author. Cyberrebate.com was this site that sold thousands of items with large rebates or, in many cases, with rebates that rendered the items completely free after you sent them in. Sounds like a good deal? Well, there were two catches 1. The rebate checks took 10-14 weeks to get back to you, and 2. The merchandise itself was marked up to ridiculous levels, usually over 1000% more than the original price. For instance, you might find a $25 toy selling there for $359. Of course, the promise was that you'd get all that money back if you sent in your rebates. Luckily I was never foolish enough to buy anything there (paying $149 for a CD was just ridiculous by any measure) but many people were captivated by the thought of "free" merchandise and spent literally thousands of dollars there. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the third, and most important, catch: 3. Cyberrebate filed for bankruptcy this week. There are thousands of consumers who are owed huge amounts of money by Cyberrebate -- even up to $80000+ in some cases -- and they're never going to see it. Keep in mind that the people who buy from this site tend to be not so well off, and thus the ones that can least afford to lose their money. It's really scary... messages are popping up all over the Internet by people who have been totally scammed by Cyberrebate, often losing significant chunks of their life savings, but now feel only intense shame, guilt and regret at letting themselves and their families down. Yes, they were incredibly foolish at giving any one company so much money, but it's still quite depressing. I don't think I've ever witnessed anything like it before. |
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So I'm pretty doped up now on various (expensive) allergy medications. I've basically beaten the beast into submission but now I've developed a cough. Somehow it always gets me. This past week was quite busy, activity wise. Friday night we went to see Cibo Matto at the Somerville Theater. It was pretty nuts -- they're very energetic (and cute). The opening band, Freezepop, was also really cool, so I may go see them again later this month when they play at the Middle East. Saturday was a Wind Ensemble concert and then a fanfare gig for Harvard's prez. Sunday was the senior brunch at Annenberg (bad food), a quintet concert and then the Currier House formal, which was on a boat and was a lot of fun. Monday was the senior dinner, and Tuesday consisted of IM fun and a BoSox game (they kicked butt). Yesterday I got up at 4 am to write my last humanities paper ever, finished it by 12 in a fit of disgust, and then took a nap before playing more IMs and going to the Eliot House Fete. Today, I'm finally relaxing and taking care of stuff like this webpage. Yeehaw. I am planning on putting up like eight gazillion pictures from the last year sometime soon... in the meantime, satisfy yourself at James's or Jeff's homepage. My quintet is giving a concert next Tuesday at 8 pm in Lowell Hall. We're also featuring a professional quintet and a saxophone quartet, both of whom sound a lot better than us ;). Anyway, it should be fun. The summer concert scene is looking good. U2 on June 5th, Paul Simon a month later, and Radiohead a month after that. I'm so used to seeing small bands that a few arena-sized concerts should do me some good. So this webpage is going to die in one month, approximately. There is a possibility it will survive if I can find adequate hosting, but I'm not sure how motivated I am to do that. It's been good, kids. |
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That's right, my last week of classes as an undergraduate. It feels strangely anticlimactic. I have a midterm on Thursday, but that's about it. This weekend is pretty busy, though: Cibo Matto concert and a karaoke party on Friday, a concert and a fanfare gig on Saturday, and a quintet concert and the Currier formal on Sunday. Wing and I have two big projects to work on in the next few weeks: graphics, and a retooling of gNarLI. We're both feeling so lazy, though, that I don't know if anything is going to get done =). I went home this weekend since my parents are in Corsica -- my dad has a conference there. So my sisters and I hung out, which was fun. Meera went bowling on Saturday night and bowled a 184 -- even more amazing since her average is around 90. Even though my average is considerably higher, my best is in the 160s. Ah, what I would give for some inconsistency now and then. One of the things I did this weekend was watch some Rock and Roll Jeopardy. It was quite pathetic. Three or four years ago, when I started watching, I was at the pinnacle of my modern music knowledge: I could run every second category, pretty much. However, in the intervening years, my current knowledge has focused on more esoteric music, and also I've just forgotten a lot of stuff. Ah well. I've been practicing a lot of trumpet. It feels good. |
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So senioritis is kicking in big time right now. But in a weird way: I'll spend days doing nothing, then suddenly feel very guilty and stay up all night doing the work I was supposed to have done. For instance, from Sunday to Wednesday I did absolutely squat (except play trumpet and sports), and then last night I slept only two hours, trying to get everything done. I guess college has made me a twisted freak of pseudo-responsibility. Senior year of high school, I did an amazing job of slacking. I played about two hours of sports a day (often including study halls spent in the gym) -- and that didn't include practice for the sport I officially did. I played Setback in the library every day. In my last quarter, I got a D+ -- yes, a D+ -- in Chemistry. My parents found this so amusing that they put my report card on the fridge (for the first time). I was quite impressed with my total lack of motivation. So it's weird feeling like that now, but still doing the work. Meera spent a few days up here this past weekend. I took her out to dinner, to my weekly soccer game, and to a music class. We also saw "Bridget Jones's Diary", which I thought was quite good. I hope she had a good time :). It occurred to me the other day that people who read this site but don't know me personally probably have a very skewed impression of me: clearly, there are many aspects of my character -- both good and bad, of course -- that aren't apparent in a web log. This is probably heightened by the fact that I'm too lazy to generate good arguments about controversial topics for my updates so I just stick to mundane ones. ... this isn't really going anywhere. I just find it interesting to consider how my "web personality" stacks up to my real personality. It would be somewhat amusing (and sad) if it were more likeable :). What's in my CD player right now: PJ Harvey, Green Day, Cracker, Stereo Nation, and an open spot. Oh, the possibilities... :). |
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My sister Meera got into Yale! It was definitely her top choice and I'm very proud of her :). Maya is doing well, too: she's been winning a few concerto competitions, and bringing in some dough in the process. Not enough to put a dent in the amount of money my parents have invested in her violin, but it's still a start :). She's been taking music more seriously now, which is good. Of course, getting lessons from Itzhak Perlman doesn't hurt either. Okay, enough bragging about my sisters. I've gotta give them props every so often, though. Anyway, I've decided to go to Berkeley for grad school. Their research is great, they definitely showed more interest in me than any other school, and it's really hard to turn down the Bay Area. So I'm pretty excited about that. Also, my to-be roommates (Jeff, Peter Graham, John Corwin) and I have nearly nailed down a four-bedroom apartment here in Cambridge for the summer. It's an awesome place, and we're psyched about that too. I saw Max Roach, the amazingly influential and just plain amazing drummer, play with the Harvard Jazz Band last Saturday night. If you don't know who he is, you should look him up. Anyway, the band sounded great -- the best I've heard them in years -- and Max was a pleasure to hear, even at his advanced age. The highlight of the show was a "duet" he did with Dianne Walker, a truly gifted tap dancer. Their interplay was outstanding, and she performed so many moves I didn't think were humanly possible that I sat with my mouth agape the whole time. It actually brought tears to my eyes (and if you know what a cynic I generally am, you'll be very impressed by this). I know I always throw superlatives around when talking about concerts, but this one was one of the top few I've even witnessed. I picked up a used copy of The Bachman Books by Stephen King... I remember reading it a few years back. It was gripping then, and it is now. Call me pedestrian, but I think that despite what the critics say, King is one of the premier storytellers of our time. What's in my CD player right now: De La Soul, They Might Be Giants, Brahms, Cibo Matto, Genesis. |
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I'm back from vacation and pretty much dead, work-wise.... as usual :). Visiting schools was fun: I meet some really great professors, gained a new appreciation for east coast schools, and hung out with old and new friends. We took a group picture of about 15 of us grad school prospectives at CMU. I did my job by providing the camera; hopefully they'll do theirs by becoming famous so I can say I knew them way back when ;). I flew home from Ithaca on Tuesday, and spent the rest of the week relaxing with my family. We went to the high school play (good job Meera!) on Friday night. On Saturday I drove Maya to New York, and my mom and I had a lot of fun going to the Museum of Natural History (I had forgotten how awesome it is), catching a movie, and travelling 200+ blocks on the subway. I did my taxes with my dad, and somehow engineered a large refund for myself in the process -- Uncle Sam taxed me much heavier than necessary last summer. I also watched a lot of basketball. I watched UConn crash to a heart-rending defeat against Notre Dame (the eventual champions) in the NCAA semifinals on Friday, after dominating for the entire first half. Then on Saturday I saw the same thing happen to Maryland, against Duke. So that sucked. At least my NCAA pool picks are doing well: I picked 6/8 of the Elite Eight, all four of the Final Four, and the two title contenders correctly, placing me at 98.5% in the ESPN Tournament Challenge. Note that I still wanted Maryland to beat Duke even though I had picked Duke to win. Some loyalties (or disloyalties, as the case may be) go well above the pool level ;). What's in my CD player right now: Indigo Girls, Pavement, Stan Getz (still!), Sugar, Magic Hour. |
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(Do These Pseudo-Titles Mean Anything, Anyway?) Today hasn't started out well. I overslept: I woke up at 9:30; too bad I had a quintet rehearsal at 9. So everyone else was justifiably pissed off (it's hard to have a quintet rehearsal with only four people) and I felt stupid. See, normally I'm pretty responsible about these things. Yesterday was pretty bad, too. I caught the redeye from San Francisco on Monday night and arrived in Boston at 7 am after about three hours of sleep. I had class at 10, too, so I couldn't sleep again. So I was pretty much a zombie all of yesterday till about 2 am when I went to sleep. And now I'm still a zombie. Problem is, I just have too many little things I have to do right now. Some freelance work, gather info for taxes, receipt reimbursement for this past weekend's trip, a problem set due Thursday, grading, arranging for transportation for this weekend (Shuttles, etc.) and of course getting stuff ready for my trip tomorrow (which extends into spring break, so I need to pack for that, too). So the grad school decision is going to be harder than I thought. Stanford has a beautiful campus, subsidized, semi-affordable housing, and a strong overall program in CS; it also has Palo Alto, which is terribly boring, and a small PL group. Berkeley has a much more dynamic, exciting town and a larger, more interested group; however, housing is more expensive, the stipend is less, and safety might be an issue. To make things more confusing, the person I think I could best do research with is at Stanford, whereas Berkeley has more faculty who I like and with whom I think I could work. Argh... And I haven't even visited the other schools yet! I'm terrible at making decisions, in general. I think I rarely have the confidence to avoid second-guessing myself after the decision has been made. And usually there's been a clear-cut winner. Now in this spring I've had to make two big decisions. One I've already done: I'll be working at IBM next year. When Google goes public and everyone there is a gazillionaire, yeah, I'll feel dumb. But I think this year at IBM will be really fun, and besides, by choosing graduate school over industry I've already thrown away a lot of money. Or something ;). Picking a school is a much bigger deal: I'll be there for at least five years, and since the work is so specialized there's no guarantee that I'll be productive with any set of advisors and fellow grad students. So the potential for screw-up is nontrivial. Okay, enough whining. Time to go play some soccer. Enjoy the beginning of spring! |
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So it's nearly 3 am and I'm catching a flight in about 7 hours. Ouch. I'll be off to the west coast to check out schools and soak up the nice weather. Hopefully it'll be a nice, relaxing pre-vacation vacation. I'm coming back on Tuesday around 7 am, going to two days of classes, and then flying out again next Thursday to Carnegie Mellon and Cornell, and from Ithaca flying home for spring break. Grant was up here this weekend, visiting the MIT CS grad program. We had a nice lunch (on him -- he owed me for a bet I won ;) and then that night he came to Game Night, a somewhat secretive experience known to only a select few. It was a lot of fun. I'll be seeing him again in just over a week when I'm at Cornell, and then again in April when he comes up to Harvard for another grad school visit. Yeah! So a lot of people have theses due in the coming days and weeks. I'm kind of floating through the semester as I usually do, but I expect I'll probably feel pretty bad for myself when everyone else is done and slacking and I still have work to do. At least I didn't have to trudge to lab everyday during the winter ;). Oh, I had lunch with Li-Chung today. It was nice to catch up with him. We are in similar positions: considering the same grad schools, thinking about a year off, and generally uncertain about our futures. And I thought I was only one like that :). He's an amazingly smart guy, though, and I am very confident that he'll do well no matter where he ends up. I feel like I don't have much to say for this update. I think I am probably shying away from describing the trivial happenings of my life, as I normally do (we know how boring those are) but at the same time I'm too lazy and too reserved to discuss anything actually meaningful. So maybe I'll talk about something inconsequential, anyway. Like, for instance, what's in my CD player right now: Luscious Jackson, Depeche Mode, Dido, Chopin, Stan Getz. Perhaps I should finish packing up and get some sleep. See you in a few. |
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I think the most trying part of my last semester here is over. I still haven't made my decisions for where I want to work next year, and where I want to go to grad school after that, but I have a pretty good idea. Within the next month I'll know the former, and the latter in the next week, it seems. But schoolwork is definitely getting less stressful. I'm realizing how easy it is to enjoy the weekends when I don't have to do a lot of work ;). In addition to lazing around, I've been putting some good practice time in on my trumpet, which is very rewarding. Soccer is great, at usual -- twice a week, these days, and sometimes thrice. I'm even making a dent in the enormous pile of magazines (SI, ESPN, Spin, and Wired) that I've been getting over the past year (free subscriptions, of course ;) but haven't had time to read. Kerry and I went to the "Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar" exhibit at the MFA last weekend. It was quite cool: I learned a lot of stuff and thoroughly enjoyed looking at some of the more radical guitar designs over the past few centuries. I went to Ghungroo with William and Jeff yesterday. It is an annual production put on by Harvard's South Asian Association. I've gone every year; the performances are excellent, and I think I derive a special pleasure from it because they always insert many Indian in-jokes throughout the show ;). This year was no exception. The first half of the show was marred by some glitches (it was the first show of the season) but it quickly settled down and was quite entertaining. Oh yeah, James and I finally completed our room switch yesterday. All my posters are up in the new room, and it looks sexxy. I'm beginning to wonder what's going to happen to this website when I graduate. Will anyone care if it's gone? I actually registered the ajshankar.com domain name a few months ago for like $12, and in theory could get an account somewhere and host this site at that location after I graduate, but I'm not convinced it's worth the hassle. I mean, my little counter tells me that I'm getting a good number of hits per week, but I can't tell whether people are visiting my page because it's, well, my page, or because it's the page of a Harvard student. Not sure how I'm going to figure this out ;).In any case, I should probably get some lunch soon. My afternoon looks kinda busy (especially with USA-Brazil at 4pm. Woohoo!). Laterz... |
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I haven't updated in ages. Remember, that's a good sign -- it means that my life isn't so lame that I have to resort to updating this webpage ;). So you're happy for me, right? Stuff I've been doing in the meantime: - I played at the Hasty Pudding's Roast for Drew Barrymore, so I got to see her up really close (five feet away). Another faux brush with celebrity ;) - I managed to get into the Roots/Peas concert by buying a ticket off of someone about half an hour before showtime. My seat was quite good and the crowd in Sanders was (surprisingly) quite energetic. I wasn't totally impressed with The Roots: I felt their great studio instrumentation and delivery was lost due to poor mixing and a "max out the amps" attitude. But the Black Eyed Peas were excellent, both at performing and getting the crowd going. They even had a few cool breakdancing moves up their sleeves. - I've been following my sports
as usual. England is doing ("England are doing", I
would say if I were in England) extraordinarily well in the Champions
League; I'm hoping all three English teams make it to the next round.
