Despite being massively hosed, I ended up doing a lot of fun things this weekend!

On Thursday:

• I relished in not having to stay up late, because no 2.004 pset was due the next day!
• Went running, that’s always fun

On Friday:

• Went to SK’s Novemberfest
• Went ice skating with some friends in Johnson ice rink. I’m still pretty bad at ice skating though!
• Had an impromptu dance party in my wing, complete with disco-ball action and booming bass from my amp

On Saturday night:

• Went to the MIT Chorallaries concert in 10-250 – it was great! Makes me want to learn to sing, haha
• Hung out with some friends
• Went to an interesting party at Skullhouse (an MIT fraternity) with WS and some other friends

On Sunday:

• Helped my friend WS teach a beatboxing class for Splash. That was fun! The kids seemed to really enjoy it, too
• Got a free Chinese-food dinner for teaching! Quite tasty indeed

Cheers!

You may have noticed lately that I’ve been writing a lot of blog posts with pictures in them. That’s because I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Tech’s cameras! On Wednesday, I volunteered for an assignment to photograph MIThenge, the twice-annual phenomenon in which the setting sun is perfectly aligned with the infinite corridor. The sun rays come in through the huge class paned windows in Lobby 7 and seem to set the infinite ablaze with an orange glow. Unfortunately this time around, the atmosphere did not cooperate; it was too cloudy to effectively see the sun. Oh well… I did get to hang out with some friends for a while waiting waiting though! Here are two more pics that I took, before and after MIThenge:

The view walking to campus. A wide angle lense does a really good job making the point at making the point of showing where the sidewalk ends!

Cheers!

I recently joined the Tech as a photographer, and they have some really nice cameras! Tonight I went out to play with some of their lenses so that I’d become more familiar with them. Here are a few shots I took of MIT’s Lobby 10, Killian Court, and Boston:

Hey all, I thought I’d give a quick update on how my fall semester’s been going so far. I’ve been pretty busy lately, which is why I haven’t been blogging all that often.

Here are some interesting things I did:

• In mid-October (10/12/2009 to be exact), there was a Tufts 10k walking race for women, to raise money for a good cause. I woke up that morning and saw that most of Memorial Drive and parts of Boston had been blocked off for that purpose, and didn’t think much of it. Later on that day, I happened to be taking a bike ride just to get away from psets for a bit, when I remembered about the road race. Other people were biking/rollerblading along with all of the people, so I decided to tag along as well. I got to ride around in the middle of Boston streets (such as Commonwealth, Mass Ave, the Harvard Bridge), etc., all without cars. It was fun, and the lack of motor vehicles was quite unexpected and made biking in the middle of the road feel a lot safer
• A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have dinner with Alan Oppenheim, an MIT professor in the EECS department who wrote the 6.003 Signals and Systems textbook. 6.003 is probably my favorite class this term, so I was quite excited to meet the professor who wrote the textbook. It turns out that he’s a really nice guy. Speaking of 6.003, we had a really cool demo in class the other day where we saw a controller balance an inverted pendulum. It was pretty sweet!
• A friend down the hall is on the Ballroom Dance Team, and participated in the Harvard Beginners Competition this year. Me and some friends trekked up Mass Ave up to Harvard Square and watched the performance, and it was pretty interesting. It looked like fun – now I want to learn ballroom dance!
• Some of my friends participated in a program called LeaderShape last IAP, and absolutely loved it. It’s a week-long retreat that develops leadership skills. I decided to apply for it this year, and I got in! Looking forward to it this IAP.
• I also joined the Tech (MIT’s student run newspaper) as a photographer. They have some pretty nice cameras!! It’s fun playing with them and learning how to use them. Here’s a fun photo I took while working on my 2.004 pset from last week (if you look closely, you can see some of my transfer functions):

• I installed Ubuntu 9.10. The upgrade feature from 9.04 took a long time and was kind of slow when it finished, so I decided to just start from scratch. But, since 6.142 requires a working Ubuntu development environment, that may have been a bad idea. It took a while to get everything working again, and to get all of the software packages I need. Luckily everything appears to be working now though, and Ubuntu 9.10 seems pretty nice.
• And last but not least, I’ve been very busy with classes. I’m pretty much hosed this semester (hosed = MIT slang for having ridiculous amounts of work to do). It’s okay though, because I really like my classes. Specifically, between 2.004 and 6.003, I’m learning a lot about control theory, which I really like.

Cheers!

Hey all, I’ve been taking some pictures over the course of the semester so far. They’re mainly random pictures of Boston and MIT, from just walking around and such.