Liverpool advanced in the UEFA Cup, too. Funny how in the Premier League
I usually want all of these teams to lose, but when it comes to intra-Europe
competition, I'm hoping they'll win. - I've been trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. Turns out I did much better grad school-wise than my pessimistic nature had allowed me to hope, and so decisions have gotten much more difficult. I'll be flying out to a bunch of places (Stanford/Berkeley on March 16-19, CMU/Cornell on March 23-26) so hopefully by the end of next month things will be nailed down. I think in the next two weeks or so I'll have decided where I'll be working next year. Did I quote Slarty before? Well, he deserves a second mention: "Great things are afoot." At least in my insignificant life... Anyway, so school gets a lot easier after this week. I'm looking forward to it. The last five days have been particularly painful (four rehearsals, about 4 hours of lectures given, problem sets, etc.) and I'm very glad I made it through. Oh yeah, congrats to Grant on getting into MIT for grad school. I don't think he'll ever have whining rights with me again =). |
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Well, not really. Just a cool song from a cool album. Thing is, I'll have to decide just which man I'll be working for soon. I came back from Trilogy on Sunday night. I met several cool people, and had a good time. Austin is a fun town, similar to Boston in many ways: it's walkable, liberal, pretty safe, and has most of the trappings of a big city. The weather's much better, though -- at least in the winter :). Just one more thing to think about. The Roots are giving a concert in Sanders Theater, and I really want to go. Tickets went on sale last week; unfortunately I was only at school one day then (between trips), and I made the mistake of emailing my friends then to see if they wanted to go, instead of just getting a ticket for myself. Turns out they were sold out the next day ;(. Perhaps I can find someone who has a ticket and doesn't want to go. Just finished the last of the Prydain Chronicles yesterday. It's a marvelous story; the writing is powerful and direct, and yet infused with an understated, deep wisdom. The books gave me a lot to ponder. Well, I think I should be doing more important things than this now -- sorry! :) -- so I'll stop here. |
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I came back from California last night, and I'm flying out to Austin tomorrow. Today I registered, met with the prof of the class I'm TFing, went to the first day of classes, and am now trying to tie up about a gazillion odds and ends as well as get ready for tomorrow and do my laundry. Oh yeah, I had to get up at 8 this morning, after a late night :(. So I'm pretty tired, too. Anyway, I'll try to stop the whining. California was a lot of fun. When I arrived in San Francisco, I have to say it was raining and colder than it was in Boston when I left here. However, that quickly changed: the next five days were sunny, cloudless, and about 60. The interviews (five technical ones in a row!) with Google went very well, and it seems like a really cool place to work. Although Mountain View doesn't seem as exciting to actually live in. Umesh and I (and often his roommate Vivek) did some fun stuff... went to a party, played football, went to a Super Bowl party, watched some Chris Rock and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Which, by the way, I've now seen twice. If you haven't seen it already, do, by all means. While the martial arts scenes aren't the best I've seen, they're quite good, and it manages to get away from the 'gritty underworld' look of so many films in the genre. Watch it for the eye candy, at least. I read several books over break. One was Modern Compiler Implementation in C. Light stuff, that :). I also read Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins's latest book. It was pretty good. Some chapters were excellent, but on the whole I felt like he was attempting too much. He often strays too far away from his native domain, into such flaky areas as a discussion of 'poetic science'. It is hard to apply objectively logical arguments to such a subjective area, and he doesn't always succeed in doing so. Of course, he is still an excellent writer; please check out his other books ;). I just started rereading the Prydain Chronicles, by Lloyd Alexander. What an amazing series. I first read them when I was a little kid, but they've lost none of their beauty in the intervening years. I need to play soccer soon. I'm really feeling the urge. But it looks like I'm going to have to wait till next weekend. Doh. |
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Well, I'm down to one more semester as a college student. I took my last exam of the fall semester yesterday, and it was quite a relief to be done. Now I have one day of relaxation here, and then tomorrow I head out to California to interview with Google and then hang out with my brother at Berkeley. I'm coming back next week for a day to register, and then I'm flying down to Austin to interview with Trilogy. I think the week after that I have an interview with Oracle. I wonder if I'll have any time to actually do schoolwork :). I saw Traffic a couple of weeks ago. It's very good. Benicio del Toro is the man (as he has been in other movies). Go see it. A couple of my friends and I wanted to go see U2 on its new tour this spring. So Jess and I got up last Saturday morning and went nuts on Ticketmaster (both online and on the phone), trying to get tix for the FleetCenter show in June. We managed to get a few, but the whole thing sold out in about 20 minutes... the floor tickets were gone in under five. This is for a show that's occurring five months from now, mind you. Pretty crazy. But we're happy -- we'll be there, at least. Did I mention that I love playing soccer? Oh. There was a funny pair of letters in the Harvard Crimson about a week ago. The first letter was by Ross Douthat, editor of the Harvard Salient (perhaps the most pompous magazine on campus), and a man who conveniently encompasses all that I dislike intellectually. Not personally, of course -- I've never met him. I was annoyed when I read it, but was of course far too lazy to do anything about that. Conveniently, the next day someone responded to him, saying basically what I would have said, but probably far more convincingly. Entertaining, at least :). Now that I'm done with all of my classes, I have to begin deciding what to take next semester. I have to say, though, that I underestimated the quality of what I took this semester -- around October, I was convinced that I had picked some terrible courses. But by now, they've all redeemed themselves to me in one way or another, and I'm glad I took each one. It's going to be weird next year (and thereafter) when I'll be focusing on only one field of study. I guess that's what college is all about: "a diversity of educational experiences", or something. |
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Yep, I'm know that you've been enjoying the new year, the new century, the new millennium even, but what you were really waiting for was the new Splagitosity update, right? :) I am hideously delinquent as usual, I know. As Slartibartfast would say, great things are afoot. We'll get to that stuff in a minute. First, vacation. I read a lot (Next of Kin by Roger Fouts [a great read], The Godfather [also a great read, in an entirely different way], The Moor's Last Sigh [still getting through this one]), and slept even more, usually 11 or 12 hours a day. In fact, when I came back to school, the first few days I slept 8-9 hours a night, and was dead tired every day. It took a while to adjust. Anyway I sent off those stupid grad school apps too (with, it turns out, a few typos in my statement of purpose... oh well). It's all out of my hands now. Just gotta wait patiently for those rejection letters :). I also saw some good movies and hung out with friends. Most importantly, though, we celebrated our parents' 25th anniversary with a huge party. Everything went off very well, and I'm very happy for them. Now I'm back at school, and trying to survive exam period. I was up past 6am the last two days working on this. It's finally done, and it's cool. Now, time for finals. My hardest one is next Saturday. So I guess I wasn't too smart in planning a trip up to Dartmouth this coming week to see my high school friend Matt with a few of my other high school friends, Dan and Grant. It'll be worth it, though. Hey, after all, I'm a senior. I just found out that a class I really want to take (and was heavily planning on taking) next semester, Bio 174: Topics in Behavioral Biology, is most likely not going to be offered. That's a serious bummer. I guess this might be a blessing in disguise: I was planning on taking five classes and TAing a sixth (CS153), and speaking of senior year, perhaps this will give me some more free time. But if I had to pick any of my classes to be canceled, this would be the last one. Doh. In more mundane news, Gradeboy is continuing its meteoric rise up the charts at download.com. It's been averaging 160 downloads a week, more than ten times as many as the next most popular grade manager, and is about to eclipse the current leader (which was released in 1998) in total downloads. Yeah! Also my soccer goals page has been getting linked from various other sites so my little ol' web server is putting up about a gig of downloads a week. Finally, I've actually updated several areas of this site. Check out the new "stuff". |
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Well, I'm going home for break tomorrow. I've got five (5) grad school applications to write tonight. I'm sure it's going to be fun. Pretty much everyone else has already left, and the dining halls are closed, so Jeff and I are planning a mac-and-cheese-fest for dinner. Yummy. So this semester is almost over. It was quite tumultuous -- GREs, grad school apps, interviews, lots of sports and music, and of course five classes. Next semester is probably going to be as crazy (no grad school stuff, but more interviews, and a class to TF). I'm looking forward to slacking off, though :). I did the Harvard thing and met some famous people last week. For some odd reason I was one of a few Currier students invited to meet several of Harvard's Overseers (one of Harvard's two guiding organizations -- a bit less influential than the Harvard Corporation :). At first I was like, big deal, until I actually met a few: the President Emeritus of CalTech, an Olympic silver-medal winner, Lisa Marie Henson (president of Jim Henson Pictures), etc. Of course, all were Harvard-affiliated. So I talked about undergraduate life, what needs improving, the Core, and so on. The whole affair was quite Ivy League-ish. Then it was back to obscurity for me. I've been interviewing with a bunch of companies, since I'd really like to take a year off and work before heading out to grad school. I'm definitely leaning towards IBM now, since the group I would work with has all the intangibles, and also they have some really great incentives for going back to school full time -- whereas most other companies basically make you quit if you want to get a masters or Ph.D. But I'm also looking at Google (they're flying me out during intersession, which means I get a free vacation to hang out with my brother), Trilogy (they'll be flying me down to Austin for further interviews sometime early next year), and maybe Microsoft, Idiom, and Oracle. I'm definitely not really into this whole recruiting thing, and I think I'll be happy with at least one of these jobs, so I'm not going to apply elsewhere. Wing and I gave our CS265 (Databases) presentation yesterday. Our project was to create a natural language interface to databases, which would answer questions that users asked in English... not the cheesy Ask Jeeves way, which just picks out keywords, but something that actually understands enough of the question to create a structured SQL query that returns the right answer -- a much more difficult problem. Anyway, we did a live, interactive demo, basically asking to get our butts kicked. But it all turned out okay, and our program (called "gNarLI"... don't ask :) successfully answered real English questions like, "What rated R movies with 'love' in the title won best picture, and when did they come out?", "Where were actors younger than 50 who won best actor born?", and "Did an actor from 'Connecticut' win an Oscar before 1950?". Pretty cool. We still have some more work to do, and of course a research paper to write, but nonetheless we're in good spirits about it. I bowed out of the fantasy football playoffs in the second round with a 54-40 loss to Dan; had I played any of the other teams in the playoffs I would have won, but Marshall Faulk's second consecutive 24-point game led Dan to victory. Oh well... a regular season championship isn't bad. Now I'm looking to next year. I went to the Eliot House formal on Sunday with a friend from two of my classes. The DJ was pretty terrible, but the atmosphere was good, and better yet, I got to see my Animal Behavior TF get down with his date and several other girls. I was quite impressed :). All in all, a fun time. James and I saw Martin Sexton at the Somerville Theater yesterday. If you're a regular reader of this page, then you know that this is my second attempt at seeing him (see below). Well, I got to see the whole show this time, and Martin was truly awesome. He is prodigiously talented: he is the most versatile and expressive singer I've heard, and he can lay it down on his guitar, too. Many of his songs were electrifying live; each tune was wonderfully rich and full, which is even more impressive given that the only instruments were drums, his guitar, and his voice. Okay, enough gushing. See this man live if you can. Okay, remember those five apps I have to finish tonight? I guess it's time to get to work. |
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Clearly I've been negligent in my updating. Yes, it pains me. As usual, I have far too many things to say and will almost certainly forget to write up most of them. First, a bit of hometown/home state pride. Thanksgiving break was good, and the Ivies represented in our annual football game, winning by a comfortable margin. The non-Ivies are begging for a rematch so we may have to take them up on it :). I saw our high school marching band on national TV during the Macy's Parade... this is the culmination of several cool performances, including at Giants Stadium, the Rose Bowl, and the Presidential Inauguration in 1997 (I joined the band for two weeks senior year just to go to that :). Did I mention that the captain of the Yale football team is none other than Cheshire's own Peter Mazza? So at the Harvard-Yale game there were several mentions in the literature of our high school's 5+ year winning streak and the crapload of state titles we won. Go CHS! And UConn basketball is underway. The men had a shaky start, losing early on to Dayton (!). Coach Calhoun was pretty honest about it: "We were lousy. We weren't very good at all." But since then they're back on track, winning 5 in a row. The women have been totally dominant, pretty much slaughtering each of their opponents -- although they did pull out a squeaker (only 24 point margin of victory) on Tuesday. Sloppy! In other news, I am this year's Fantasy Football regular season champion! It was an amazing combination of luck, some good draft picks and trades, and more luck -- mostly provided by my roommate James. Schoolwork is piling up pretty high. I've had something major due every day this week, and it continues through next Tuesday. And I've got three grad school apps due then too. And I still haven't written my personal statement! It'll be such a relief when these things are done. Oh yeah, I'm 21 now. I saw Paul Simon in concert last Friday, on my birthday. It was a great show: a good mix of songs off the new album and classics. It's kind of crazy because he has so many awesome songs that every time he pulls something out of his catalog, you're like "Wow! This is a great song!" ... and that happens for every song :). So it's quite an experience. I had 3rd row seats so I got to see everything up close. I almost got to shake his hand, too. The fat guy next to me did, but he wouldn't move over enough for me to as well. That would have been really cool. Oh well. I did run into members of his band after the show. Of course, I sounded retarded: "Hey, you guys sounded great!" "Uh... thanks." Not like you can really say anything witty in such situations. Okay it's 2 am and I have a test tomorrow. Time to study, methinks. |
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Har har, what a witty title. I'll get to the concerts in a bit. It's been getting colder and darker. I'm paying less attention in my classes and doing significantly worse, mostly because I find it hard to care about them. I think these two facts are related, especially in light of all this research that's been done on the correlation in many people between winter and increased depression, moodiness, and desire to sleep. I'm definitely one of those :). In fact, I loaded up Gradeboy and it turns out that my GPA in the fall semesters here is fully .25 lower (4.0 scale) than in spring semesters. Something is definitely up. Oh well. Just a few more months (ack!) and it'll be springtime in lovely Boston. Matt came down here on Thursday and Friday through the Game on Saturday. It was a lot of fun to hang out and talk with him about old times, and new stuff as well. My mom was also up here for a conference, and when she was done on Friday we had a good time exploring Boston Commons and talking. Then we came back and picked up Matt and some of my friends here and had a yummy dinner. Saturday was the Harvard-Yale game, which we lost because of a series of ugly fourth-quarter mishaps. My mom sat on the Harvard side with us, and we convinced her to root for Harvard, even though she's been affiliated with or working at Yale for like 20 years now ;). Anyway, afterwards, I got my friend John who goes to Yale, and sent Matt on his way back up to Dartmouth. Then John, Kerry and I saw my mom off at South Station, and headed to the They Might Be Giants concert at the Avalon. It was a great concert: the best I've seen them play. Their song selection was excellent, and spanned all of their albums (which of course I loved, but I imagine people who don't know Their music that well weren't too happy), and the live performances were terrific. Highlights were "She's an Angel" and an extraordinary full rendition of "Fingertips"! It was quite awesome. After that John and I stayed up pretty late listening to lots of CDs. I think we've both benefited a lot from each other's expanding musical tastes. Today was Dar Williams at the Orpheum. I think her voice has gotten a little tired from all the constant touring (at least compared to the last few times I've seen her), but the songs from her new CD still sounded great. And of course she has amazing stage presence (with some very witty between-song banter) and is an extraordinarily captivating performer. Wow, what an update. Anyway, I'm back to my ordinary life for a few days, and then it's back for Thanksgiving to see the fam and the homies. |
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I hope you've noticed the monumental changes to this site -- unless you're a first-time visitor, in which case, welcome. I spent a few days laying out all the pictures (there are many more now) and pruning out all the other crap. I hope it's a change for the better. I voted for Gore, and I want him to win, but I don't think he's going to. Saw the Nields tonight. It's maybe the 9th or 10th time I've seen them live. For some reason this show, while still a lot of fun, wasn't as awesome as previous shows... perhaps because they didn't play enough of the older material that I love. Definitely worth going to, though, especially since their tickets are so cheap. Next weekend is Harvard-Yale. Will Harvard lose due to a missed field goal? Probably. More importantly, in the span of three days I'll be seeing my friends Matt and John, and my mom. Should be a lot of fun! This last week was pretty painful, culminating in two midterms and a problem set on Thursday. I've definitely been relaxing these past two days as a result (happy Armistice Day!), but I think tomorrow I'm going to have to get my butt in gear. Oh yeah, let me know what you think about the site redesign! |
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A bunch of my friends are actually going out trick-or-treating tonight but unfortunately I have rehearsal so I can't go. I'm kind of out of practice, anyway... the last time I went T-or-T was senior year of high school... it was the day before Cross Country State Championships, and we still managed to pull in over 10 pounds of candy each. Our coach was definitely not happy the next day ;). The weather's gone from great to terrible in the last few days. On Friday I was playing soccer in shorts and a t-shirt; on Sunday it snowed. I guess we had it coming, after an amazingly warm October. No more outdoor sports (possibly), and no more goose watching for Bio 22. The Wind Ensemble played its annual Dartmouth concert in Sanders on Friday. There were a few screwups but I thought on the whole we sounded good... and the party afterwards was a lot of fun. Oh, did I mention that I've put up a bunch of new clips of us from last year on the WE website? Check them out. Good albums to which I've been listening recently: Flying Cowboys by Rickie Lee Jones, Illadelph Halflife by The Roots, and Big Calm by Morcheeba. Speaking of music, I'm taking the GREs on Saturday (yes, this is relevant). I can't wait till they're over; I'm finding it hard to study in advance and it's just making me feel guilty. Anyway, so it turns out that Wynton Marsalis, the great trumpet player, is speaking here... on Saturday morning. Great. I was mentioning to someone how ironic it is that even though I'm at Harvard, the land of all these wonderful opportunities, I have to skip them to take a standardized test. How high school. I think I have time to take a little nap before rehearsal if I end this now. Good night. |
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Things are rolling along. Midterms and papers are coming. GREs are coming. Grad school apps need to be done. Concerts to play, concerts to attend. The usual. Last weekend They Might Be Giants came to Harvard (even better -- the quad) to play a concert that the IOP was sponsoring. I didn't care about the politics but it was cool to see Them play in the quad. The concert was entertaining but I don't think enough people who knew TMBG's music (other than the three singles on Flood) came. I actually told John Linnell that the people who like TMBG most likely didn't give a crap about the other stuff, which he found amusing. Anyway, the whole thing was free (cotton candy, too!) so whatever the outcome, I'm very glad the IOP did it. This weekend I went to New York with the Wind Ensemble. We did the concert at the Harvard Club of Boston (the quintet I'm in also played, and I think we sounded quite good). Then a bunch of us headed 40 blocks south to the Blue Note to see the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars, with Clark Terry and Paquito D'Rivera. While the ensemble playing wasn't that tight, the improvisation was outstanding. Those guys could groove, baby. The show was also quite funny and we had a great time. Walking back at 1:30 am (and seeing all the crazies) was pretty interesting too. Saturday we went to Princeton, where I met up with two of my friends who I hadn't seen in four years. It was great to see them, and I also got to eat in an Eating Club for once. Then it was off to the Harvard-Princeton game. Umm... it wasn't very professional but Harvard managed to kick some butt despite missing two 30-yard field goals (believe it or not, they haven't kicked a successful field goal all season), which was cool. So now it's back to work, I think. Yesssssss. |
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Today was a totally beautiful day. However, I still made a mess of it :). I had to get up at 7 to do a problem set I was too lazy to write up last night, and as a result I missed breakfast. I was pretty comatose through all of my classes and the problem set didn't turn out that well, either. Then at rehearsal I played terribly... my lips were really dry and I wasn't hitting notes consistently. Of course, this happened to be the day when Ron Barron, Principal Trombonist of the BSO, rehearsed with us for our upcoming performance with him. Great. From there it was off to IM Soccer. We won by forfeit but we gave the other team some guys and played 10-v-10 anyway. I think our team played well overall, but I kept on missing through passes to James... he had good position but I couldn't get the ball to him. Oh well. It was my Mom's birthday on Tuesday. Happy birthday Mom! We played IM Ultimate Frisbee yesterday. No girls showed up so by the rules we had to play with two less people (5) than the other team. Never mind that there are 30 people on my email list, the game was in the quad (about 30 yards from my dorm), and the weather was beautiful... Anyway, we still won though, which was quite cool. An amusing (but sad) story... this past Friday around 9 pm I was sitting in my room wonder what I was going to do that night. James was on some RCF retreat in Connecticut. I happened to glance in my desk drawer where I had tickets to a Martin Sexton concert that we were going to go to on Tuesday. I ripped open the TicketMaster envelope (it was glued shut) and, surprise of surprises, the concert was that Friday night! I felt pretty retarded. The concert had started at 8 so I recruited Jeff and we hauled over there and caught the second half of the concert. Martin was quite amazing, though. It was my first time seeing him in concert. Next time he's in town I'm definitely giving it another shot :). |
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Things are starting to heat up: problem sets are due, rehearsals are underway, and I'm procrastinating more than ever. The weather's been beautiful and the sports have been great and the work ethic has just gone out the window, unfortunately. I'm trying to get it back, though... it's a long, agonizing road :). I've been playing a lot of soccer and it's been amazingly fun. I've also discovered how bad I've become at volleyball (but I'm working on recovering), and also how fun table tennis is. Jeff and I played for about 45 minutes on Sunday night and it was pretty awesome -- what a dynamic game! We were both hitting some nice shots and I can't wait to play again. Currier's first IM ultimate frisbee game is on Wednesday. If we get a good turnout we've got a shot. I've acquired a bunch of CDs in the last few weeks and am wading through them now. Favorite new CD so far: Depeche Mode's Ultra. Took a while to grow on me but I'm totally sold now. Oh yeah, the new Radiohead and Paul Simon CDs should be arriving in the mail tomorrow. Speaking of Paul, I ordered tickets this morning for his concert in Boston on my birthday (December 1st)... looks like I got third row, which would be awesome. I should go to sleep now. I'm going to be quite busy over the next few days. |
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I actually updated the computers and programming pages to reflect the fact that it is no longer 1998. |
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Halfway through shopping week and my schedule is finally starting to solidify. I'm sure I'm be whining about classes later, though, so I'll talk about other stuff now, while I still can :). We went on the Currier House sophomore outing on Sunday: a whale watch on Boston Harbor. OF course, we're not sophomores, but then again we went last year and we weren't sophomores then either. We saw several humpbacks and a minke whale, but the absolute highlight was on the way back to Boston when we ran into a "superpod" of dolphins -- over 200 of them! They basically surrounded the boat and were jumping about, and swimming quite lithely just under the surface. It was really an amazing sight, and truly beautiful. The new Currier web page is up! Check it out. I'm done with the General GREs finally. It's such a relief to have that off of my back, finally. Of course, I still have to worry about the subject test in November, which will be a pain in the butt. But at least this is over. Oh, another cool thing -- I was reading Time Magazine the other day (in the barber shop, actually), and I noticed they had written a feature on Miguel de Icaza, pretty much the leader of the GNOME foundation. The cool part is that he worked up the street from us all summer, and we actually got to talk with him and meet him several times during the course of the summer. He is an amazing guy, and it's awesome to see him get some big time press coverage. Oh also at the end of this summer I found out that both Boys and Girls swim teams from Cheshire High are ranked #1 in the country (no joke), which is truly phenomenal. |