Around the beginning of the year, I randomly decided one day to walk the bridge-loop (a path connecting MIT to BU and going around the Charles River). If I recall I was just getting over being sick, which is why I decided not to run the bridge loop. Here are a few nice pics of Boston I took:

Last week was the Head of the Charles crew race. Strangely enough, it was also snowing… pretty early, even for Boston! I took some pictures of the bizarre scene of lots of crew boats on the Charles, with snow simultaneously falling:

Cheers all!

Cheers all,

As you may have heard, Microsoft released Windows 7 yesterday. Because MIT is awesome, IST (Information Services and Technology) had it ready for students to download for free and install the same day. So, taking advantage of this, I upgraded my Windows 7 RC partition to the full-on version, Windows 7 Enterprise. And I have to say, it seems pretty nice so far! Here’s a screenshot of my desktop:

Since I never had Vista, I can’t compare speeds. It does seem to be pretty quick though, it looks as though the OS might be pre-loading or caching certain commonly used programs.

The only hiccup I’ve found was that, immediately after installing, Windows 7 didn’t recognize my graphics card, so I didn’t have Windows Aero and my screen resolution was small. Windows later redirected me to download a graphics driver from nVidia’s website, which worked quite well.

Coming from Windows XP and Ubuntu, one feature I think that’s really cool is the Media Center. You can play music and have a pretty, moving display of your albums in full screen mode. I think it’s pretty knarley:

Although it’s a bit early to say for sure, I think Windows 7 is going to be a success.

See you later!

I realized just now that I have a lot to blog about it, and I haven’t written anything in a while. But I don’t have a lot of time right now though! I have a 6-10 page, single-spaced LaTeX project proposal due tomorrow for 6.142 tomorrow, as well as a 6.041 pset due tomorrow, of which I have done very little so far. Such is MIT!

Here are some blog entries I’ll write  soon:

• Computer adventures – first steps in putting my server, electron-monkey, on my wall (and having it still work!)
• Computer adventures – getting a free laptop, and trying (unsuccessfully) to fix the keyboard
• Walking around Boston (the bridge loop) – took some neat pictures
• Pictures of Head of the Charles, during the snow…!
• Doing fun stuff, like going to Next Formal

Cheers!

Since it’s the start of the school year, why not blog the classes I’ll be taking? I like them all so far; I think it’s going to be a great (although very busy) semester!

2.004 – Dynamics and Control II

Since I’m minoring in course 2 (mechanical engineering), I’m taking one class from the MechE department. It seems like a good class so far; and I already tried to learn a significant chunk of the material from OCW over the summer. Control theory is pretty important in robotics, which is one of my main motivations for wanting to take this class.

6.041 – Probabilistic Systems Analysis

This class seems like it’ll be pretty good. I’m taking 6.041 even though I already took 6.042 last year, because 6.041 has a lot more probability than 6.042. 6.041 will satisfy one of my MEng math requirements, and since probability is important in AI, I elected to take it instead of some other math class.

6.003 – Signals and Systems

This is one of my favorite classes so far. The content is really cool, it’s taught very well, and it applies to a lot of engineering. 2.004 is very similar so far to 6.003, although I expect the two classes to diverge a little bit as 6.003 focuses more on signal processing and 2.004 will focus more on mechanical controls. Tasty.

6.142 – Robotics Science and Systems II

I’m really looking forward to this class. Unlike nearly all the other courses I’ve taken so far at MIT, this one is more research-based rather than concrete lecture-style. You may have heard of the DARPA grand challenge, a competition in which teams must develop autonomously-driven vehicles that drive themselves around a city-like course, complete with other cars. MIT competed in 2007, and is now working on a spin-off project to try and develop an autonomously-controlled forklift. That is, the forklift will ultimately be able to take in user input, and automagically drive to and pick up crates of stuff and move them around. That’s pretty hard to do in a non-controlled environment, and is on the cutting edge of robotics. In 6.142, we get to explore the codebase for this project (which is in active research in the CSAIL lab, and much of the code is based off the DARPA grand challenge), and do an independent research project on some component of the system. If our code works well in simulation, we’ll get to try it out on the real robot (awesome!). And if it works really well and is helpful in some way, it may even make it into the final robot (double awesome!). This definitely seems like the kind of class that the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

21M.392 – Music of Africa

And now for something completely different. This is my humanities class, and it’s been quite fun so far. We get to study the music across the continent of Africa, learn a little bit of Senegalese drumming, and even go to some concerts at jazz clubs around the area. Yeah!

So, those are my classes for this semester. Ideally I’ll have time to do well in all of them, have a life