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(Part I below) So here we go, round two. The last few days have been pretty busy for me despite the fact that school hasn't even started yet. I've been taking some practice GREs, trying to wear contacts (again), and working on this. But most of that stuff is almost done: I'm taking the GRE general on Monday, and the web page is all but done. I hope my contact-wearing experiment lasts longer than a week this time :) -- they still feel uncomfortable but I'm hoping that some brand won't be as irritating. My new room is shaping up nicely. The posters aren't up yet but everything else is set up nicely and the stereo is sounding great -- I'm finally giving my PSB speakers the room they deserve. Music is looking good this semester. Already I'm planning on attending four concerts: Martin Sexton, Dar Williams, the Nields, and Paul Simon. And the new albums are flowing freely... Dar's new one is great, and I've preordered the new albums by Paul and Radiohead. U2 is supposedly coming out with a new album soon as well. Speaking of new... I got Phish's latest, "Farmhouse", a while ago but am only giving it a listen now. No, I'm not a hardcore Phish fan (I like their newer albums better) but I like this album a lot. It's not as good as Billy Breathes, my favorite (see, I told you I'm not hardcore) but still very good and accessible. Honestly, I'm not very appreciative of their long jams (if I want to hear some good improvising, I listen to some jazz greats instead) and Farmhouse for the most part stays away from Phish's traditional improv indulgence that I dislike. Did I mention that I love Bob's Clothing stores? I do. Anyway, with all this graduate school and job oriented stuff I've been doing recently, I've been thinking a bit about where I want to live. It had always been pretty much, head to the west coast, baby. But this summer has given me quite a different outlook. First, I'm really beginning to love Boston. It is truly an amazing little city, combining all the perks of a large metropolis with the safety and walkability of a smaller town. Second, my trip out to California made me think twice about living there. The upsides were that the weather was awesome -- I literally did not see a single cloud the entire week I was there -- and that Monterey was absolutely beautiful. On the other hand, Silicon Valley is horrible. There traffic jams everywhere you go, the burnt hills just make all the concrete and pavement look even worse, and it seems that the whole valley is just miles of suburbia and strip malls. Kind of kills the spirit. Of course when it's like 8 degrees F here in three months, my spirit's going to be pretty dead too :). So I'm not sure. Just one more think to have to think about. Okay, I'm playing soccer today. Yeah! |
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Yeah, so this is the longest break between updates since... I think since Splagitosity's inception. Pretty embarrassing, really. See, the thing is, I was really busy for about two weeks after the last update, and I had so much to say as a result that whenever I thought of updating I assumed it would take forever, and put it off. Of course, as I did, more stuff accumulated and I was even less likely to start... you get the picture. But it's been hanging over my head for a while now (I've been feeling pretty guilty about it) so I decided to finally give it a shot. Interestingly enough, by the way, I've gotten more hits to this website in the last month than in any of the previous six. People seem to like it when I don't write. Maybe I should take the hint :)... or not. So in the name of, well, something other than getting hits, here's a month's worth of updates compressed into one. Well, maybe two, actually. Looks like this baby could be too big for one night's typing. So I'll cover all the trivial goings on in this one and then hopefully sometime in the coming week write another with perhaps some deeper ruminations. So where do I begin? The IBM trip to California was a lot of fun. We gave some demos, some interviews (even a press conference, kind of!) and met some cool people. I also had a kind of eye-opening fall-out with Silicon Valley (well, more on that in Part II). Anyway, we got to exercise our corporate credit cards, get a huge number of t-shirts, and basically relax after a pretty intense summer. I also met a lot of pretty extraordinary people in the last month. Of course there's the bunch of guys at IBM who are really pretty amazing, and then I also got to play soccer with an ex- pro player for FC Zurich, a very well respected club in Switzerland, toss a disc with an ex-world championship team ultimate player, meet Mary Joe Fernandez and Pam Shriver (my mom actually sat next to her for an entire tennis match!), take a picture of my sister with Amanda Coetzer, see Martina Navratilova up close (and have her apologize to about five of us for the rain delay they were experiencing :), and also stand about three inches away from Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux) for about 5 minutes. That last story is interesting... at LinuxWorld I was instructed to give a message to Alex Morrow, a really cool IBM Fellow who we knew back at Cambridge. So I went looking for him on the show floor, and ran into Andrew (a fellow Extreme Bluer who was in the Sash group with me; also a really cool guy) along the way. FInally I spotted Alex showing off his ultra-cool Linux-on-a-watch (really!) to someone. I went up to him to relay the message and I noticed that he was talking to Linus himself! So Andrew and I just stood there for about five minutes with stupid smiles on our faces as Linus and Alex talked. Pretty sweet... I guess only if you're a nerd like me =). So I finished this year's Fantasy Football site and I must say I'm happy with it. I'm currently working on the Currier House site, which is sorely in need of renovation. Hopefully I'll do it justice. I've also started studying for the stupid GREs, which I just can't wait to get over with. I'm calling about the general test tomorrow, and hope to take it as soon as possible... ideally, this weekend. That will be a relief. Then of course, there's the (harder) CS section to take in November! Yay for standardized tests! Or something. Okay, enough for now. It's late. |
8/8/00
Last week of the program. Next week we're flying out to LinuxWorld expo in San Jose to debut Sash. Hopefully all will go well. Our presentation last week was awesome -- we put together a kick-butt demo, and everything went off without a hitch. Our project was actually featured in CNET's news.com, Wired, EETimes, EWeek, ZDNet, and a bunch of other places... very cool. That's the cool thing about IBM: you can spend all your time developing a product with the knowledge that there's a whole PR team out there spreading the word for you.
I went home this weekend. First on Friday night James and I saw the Hip again, this time at the Webster Theater in Hartford. The tickets said the show was at 8pm and the seating was general admission, so we took a bus down from Hartford early enough to get there by 7. Turns out the that doors opened at 8 and the show actually started at 9. So we were pretty much first in line, and ended up at the very front -- first row, directly in front of the stage. It was unbelievable! And this is a band that routinely sells out huge arenas in Canada. I was quite happy. Then Matt and Grant picked us up (thanks!) and drove us home and I spent some time with my mom and sister. Saturday all of us guys met and played our annual basketball tournament... about 6 hours worth. I'm horrible at basketball (I would have much preferred soccer, or even football or something) but it was still a lot of fun.
Sunday was the fantasy football draft, and I think the Cambridge Dudes (my team) fared quite well.
Now I'm back up here and things are getting really hectic. I have many things I need to do in the next week or so. And I'm already very tired. It's going to be interesting. After CA next week, I'm going home for a week, which should give me some time to recharge.
7/30/00
Well, Extreme Blue is coming to a close. We have our final presentations on Wednesday, and we're working pretty furiously to get stuff done by then. I even went in for a few hours today (Saturday), and I almost certainly will go in again tomorrow. Our project is very exciting and I am considering continuing on it after this summer. My group is most likely flying out to California on Aug 15-18 for a Linux expo to announce our product. Should be cool!
I just realized that somehow the gradeboy zip file I had uploaded to fas didn't get fully sent -- only 60K of it was there. So it looks like many people in the last two weeks have downloaded bogus, non-functional copies. Damn.
We saw Sister Hazel and Cowboy Mouth last night at the Avalon. I wasn't a big fan of Sister Hazel, but Kristen knew the drummer (actually, her dad taught him how to play drums) so a bunch of us went. It turned out to be a lot of fun. Cowboy Mouth were great as openers, and the whole experience was cool.
I was just surfing the web and I saw mention of a new House of Freaks album called Hour Glass. I don't want to get my hopes up since I thought they broke up several years ago, but who knows. That would be ridiculously awesome.
I'm going home this weekend, to see all the guys. It'll be the one weekend all summer when we'll all be home. And James and I are going to a Hip concert the night before. Should be an awesome weekend.
Time for sleep now, I think.
7/15/00
Too much stuff to write here. Saw X-Men on opening night; I liked it, although Wolverine (my favorite character in the comics) was a wuss. Saturday, watched Gattaca for the second time. It is a beautifully made movie. Then, saw The Exorcist for the first time. Boring in parts, but ultimately worth watching. I also saw Brazil sometime in the past week -- forget when. It was cynical and bleak and wonderful. Highly recommended. Just make sure that if you watch it, you watch the version with the real ending, not the one which was cut to make it more commercially appealing.
Sunday night we went to see the Foo Fighters (lame) and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (awesome) at the Tweeter Center. It was a pain to get to: we had to take the T to the commuter rail to a taxi. The Foo Fighters just didn't have good enough songs to hold them up live. The Peppers, on the other hand, rocked out. Anthony Keidis could actually sing well, and the band was tight and energetic. The crowd wasn't great, but it was still quite an experience.
Newcastle is playing DC United this weekend! I bet they're not showing it on TV. That sucks!
Wow, I'm really tired. Time for sleep. A longer update next time, I promise.
7/9/00
Another week has flown by. This was a busy one. We had Monday and Tuesday off from work, but Wednesday through Friday turned out to be really productive. We may even be going in sometime this weekend to finish some stuff up.
Anyway, to continue the saga of last weekend: Saturday night we went to Karma, a club that was supposed to be having "funk night". It didn't, and played a lot of trashy dance music instead. But they also threw in some R&B, and we made the best of it and enjoyed ourselves. Sunday I watched the Euro 2000 championship game. It was unbelievable. Everyone in the pub I was in wanted France to win (I guess all the Italian fans went to the north end to watch the game). Despite France's best efforts, though, Italy scored in the early part of the second half: 1-0 Italy. The end of regulation time rolled around, and I was feeling a sense of desperation -- every team I'd wanted to win in the tournament (England, Holland, and now France) had lost. But amazingly, in the 94th minute, the last minute of injury time, Wiltord scored for France and sent the game into golden goal overtime. You can imagine how crazy everyone in the pub was going. France ended up scoring again in extra time, securing the victory. Awesome!
Then that night I saw Mission Impossible 2. Pretty good, but nothing special. When I got back, Rumble in the Bronx was on TV. I'd never seen it before, so I watched it. The acting was horrendously funny, but the fights were pretty good. An entertaining movie, overall.
Tuesday was of course the 4th of July. Some of the interns got up early and staked out a space in front of the Hatch Shell for the Boston Pops that evening. While the day was quite hot, the night was very pleasant, and the concert was entertaining. Happy Fourth! I love this country...
So this weekend I haven't been up to much. Just saw The Perfect Storm, with which I wasn't too impressed (yeah, I know, everyone loves it except me). I just felt too detached from the story to care very much. I have to install a new power supply for my computer and fix some bugs in GradeBoy (thanks Andrew!) and then release the new version. That'll be a big load off of my back. Anyway, time for sleep.
7/1/00
So it's the first of July. I've never been in Boston for the Fourth so this year I'm planning to do the whole Boston Pops thing. Should be fun.
On Wednesday we went to Fenway to see the Sox play the Orioles. We lost in the eleventh inning. It was pretty much the best baseball game I've seen live -- many lead changes, and the crowd was totally into it. But then again, we were in the stadium for four and a half hours, and I must say that at least a third of it was quite boring. Still nothing like watching basketball or soccer :).
Yesterday night I saw The Tragically Hip live at the Somerville Theater. I had never seen them before. I didn't have a ticket and it was sold out so I had to get there early and buy one off of someone. The seat I got was good, and the show was magnificent ... the Hip are pretty much an arena rock band, so it was amazing to hear them at such a small venue. They didn't play as many songs from "Day for Night" (their best album, IMO) as I would have liked, but other than that, the performance was riveting. They're playing in Hartford at the beginning of August so I am going to try to see them there as well.
Tomorrow's the Euro 2000 finals! I am going to a pub in Cambridge with one of the Extreme Blue mentors (who is British, of course) to watch it. I want France to win -- Italy didn't really earn a spot in the finals, I think. Holland just self-destructed.
I have a few other plans for this weekend, so I hope it turns out well. We're all pretty tired out from the past few weeks so this long weekend should do us some good.
6/21/00
Halfway through week three. I'm pretty tired. We kind of hit a rut in work so our last few days haven't been that productive, but we hope to change that tomorrow with a more focused plan of action.
GradeBoy downloads are somewhere near the one thousand mark. I've gotten a lot of good suggestions through email and am just starting to work on Version 2, with a host of new features, including selective semester counting, and exporting or printing grades.
One of the reasons that I'm tired is that I stayed up pretty late last night playing FIFA soccer (on the computer) for the first time in a month. Why, you ask? Well, England suffered a tragic loss against Romania in the EURO 2000 tournament. On Saturday England beat Germany for the first time in a real competition in 34 years -- Alan Shearer putting in the goal to make it 1-0. After that, all they had to do to qualify for the next stage of the tournament was to tie or beat Romania. the game yesterday was intense: first Romania took a quick lead, then England equalised and jumped ahead with a goal each by Shearer and Owen. Romania tied it up again in the second half, and the last thirty minutes were nerve-wracking. But yes, you guessed it, in the 88th minute (two minutes before the end of the game) Romania scored again, bringing the final score to 3-2. So England were out of the tournament, and Shearer said goodbye -- it was his last international game ever. Tragedy.
So to console myself I destroyed Romania a few times in FIFA. I felt a bit better afterwards :)
The weather has been absolutely beautiful and we've been playing some ultimate recently. Lots of fun.
I went home this weekend to see my family. My mom and sister flew out to Aspen Monday morning. I saw Matt over the weekend at his brother's graduation party, which was cool. Oh yeah also on the bus ride up here on Monday morning (for which I had gotten up at 5 am to make) the bus broke down for like an hour outside of Worcester. That was a pain in the butt.
I shouldn't end on a gripe. Okay. So this weekend looks good. My dad and other sister might be coming up on Saturday, and Jeff is turning 21 on Sunday. I really need to stop by my room to get my soccer ball and tennis racket. Apparently one of the mentors here who's Swiss was on a pro soccer team and actually played against the Tottenham 'Spurs. Cool.
6/10/00
The first week is over. It was pretty cool. I put in a lot of hours and learned a lot of stuff. But I haven't been too productive, code wise. Just too much stuff to assimilate. Today we wrote some code for the firs time. It was a relaxing experience after all those design meetings we had to live through :).
I saw two movies this week: The Virgin Suicides and High Fidelity. I liked the first better than the second but both were good. It doesn't take much for me to enjoy a movie. But then again, it takes a lot (just ask my friends) for me to say it's a great movie.
Some dude linked to GradeBoy in an online newsletter. So yesterday I got over 200 downloads of GB. Pretty cool :). Speaking of computers, my power supply has been making weird noises and I'm getting worried. I think I'm going to get a new one just in case. It this one dies, it could toast all of my components. Not good.
After a few weeks off (which was in turn after two or three hectic weekends of playing like 20 gigs) I've started to practice trumpet again. It is very relaxing. And my lips are feeling a lot better, which is good.
I'm going over to my cousins' house for dinner tomorrow to see them and two of my uncles. That should be a lot of fun...
6/4/00
So this is my first full day at the IBM Extreme Blue program. Last week was quite an experience. I lived in the Currier ten-man suite with all other seniors. Being seniors, of course, they were taking full advantage of senior week -- partying all the time, making a lot of noise. This didn't quite jive with my schedule of getting up, going to work for 10 hours, hanging out for a while, coming home, and sleeping. They made prodigious amounts of noise every night (especially during Monday night's Raw is War session) and basically made my life quite an interesting experiment in sleep deprivation. Ah well, it's all over now. And then on the last day, right when we were about to start moving my stuff, I really injured my back again. It killed! -- I literally couldn't move for like 15 minutes. Luckily William and Jeff were there to help me out and basically did all of the work in getting me here. Thanks, guys.
So my room here at Emerson College is better than I thought it would be: a single in a six-person suite, with big windows. And the location of the college is great, right in the middle of Boston. And it turns out we get to use gigahertz desktops at work with 256 megs of RAM, DVD drive, CD-burner, GeForce 256, 20" monitor, the works. Also they let us have Thinkpad 600s for use at home during these 2+ months. The nerd in me thinks all of this is pretty sweet :).
Grades come out tomorrow. I'm still clueless as to what I'm going to get in math. We'll see.
The few of us who were still at school last week ate out every day. On the one hand, it was nice -- I ate a huge amount of food. On the other, eating out is naturally a big drain on the wallet, and also there are times when you just want to plop on the couch and eat some food. Formality in eating is not always good ;).
5/29/00
Changed the navbar a bit (yes, an actual change to the site), and tweaked some other pages. The photo section now has a more prominent display. Hopefully that will spur me on to actually putting up a few of the hundred or so pics I have lying around.
5/25/00
I'm done! Took my last exam today. It was very difficult. 180 people in the class, only one kid left early (and that was ten minutes before time). Even the "simple" problems were difficult. You wouldn't think that ordinary first- and second- order differential equations could be tough, but somehow our prof found a way to make them so. It was painful. I'm just glad it's over. And of course, for my sake I'm hoping that the mean will be low...
... not that it will matter. I got back my ES exam yesterday. You won't believe this -- I was like 22 points over the mean on the final, and something like 18 points above on average for all the tests in that class, and my overall average (with problem sets, which kind of brought me down) was 89.7. The cutoff for A was, conveniently, 90.0. Turns out that the prof only gave two people in the class of 35 or so A's, and, guess what, I was third in the class. Such is my life :).
Our Karaoke party was a huge success. I'll put pics up when I get around to it (um... there's already about 60 pictures in the queue already... sorry). Everyone (nearly without exception, I think) had a great time. There's nothing like singing your favorite songs (miked, of course) in front of your friends. We had a mini-recreation tonight for those who missed it the first time around, and we're planning future such parties in the coming year.
Anyway, I've gotta get up at 7:30 tomorrow morning to get to work. And I still have to take care of some stuff tonight... so I'm out, for now.
5/20/00
Second update in a week. Aren't you proud of me?
So I'm done with two of my three finals. The second one (Engineering) was ... amusing, shall we say. I started studying for it last night but after an hour I had basically lost all motivation. Normally I get kind of worried if I haven't prepared for an exam, but for some reason this time I just didn't care. I ended up hanging out in my room for a few hours and (believe it or not) practicing with James for our upcoming Karaoke party this Saturday. That's gonna rock, baby! Anyway, long story short, I went in with about two hours of studying under my belt. And it was one of those tests where not a single person left early. I was just trying to maintain the grade I had going into the exam... I hope I pulled it off.
Fairy Tales (yesterday) was pretty painful. Three hours of mind-numbing writing. If I hear the name Bruno Bettelheim one more time, I'm gonna puke. (If you don't know who he is, consider yourself lucky.) But I'm very glad that's done with as well. All that remains is my math final on Wednesday. It's my hardest exam, concept wise, but I'm more confident about taking it than these previous two. At least I know I can learn the material.
Other than that I'll be working at Actifunds a lot, burning some Wind Ensemble CDs (more on that later, maybe), and cleaning up in preparation for the summer. School ends in less than a week! And believe it or not, I'll actually be moving five times this summer. And I've accumulated an enormous amount of junk this year, mostly through cheapo deals on the Internet. It's pathetic, really. My latest acquisitions: all five books of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles for $8, and some really nice Nike Air Eurostrike FG soccer cleats (list $45) for $14.
Okay, it's nigh on 3 am. Time for sleep. Oh, here's a question: can you name an English word with five consecutive vowels? (no y's). If you can, email me.
5/16/00
Finals are approaching. I have one on Thursday morning, and then one on Friday afternoon. Then I have a short break before my last final next Wednesday. My CS final project is also due on Friday, but Wing and I basically spent all weekend finishing it up. It's really cool (we think) -- and actually useful! Check out the webpage here: Image Inpainting. You know you want to.
Last Tuesday I saw Gladiator. It was quite good: the fight scenes were amazing, and some of the recreations were very good. However, I thought the plot was mostly predictable and forgettable. It certainly wasn't a detriment; it just didn't add to the experience. Overall, worth watching.
Wednesday we went to see the Red Sox play the White Sox. Ramon was quite good, but Tim Wakefield put up one of the worst pitching performances I have ever seen. We left after the sixth inning because it was starting to rain, and when we got back here we found out that the game had been cancelled after the sixth anyway. Luckily the Red Sox got the win. They've been kicking butt recently. I'm happy.
Thursday night was a three-hour rehearsal; Friday was a gig at the banquet for "Harvard's most generous alumni." It was in Annenberg, which they had redecorated to look quite amazing... the net worth of the people it the room was likely over 10 billion dollars. Kinda nuts. Luckily we got paid for it :)
Saturday was another fundraiser gig (the one for which we had the rehearsal on Thursday). I ended up doing what I was supposed to (playing like 12 fanfares) but also subbing in at the last minute for the jazz band and then the marching band. The jazz band thing was kind of weird because they had these huge screen which showed closeups of the people performing to the crowd, and I'm sure I must have looked kind of crazy since it's kind of hard to look natural when you're sight-reading some music :). But I kept my eyes off of the big screen while we played, so I'm hoping everything turned out okay.
Sunday night some trumpet buddies and I went to see Arturo Sandoval and Maynard Ferguson play at Berkelee. It was really amazing. I wasn't really a big fan of Arturo -- he's amazing, technically, but I've always found his playing style and choice of pieces somewhat schlocky. And I still dislike how he goes for those ridiculously high notes over and over again just to elicit cheers from the crowd. But he's an incredibly likeable guy, and his performance was at times jaw-dropping (in particular, he skat-sang for like 5 minutes straight and then doubled the saxophone's very complex part perfectly, in key. I guess you had to be there to appreciate it). Maynard's set was as good, stronger musically and a little less flashy. In the end I came away thoroughly impressed and very entertained.
I guess now it's time to start studying, eh?
5/7/00
This weekend was pretty nuts. And it's not over yet.
Well, it's the middle of allergy season and despite my best efforts (and those of a bunch of anithistamines), I'm still sniffling, sneezing, and waking up several times a night for lack of breath. Which means I've constantly got that scratchy-eyes, tired feeling (or maybe that's just more allegies?). Anyway, so it's just added that extra dimension of pain to my life :). (Don't worry, I'm just kidding; and yes, I'm thankful for everything I have).
So, on Friday: class, frisbee, rehearsal, soccer, swing gig at the Cabot formal. Saturday: WE concert, with quintet performance (at which I played the Ewald horribly... it was painful), run back and change into my tux, Rudenstine fanfare gig, eat, Adams formal. Sunday: rehearse, House concert, indoor soccer (which was, btw, incredibly fun), and of course now (10:30 pm) I'm trying to think of a topic for my 8-10 page Fairy Tales paper due tomorrow :). Of course in the meanwhile the cleaners lost my shirt and mistakenly gave me another one (about 6 sizes too big) which I didn't realize until 30 minutes before the Rudenstine thing... let's just say I had quite an entertaining conversation with the clerk then. But they found my shirt in the nick of time, and all turned out well.
So now, it's just paper tomorrow, Tuesday two problem sets and hopefully we're going to see Gladiator, and then every night for the rest of the week through Sunday I have either gigs or rehearsals.
How pathetic is this? All I'm doing is writing about what I'm doing. So boring! I promise that next update will be more interesting. Really!
4/30/00
Only one week of school left! It's going to be a long one, though. On Friday, I went over to my brother's apartment to see The Insider (which I got for him on DVD). It was excellent -- an amazing story. Then yesterday James and I went to see Richard Shindell. Jess Klein opened. She's gotten a lot better since the last time I saw her, but let's just say there's still a lot of room for improvement. Richard was great. He had very good stage presence and he performed his songs (avec backup band) with a lot of emotion and musicality. Definitely worth it. Oh yeah, in a bizarre concidence, Shindell's backup guitarist was the same guy who played in Bob Dylan's band when I saw him with Paul Simon this summer.
Today is Springfest. I'm probably going down there for a few hours. Then rehearsal, hopefully some soccer, then another lovely all-night math fest for 105b. Yay!
4/24/00
So I'm kinda coasting now. Spent a good 7 hours tonight doing and writing up my math problem set. But it was kind of fun... I'll be pretty much stress-free until finals. Problem sets are long (I'm writing this at 3 am) and occasionally painful, but they aren't stressful. And Actifunds is going really well -- it's actually pretty fun to work there.
Fairy Tales is a good class. The reading is excellent. And my engineering class finally got interesting, with some really cool game theory problems in our latest problem set.
My sisters are doing some momentous things. Maya has another lesson with Itzhak Perlman. And Meera is having a big day coming up for her: in the morning, SATs, and then at night, her Junior Prom. Ah... the days of the prom... what am I talking about, anyway? Bizarrely, I never went to my own prom. Junior year, I went to someone else's prom, and senior year I had to skip the senior prom and instead went to our junior one. Go figure. Hopefully it will all go well for Meera.
The weather here has been absolutely horrible. It's rained four of the last five days (at least) and looks to continue on into next week. Sucks!
4/15/00
Just 96 more hours. Then I'm pretty much free until finals: over the course of the next month I just have a few problem sets, a final project, and a ten page paper to write. Between now and then, though, I have two midterms, an hour long presentation to give, and two problem sets to do. In the past week, though, I've been having some fun, playing the trumpet and soccer a lot. Kerry and I saw Richard Dawkins speak on Wednesday, which was really cool.
Actifunds has been going well, too. The hours are weird and I'm not even getting any stock options (... don't ask why) but the work is pretty fun. I hope it does well.
The CS276 final project that Wing and I are working on is really cool. If we get it to work, that is. It's really useful (even for non CS people). More information on that later...
So GradeBoy is doing pretty well. It's gotten over 120 downloads from download.com in the last month. I haven't been keeping track of how many downloads it's gotten directly off my site, and also I obviously can't know howoften people copy it from other people. So I'm pretty happy with it.
Anyway, I guess I should start studying. Or at least procrastinating in some other way. My first midterm is (believe it or not) tomorrow at 5 pm.
4/3/00
So I'm back at school after break, and I'm already tired, and sick of it. So: Florida was very relaxing. It was great to see Will again (and Dan too, for a day). We frolfed, bowled, played tennis, and watched a lot of SportsCenter, among other things. It's definitely a different kind of lifestyle down there: much more relaxed. Up here, if there's a single day of good weather, we're all hyper about doing something active outside: playing soccer or ultimate or whatever. Down there, it's almost always good weather (it hardly rained while we were there, unbelievably) so doing something "active" is not so imperative.
Midway through last week I came back home. I saw Itzhak Perlman -- actually my little sister had a private lesson with him at Juilliard, which was really cool, so I accompanied my dad down to NY for the trip. Other than that, I basically watched a lot of sports, and enjoyed the good company (and food) of my family.
I'm working on a page of my favorite books, which were a significant and very formative part of my childhood. I used to read incessantly, many hours a day, often at the expense of doing my homework. I think it was worth it.
Baseball season starts today. Go Sox! Of course, I'm only expecting the worst, as usual.
So the UConn women won the national championship! It was a pretty amazing game -- they were totally dominant, even more so than they had been in some of the previous games of the tournament. I was very proud.
Most (basically, all) of my high school friends hate women's bball, especially the Huskies, even though they're rabid men's UConn fans. Some go so far as to root for the opposing team. I'm constantly surprised by this, and find it quite narrow-minded and chauvinistic. Actually, I think it's mostly due to the fact that they've hardly watched it and just make a lot of assumptions of how well (or poorly) girls play. Now before you go on and accuse me of being all self-righteous, hear me out. Yeah, women's college bball doesn't have the dunks or as much dribbling finesse as the men's game, but it's still very entertaining to watch. Consider this: my friends have no problem watching men's college bball, which is definitely a step down from the NBA. Any NBA team could thrash any college team. So they're obviously watching college bball because it's entertaining, not because it's the best display of basketball out there. So it doesn't make any sense to me. I enjoy watching women's soccer and tennis, for the same reasons: yeah, they're not nearly as athletic, but it's a different kind of game, and still entertaining. Hell, I watched Will play intramural floor hockey over break, and that was entertaining, even though it was totally amateurish. So it comes down to this: if my friends want to watch only the most athletic displays of a sport, they should forego college sports altogether. If they watch for entertainment, they should have no problems with women's bball. Yeah, some women's games are painful to watch, but then again, so are some men's (if you saw UConn putting up an absolutely miserable losing performance in this year's tourney, you know what I'm talking about). And if you watch a good women's team, like UConn of this year, which has an over 50% field goal percentage and shoots over 40% from the three, it's pretty damn fun to watch.
Of course, it's their loss, not mine ;).
3/23/00
24 hours from now I'll be in Florida, baby! James and I are heading down
there and staying with Will, one of my very good high school friends.
It should be a lot of fun; I'm excited. Midweek I fly back up to Connecticut,
where I'll spend the rest of the week with my family before taking a bus
back up here on Sunday.
I played some basketball and soccer today. I love soccer. It's nearly
as good as ultimate (although a bit more frustrating, I think, because
people are much better with their hands than they are with their feet).
My ankle is feeling much better... I just have to wear a brace when playing
sports.
The Wind Ensemble concert went well. Some of my solos sounded good, so
hopefully after break I'll borrow the DAT and mp3-ize them.
Oh yeah, I just found out today that I got into this really cool Extreme
Blue internship at IBM. I honestly never thought I had a chance. And
I wouldn't, had not Grant
told me about it in the first place -- even though it's highly competitive
and he was also applying. I think that's the mark of a true friend.
So it looks like I'll be working at Actifunds from April to mid-June,
then doing this IBM thing till mid-August, and then working back at Actifunds.
I hope it all works out.
Anyway, I doubt I'll be updating this page until I get back -- so have
a great break!
3/18/00
Yesterday was crazy. Thursday morning I was running around in shorts playing
frisbee, and in 24 hours it was snowing. Insane weather.
As of yesterday I am officially an employee of Actifunds.
I think it's a cool company. I'm excited to be working for them.
I bought some speakers online: used (but in perfect condition) PSB Century
400is. I found a great deal on them, and am excited about that too. Please
don't ask about my credit card bill this month... ouch. Actually, this
is the first year of my college career in which I have spent more than
I have earned. So I've had to dip into my savings accumulated over the
last few years. Not good, I think.
Wind Ensemble has a concert tonight.It should be a lot of fun. And it's
good music too, and I have some really nice solos. 8pm in Sanders Theater,
if you're at all interested (probably not). Anyway, I hope to get some
clips from it up if all goes well.
I have a midterm on Monday which I really don't care about.
Spring break in five days, baby!
The NCAA tournament has started. I'm 28/32 so far. Pretty good.
Okay, that's enough :)
3/14/00
I just had my math midterm. It was hard. I don't think any of the fifty
people in the room left early. I guess that's a good sign :). I also got
my ES midterm, which wasn't so great -- not terrible though, and definitely
recoverable.
GradeBoy's slowly gaining momentum: 25 downloads so far :). And it's not
yet been listed on download.com.
Soccer is awesome. It's so fun to play! Unfortunately my feet are like
magnets for other people's feet. I always get kicked in the foot or the
ankle really hard at least once per game. In fact, the last two times
I've played I've taken particularly severe beatings, so bad that I actually
went to UHS to check them out. Turns out I have a contusion and an ankle
sprain. And I have to go back tomorrow for X-rays to makes sure I don't
have a hairline fracture or anything. All for the "beautiful game"...
:).
UConn's seeded 5th in the tourney. The women are #1. Newcastle won this
weekend. Both Ray Allen and Donyell Marshall are doing very well in the
NBA. Just need to see a little more action from Rip Hamilton. Tennis is
going as it should -- although Agassi had a major upset today. All in
all, quite good.
My crappy stereo system died for a few days before coming back to life,
and it made me think about getting a new one. I figure, I spend so much
money on CDs, so I might as well have a good system as well. I'll give
my current one to my sister, I think. Anyway, I've started buying (used,
of course) and have gotten several good deals. I now have a NAD C340 integrated
amp (list $400; cost $210) which I'm very happy with, and Marantz CC-65SE
5-CD changer (list $500; cost $220), which is just like James's except
it's a "Special Edition", for what that's worth. I'm on the lookout for
some good speakers (in the <= $350 used range). Any suggestions? In the
future I'm looking at getting a tape deck and maybe a tuner. I haven't
spent this much money in so long. It's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? But
then again, it's all money I've earned, and since I hardly ever spend
anything, indulging in something I love isn't so bad, I think. Or maybe
that's just rationalization.
3/8/00
So what has gone on recently?Yesterday was so nice (weather-wise) that
I ended up doing nothing all day (except playing some soccer, which was
great), and I had to pay for it bigtime last night at around 11 when I
realized that I had about nine hours of work to do. So I went to sleep
at 6, and got up pretty soon after that. It sucked.
This weekend was Junior Parents' Weekend. It was quite fun -- my parents
came up, met my friends' parents, went out to dinner with me and my brother,
stuff like that. I think we all had quite a good time.
I finally updated a lot of the rest of this site. I felt I had to when
I noticed that the About Me page said that I was a sophomore :)... anyway,
that page has been updated, along with the computers section, my resume,
and a bunch of other stuff. More changes to follow, definitely.
Oh yeah, my trumpet playing's back to normal, almost. It's quite a pleasure.
Being able to play well reminds me how much I enjoy playing.
3/3/00
So... my lips are getting better from my injury (see below) but they're
still not in top shape and my trumpet playing is still suffering. It's
painful.
I saw Matt Damon this weekend. Wynona Rider was there too. Matt was host
of Harvard's annual Cultural Rhythms show. I like him a lot.
Latest Promotion Dept.: As a "preferred member" of fogdog.com,
the online sports store, I can give out $10 gift certificates to my friends.
I have also found an additional $10 off coupon, so you can actually get
$20 off purchases of $25 or more (or you can just use the $10 gift certificate
to get something at any price). What do I get from this? Well if I get
two people to make purchases, I get a fogdog hat, and five people gets
me a fogdog t-shirt or something. Even if I don't know you, you visit
my site, so I consider you my friend :) -- so if you're interested, email
me and I'll email you a certificate.
GradeBoy! It's finally out! Check it out here: GradeBoy
page.
I was thinking the other day: humans are pretty much the most complex
things we know. (Of course, I'm talking about complexity at a system-wide
level -- otherwise, you could say that anything that contains something
complex could be considered at least as complex, and that's not what I
mean.) Isn't that weird? We look for the king of complexity, and find
out that it's us. Okay, I know this sounds incoherent, but I think that
if you think about it for a bit, you'll (hopefully) appreciate the weirdness
of it in the same way I did.
2/25/00
Too much stuff has happened... I can't remember all of it. I got kicked
in the face playing indoor soccer (by someone's foot, not the ball), which
was really annoying since I've been unable to play trumpet for a while
now, until my lips heal. I'm hoping to get back to playing by Sunday.
Have you ever been to TheSpark.com?
It's a pretty cool site. Anyway, I just found out that my TF from CS50
and CS51 is the CEO of it! So I actually know someone who's created a
successful startup. And he's an awesome TF, too.
I decided to learn Visual Basic well, so I'm writing a program called
GradeBoy. It'll be done this weekend, so I'll have more details then.
You might actually find it useful.
My math class is pretty interesting. Actually, it's a mixed bag. Doing
differential equations is all about problem solving, basically -- identifying
what kind of equation it is, and finding the best method to solve it.
That's the cool part. The bad part is that there's so much painful algebra
involved, so much room for error, that often even if I have the right
idea and the right method, I'll still get a bogus answer.
2/9/00
Second semester has started up. I'm, as usual, unable to do work. It always
takes a few weeks for me to get in gear again. I'm back to working for
Smarter Living, though. Nothing like managing a database of half a million
users (and being responsible when you screw up). Anyway, this weekend,
Kerry and I went with my cousin (who's a freshman here) and some of his
friends to a They Might Be Giants concert. I'm really glad I got to see
them -- I don't know how many more years of touring they have left in
them. Anyway, the concert was great. They played songs that pretty much
spanned their entire career, from the first album to their latest. Highly
recommended. Then on Sunday night James, Jeff, Chris, and I saw the Celtics
play the Trailblazers. They lost 100-94, which was a much closer game
than I expected -- quite entertaining. We went with Currier, so we only
had to pay $10, and I got a free pretzel and soda to boot.
I got lotteried into Fairy Tales for Core. That's cool. Other than that,
it looks like I'll be taking AM105b, CS276r, ES102 (yeah I never thought
I'd be taking an engineering class), and Music 91r. It promises to be
an interesting semester.
1/23/00
Wow, two updates in two days. They're both fake though. This one is about
ridiculous .com company promotions. Talk about throwing around investment
money. I raise this point because I just got an email about how PayPal
is giving away $10 to everyone who signs up for their service (which actually
seems useful). Furthermore, if you refer someone, you get $10 for him
too. And this is real money -- you can immediately have it directly deposited
into your bank account (which is what I did). It's incredible. If you
want to be referred from me,
click here. If not, you should at least check the site out.
Then there are the companies that just give you products for free. Vitamins.com
is giving you $15 of products totally free (no shipping either). And if
you're ever interested in music, check
this out. B&N and Buy.com give you $10 off any purchase of $10 or
more. That basically translates into a free CD. And you can do it more
than once with B&N -- just use a different coupon code.
Finally, there's AllAdvantage. It's a little advertisement bar that you
keep around on your screen when you're surfing the web (like right now).
You get paid $.50 an hour, and $.10 an hour for people you refer. The
end result is you get something like a $20 check a month, all for doing
what you normally do. If you want to be referred by me, click
here.
There's plenty more stuff like this on the web. Pretty much, before you
buy anything on the web, it's a good idea to go to aj.com and search for
coupons from the site you're buying from (like "cdnow coupons" or something).
And yes, I've finally sold out. I could theoretically make money off of
you if I refer you. But the choice is yours, and of course, you benefit
as much or more than I do. I would never, for instance, put some ad banners
on my site (which, believe it or not, I've been asked to do several times),
since it's annoying as hell, and you don't get anything out of it. But
this is legit, and soon investors will realize that e-businesses are just
like any other, and the money will dry up. Until then, let's keep milking
'em.
1/22/00
Well, I'm in the middle of finals. It's painful. Here's a little sports
update for you. Newcastle United lost today. Both UConn teams kicked butt.
My favorites in the Australian Open are still in it, although Sampras
had quite a scare. Philippoussis and Agassi are playing right now, but
unfortunately ESPN2 coverage doesn't start for another 40 minutes. I want
the Rams and the Jaguars to win tomorrow.
In that vein, here are some phenomenal soccer goals you should check out.
If you like soccer at all, or have a fast connection, they're definitely
worth your time.
1/12/00
Finally added another sound clip (on the right there) for you. Enjoy.
1/6/00
The big 00. Dat's right. Anyway, this is going to be a long update since
I haven't updated in a while.
I reinstalled Windows today. It felt good. I do it about once a year.
My \windows dir went from 950 megs to a svelte 350.
I hope your New Year's plans all went well. I'm sure you experienced the
same sense of anti-climax that I did as the clock struck 12, but even
so, it's refreshing to have a new year. Of course, realistically speaking,
this new year is no different from any other, but we still "go celebrate
the fact that, beginning with an arbitrarily-chosen date, the number of
times the earth has revolved around the sun is exactly two times the cube
of the number of fingers I have on my hands" as my friend Brendan puts
it. We humans are suckers for signifcance: we're always looking for it
in one place or another, whether or not it's actually there.
Speaking of the new year, how lame was Y2k? No power outages, crashed
airplanes, nothing. Yes, this is a good thing. But it really annoys me
how those Y2k prophets went around raising hell for five years, milking
scared consumers and companies. I'm thinking specifically of Ed Yourdon,
perhaps the biggest Y2k hypester of them all. I don't know how much he's
made through his lectures and his books, but I'm guessing somewhere in
the seven figures. He spoke at one of my CS classes two years ago, about
how there's 8 gazillion lines of code and no way anyone could fix them
all and how there were going to be enormous calamities, etc. Of course,
now he'll claim that it was all his harping that saved us. I'm confident
though (as I was back then, too -- ask my friends ;) that businesses will
do whatever they need to to stay in business -- including fixing Y2k glitches.
Whatever.
So my vacation was pretty good. I watched a lot of TV, mostly football.
I went bowling once... it was pretty good: 149, 128, 145, 120. I'm just
too damn consistent though, just like with cross country (I'd always run
like 17:10-17:20, without any real breakout performances). I don't care
if my average is 10 points lower, if I could just bowl a 190 once or something
:).
My family and I went on a cruise over break. It wa quite nice... tons
of food, great weather, beautiful beaches, snorkeling. I needed that.
12/17/99
So this is my last day of school for 1999. It'll be really nice to have a break. I had an appointment to look at my finger today at UHS... I had torn a tendon playing basketball this summer. Luckily things seem to be progressing well and while there will probably be some residual swelling forever, I shouldn't lose any functionality in the finger. Whew.
Well, other stuff's happened that I would write about, but I have things to do today. Pack, for one. Be lazy, for another. In any case, have a good break. Perhaps I'll write something from home.
Oh yeah, if you have a fast connection and want to see what I've been doing in my CS class, check
this out. I wrote the program that lets you
manipulate the robots and create keyframes, the routines that animate the robots based on the keyframes, and the raytracer which actually rendered the movie.
12/6/99
Well, I'm waiting for my raytracer to compile (fas and ice have been ridiculously slow recently), so I figured I'd write something in here.
Actually, as usual, I'd been planning on updating this for some time now but, again as usual, never got around to it.
Anyway, so lots of stuff has happened. My birthday's come and gone (I'm no longer a teenager... yay). I went home for Thanksgiving. That was quite enjoyable -- it was nice to see my family again, and to take a break from the work here. I played a concert Saturday night, which went quite well. Maybe if I can get ahold of the DATs I'll put some more clips up of me playing :).
Some of the CDs I've recently bought on whims have turned out to be very good. I was expecting something quite mediocre and was quite pleasantly surprised.You might want to check out, on a whim ;), Magnet's Shark Bait, Tonic's Lemon Parade, or Luna's The Days of Our Nights, Sure, these aren't the best albums I own, but they're worth the money.
I've been trying to get contacts, but none of them are comfortable! Either they don't fit my eyes, or they're too dry. I've already paid the proverbial arm and leg but have gotten no positive results yet. I hope it works out.
11/17/99
Yeah, it's been a while, as usual. My last few weeks have been pretty easy, but I'm ramping up for some pain: Midterm next week, then the day after I get back from Thanksgiving, I have a big CS project due and a Hindu Myth paper; two days after that I have another midterm. This is somewhat compounded by the fact that I'll be away this weekend in NY (playing at the Harvard
Club as we usually do) and then at the Game, so I won't be able to study or go to CS section. Ah well... it should be fun at least.
So the weather is now freezing, and all my sporting activies have pretty much come to a halt. I'm getting lazy, baby!
UCONN debuted at #1 for both men's and women's basketball (quite impressive), but after a very narrow loss to Iowa, the men have dropped to #8. Good for them, actually... I always like rooting for underdogs ;).
Last weekend we saw Fight Club (a very messed up movie; pretty good but not fantastic), went to see the Nields at Paradise (they were a lot of fun, as usual), and saw a Harvard production of Jesus Christ Superstar. The music was good (hard to mess up such a great score), the directing was mediocre, and the singing was pretty good (although I couldn't really tell, since several mic problem made the songs very hard to hear). (Parentheses are fun.)
Enough for now.
11/3/99
My little hell week is over, almost. And it wasn't as bad as I would have thought. Matt came down this weekend for the Dartmouth game. We ended up not going (Harvard won with the fairly ridiculous score of 63-21). We played some tennis instead, and some FIFA. And since we both had lots of work to do (he, some reading, me 30 hours of CS assignment), we got a lot of that done as well. So the end result is that we actually finished what we had to do but still had a lot of fun. Matt became obsessed with Bullpen Blast. Don't ask.
We played a concert this past Friday. It went quite well -- Sanders was really sold out and our guest artists (Christopher Lydon from NPR's "The Connection", and the BSO's principal tubist) performed well.
10/20/99
Lots of stuff going on. First of all, my mom showed me this article a while ago:
The other thing Kansas left out. Pretty interesting, and worth reading.
Last Friday Kerry and I went to see Cats. The tickets were cheap, and the show was really good -- I enjoyed it much more than the first time I saw it, several years ago. Saturday and Sunday were filled with my CS assignment, working for Idiom, and plyaing tennis and ultimate.
Sunday night Kerry, James, Kate, and I saw the Nields sisters open for Dar Williams. It was an all-acoustic show, and it was awesome. Dar was very engaging, and her sharp wit contrasted very well with songs. If you've heard her, you know what I'm talking about. Highly recommended!
I had my first midterm of the semester yesterday, for AM106. It was of the open note, open book variety. Those are the most nerve-wraking for me: no matter how much you study before, it all comes down to how well you can reason during the test... memorization plays no part. Ah well, we'll see how I did.
Did I mention that the ALCS was painful? All but one of the games (the one the Sox won) came down to the last one or two innings. The Sox of course had to make things interesting, just to give all of us fans some hope before squelching it. They had several things working against them, though:
Phantom Menace Review
Overall, the movie was entertaining, and worth watching. Luckily its good aspects (visuals, action scenes) are a lot easier to remember than its bad parts (plot, pretentious dialog) so I have a feeling my impression of it will improve with time. Right now, though, I'd give it a 6.5/10. Here's a general, rambling discourse on it.
The dialog was not as bad as some reviewers had me think. It suffered from a lot of pretension, which is pretty obvious, considering that this is a moralizing, good-vs-evil Star Wars film, after all. Some lines did make me cringe. However, it never had anything as bad as the all out awfulness of Titanic, for instance ("I can't change you. Only you can change yourself." Ahhh!). So although the dialog certainly wasn't a plus for the film, it was a lot better than I expected, which was a relief.
Jar-Jar isn't that bad, either. Sure, at the beginning, I was going to die. His voice couldn't be more annoying, and his lines are incomparably dumb, when you can actually understand him. But by about halfway through the movie, I learned to just tolerate him, and it turned out okay. No big deal.
A few quirks were annoying. Anakin and his mom are slaves? Let's just say that those are the nicest slave quarters I have ever seen... Also, interesting how even though Darth Sidious instructs his minions, in reference to their upcoming battle with the Gungans, to "wipe them out... all of them" (of course, those of you who have seen the trailers are intimately familiar with this line), the droids make the Gungans surrender instead, and conveniently hold them there, doing nothing, until Anakin just happens to destroy their power source and the Gungans are freed. Talk about lame. Also Queen Amidala reveals herself at the worst time.
The action scenes are great. Lucas definitely came through on this end. The pod race is great; if only Need For Speed were that exciting :). Even though we knew who was going to win, it was still exciting to watch. The Darth Maul fight scene was fantastic. He is sooo cool. The red force shields were also a great idea -- that's the kind of on-the-edge-of-your-seat stuff that really gets your heart pumping. However, I have to say that the way Maul died was totally lame. Okay, this guy has the reflexes to fight off two Jedi Knights at the same time, and yet he couldn't protect himself when Obi-Wan stared at Qui-Gon's light saber while it inched towards him, and then did an entire flip over Maul and then cut him in half. A guy as cool as Darth Maul deserved a better ending. I was disappointed. Also, I didn't think the special effects were that revolutionary. Of course, James disagrees. But realistic rending was pretty much accomplished back in Juraissic Park (or, some would say, Dragonheart). I didn't see anything that spectacular here.
The plot is terrible. Of all the cliched, hacked plots, this is the worst. Perhaps I've read too many fantasy books, but every plot "twist" was predictable at least 30 minutes before it happened. Hmm, let's see: "Why don't you take out the power generator while we sneak into the city." Please. How about using something that hasn't been done a hundred times already. "Whatever you do, don't leave the cockpit, Anakin." Um, okay, I wonder what he's going to do next? I'll stop here...
Overall, though, if you can just unplug your brain before you step into the theater, you'll find the movie enjoyable. It is worth seeing, if only for the action. Be warned, though :).
5/18/99
Okay, so it's been way too long. I'm done with half my finals now, though: I just handed in the CS161 24-hour take-home final. That baby was looong. And on Friday my brother and I presented Cheetah, our C-like compiler for CS153. We didn't fix all the bugs till Sunday night, though, but by then it compiled a lot of stuff: fibonacci generator, primes finder, bubblesort, mergesort, and a hash table implementation (with structures, obviously). It was very cool. But that ate up all of last week for me. We definitely didn't sleep enough.
Now I have a week before my last two finals. I'm going home next Wednesday, too. What a quick year!
Things coming up: I have an appointment on Thursday to see if I can take one of my finals (a three-hour essay-fest) with a break in the middle because of my RSI problems. Typing isn't that bad, but writing for that long really, really hurts my hands.
Oh yeah, tomorrow I'm seeing the Phantom Menace. 8 o'clock, baby :). I'm not expecting much, though, so it should be cool.
More later.
5/10/99
Just for you: made some changes on the "about me" page and on the "computers" page (to reflect my new setup). You know you're interested.
5/8/99
Expect more frequent updates from now on... because school's over! Not really: I have a project and three finals left, but at least starting the day after tomorrow I don't have to get up at any fixed time for quite a while. Yes!
I play briefly at the HRO concert tonight, but then had to run back here to work on my 161 project, which was due at midnight. Tomorrow I'm playing in the WE concert outside, which should be pretty fun. Also, my sister Meera is up visiting us, which is nice.
Anyway I should get some sleep now, and I'll write some more later. Maybe even do some updating of the rest of the site :)
4/29/99
So I'm jamming to the sounds of Widespread Panic now. Awww yeah.
Sunday was one of the most fun days I've had this year. We played a fairly lame concert on the steps of Mem Church for Archie Epps's retirement, but the weather was so good that it was actually pretty fun. Then I played a few hours of soccer, and then some great ultimate frisbee. Three on three, the best matchup: you need lots of endurance and accurate passing skills to connect, but you can always let loose with a 60-yard bomb if necessary. The weather was great, and just getting out in the sun for that long was fantastic.
Work-wise, this week was pretty bad. I think I messed up on my physics midterm today, and then I wrote a terrible paper for my core in the three hours before class. Ah well, who cares. :)
Yesterday night we saw Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra play Ellington at Symphony Hall. It was awesome. The second half wasn't as good as the first, since they attempted more ambitious pieces like Harlem which, while great charts, are very hard to play fluidly live. By Wynton and Co. went nuts on a few occasions, and some songs were positively electric. Definitely worth it... except, of course, that I came back late enough that I didn't really study for physics.
In the meantime, I got some mail from the American Association of Retired Persons informing me that I was a new member. Maybe if I'm lucky I can get senior citizen discounts :).
4/25/99
What a crazy week.
First, Colorado: This just totally blew my mind. First, I absolutely can't believe those two kids. Sure, they're products of society, blah blah, but there have been "products of society" as long as there has been society, raping and killing from day one. What I don't understand is how any of these people could do what they did. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that they would have to die first before they could recognize how amazing life is. It's really too bad. But hey, I already lost faith in humanity a while ago.
On a more rational note, I'm all for stronger gun control laws. Yes, I take a libertarian view on most other things, but this is one issue about which I have no qualms... having the power to say what you want and having the power to kill someone are two different things entirely. And people almost exclusively use guns to infrige on the rights of others (by causing them bodily harm), and that's a big Libertarian no-no. Look at these statistics:
http://www.insync.net/~tagvhou/murders.htm
http://www.handguncontrol.org/protecting/D4/d4firefc.htm
Only police are allowed to carry handguns in Britain.
Then, the day after that tragedy, I found out that the father of one of my good friends from high school died. He wasn't old or disease-ridden; he just died. I felt horrible, and I can only imagine what he and his family are going through. I'm really, really sorry, Matt.
Life can suck, can't it?
To add to my personal lameness, I got selected for jury duty. In Ayer, MA, on June 22. Never mind that I have no way of getting there from here. Or that I actually live in CT but go here for college. Or that it's in the summer, when I'll actually be in Connecticut, working, and with less of a chance of being able to get there than I have now. Gotta love the government ;)
Mundane news... my brother and I did really well on our 153 project, and my partner and I actually did everything right in 161 for once :). Too bad I haven't been sleeping much.
4/20/99
I had quite a busy weekend. On Friday I played at the President's Dinner (not as cool as it sounds: Rudy & Co. just woo some really rich people and try to get them to give Harvard some money. We just play fanfares to bring them to dinner) and went straight from there to the HRO concert. Debussy's Nocturnes were taken a little too slow for my liking, but Brahms 4 was quite a pleasure.
Then on Saturday we went to the ART to see a dance interpretation of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. It was really cool (in fact, I saw it last weekend and went again this weekend because it was good) -- the album is perfectly atmospheric, and the lighting and effects were awesome.
Yesterday Kerry and I went to see Tommy at the Colonial Theater. The music and acting were quite good, but the production was some new minimalist thing (or something) with very few props, which seemed to be intended more to get the critics' attention than to please the crowd, which I found annoying. But it was enjoyable overall.
Yesterday night we had the house room lottery. We successfully bid for our current room for next year.
4/14/99
Okay, so it's been a while. That last rant probably scared you a bit, huh? :) Anyway, things have been looking up, sort of. After a string of bad grades before and after vacation, I've finally been getting some better ones. And also, I've finalized my job this summer with Yale. The pay is great... let's just say that I got a *huge* raise. Hopefully if I make enough this summer I won't have to work next school year.
I put some live Wind Ensemble clips up here.
Khalid El Amin is dumb.
The compiler that my brother and I am writing from CS153 is putting me through hell -- there's so much stuff to be done! As of break (two weeks ago) it properly interpeted a test program I had written which included fibonacci, a primes-finding algorithm, bubblesort, mergesort, and a set of hash table functions (which used structs). However, since then we haven't done much and a huge amount is due on Wednesday. That would be fine except for the paper and midterm I have on Thursday, and the (very large) CS161 project due on Friday. Yay! :)
Those of you who are regular visitors (come on, I know I have at least 10 or so), you know you want to: email me. Just for the hell of it. Email is good.
4/8/99
The week is over. It was quite painful. However, the weather's been awesome, and it can't help but put you in a good mood, you know?
Harvard women's hockey had a big celebration today after winning the NCAA national championships. That's pretty damn cool... Most of my sports allegiances are to my home state and high school, but if this kind of activity keeps up, I'll definitely be feeling the pull of the Crimson :).
On a more somber note, I was pretty amazed at an occurrence in my core section today. We were discussing mankind's obligation to nature (if any). The primary theme of the comments made went along the lines of "Well, people are basically self-centered [ -- which I agree with, for the most part], and so our only obligation to nature is to stop abusing it if this abuse will harm us down the line." I then suggested that perhaps there was some moral obligation as well, for the preservaion of nature for its own good, as opposed to from a purely practical, save-our-butts point of view. A girl countered, "Come on, no one really cares about that. I mean, no one really cares about the lesser life forms. No one here would think twice about killing a rat if it got in their [sic] way." I offered that I would (vegetarian-by-choice and animal lover that I am), and that I was sure that others in the room would as well. Of course, you guessed it, no one said anything for a while, and then a few people chimed in in her defense. I was pretty shocked! I mean, here we have like 15 people who are normally pretty friendly, etc., who wouldn't think twice about killing an irritating animal -- or at least were too wimpy to admit that they would. Call me crazy (and I probably am) but in additional to all the other morals people seem to feel necessary to instill in their children, I think that perhaps a greater respect for the sanctity of life would be in order.
I'll stop now :)
4/4/99
Haha, I fixed some of the problems on this page: not only were the last few dates messed up, they also said 1998 instead of 1999. You'd think I would've learned by now...
Anyway, I'm back at school. Break wasn't very exciting by was definitely relaxing. I saw lots of movies, all of which were (surprisingly) above average. From worst to best (where worst is still quite good): Analyze This, Saving Private Ryan, October Sky, Life is Beautiful.
And my new computer is up and running, overclocked to 450 MHz, successfully I hope. Has only crashed once so far, which is a good sign (systems can get unstable when you overclock). Quake benchmark, 640x480x16: 97 fps. I think that'll do :).
Oh yeah, I bought a Huskies National Champions t-shirt. This is significant because it's the first t-shirt I've actually purchased in the last four years or so (all my other t-shirts I've gotten for free through various sports, math and academic competitions, computer promotions, etc.). I'll be flaunting it, baby! :)
Anyway, it's back to school for me: I have an assignment due Wednesday, and a problem set, paper, and midterm on Thursday... none of which I've started because I'm a moron. Yay!
3/30/99
Say no more! UConn takes the championship! (see the front page). They're now national champions.
It was a great game, well played by both sides, with no really controversial calls... a pleasure to watch. I can't believe they did it! They had all the moves.
Anyway, that made me pretty happy. I saw Saving Private Ryan today, which was pretty good.
3/29/99
Spring break is finally here. I definitely needed it: I had a very horrible week, with little sleep, lots of painful school stuff, and an annoying sickness which is only leaving me now.
UConn!!! Championship game tonight, vs. Duke. We're the underdogs. Root for us!
So my new computer finally came, and I only got to overclock it for a bit before I had to leave. I was getting 90 fps running Quake, though... nice :)
I saw Noam Chomsky speak on Thursday. It was quite interesting. He's a total radical.
I'll write more after tonight. :)
3/21/99
An interesting weekend. Tonight we're seeing Ragtime. Yesterday I did work, but mostly rooted for UConn. Yeah baby -- Final Four!! I was watching the game on the Currier common TV, and it sucked because most of the people there (except for like two of us) were rooting for Gonzaga since they were the underdogs. There's one real die-hard UConn fan in Currier, and he drove down to UConn yesterday to watch the game there! Pretty nuts. Anyway, so I was about to have a heart attack, but UConn managed to pull it off at the last minute. Phew.
I must say, though, that this has been a crazy tournament. Just an unbelievable number upsets. To give you an idea, after the first round, I was 96% in the ESPN Tournament Challenge (that is, I had a higher score than all but 4% of the people). Now I'm somewhere around 65% :).
Two of my friends from high school, John and Pete, came up on Friday. We played Taboo with my blocking group, which was fun. Then at 10:30 I had to head down to Quincy House to play at their swing dance with the Harvard Jazz Band. We played pretty poorly: I, for one, had never seen the music, and my improvisation sucked. On the whole we sounded pretty lackluster, but I don't think the dancers noticed, so it's okay :).
3/17/99
Only 9 more days til break! Of course, it's going to be a painful week (a lot of stuff to do) but even so...
So I finally had to reboot my computer. Close to 10 days, over 120 megs served up with good ol' Omni. Oh yeah, I added more albums to the lists (popular and classical).
The weather here was beautiful today. 60s, sunny, perfect wind.
I ordered a new computer! Yeah, pretty quick, huh? Well, there are a few reasons behind it... perhaps I'll explain later. Anyway, it's not exactly an entirely new computer, just a $600 upgrade for my Pentium 200 MMX. Prices are so good these days. If everything goes well, my configuration will be:
login4:~ 41> pine You're not allowed to run pine anymore, retard. login4:~ 42>And so on. It was especially frustrating for him since he couldn't use pico to edit the .aliases file (he doesn't know about vi or emacs), and he also couldn't logout without closing his entire client. (Of course, there's an easy way to circumvent this whole problem, but I wasn't about to tell him how.) It was funny, until he promised he would kill me unless I fixed it. Aren't I just so mature? :)
11/30: Um, four math assignments, a music review to write, a very long CS 121 problem set, a very, very long CS 141 problem set, B29 readings (sorry, not happening) and a quiz, four rehearsals and two concerts this week. So come to the HRO concert on Friday and watch me fall asleep. Or come to the WE concert on Saturday and watch me fall asleep.One of the reasons I have so much work, of course, is that I didn't do any of the stuff I was planning to do over vacation. But I did get some bowling and setback in, which makes it all worthwhile.
| 83.7% | |
| 4.7% | |
| 4.7% | |
| 3.8% | |
| 1.4% | |
| .9% | |
| .5% | |
| .3% |
6/8/98
Okay, well, I haven't actually updated anything. I'm thinking of
installing Photoshop on my computer at work :). Seriously, though, I did
decide to do a little research. Which is more popular, Netscape
Navigator, or Microsoft Internet Explorer? Of course, I don't have a very
good idea,
but I did crunch some statistics from my site logs:
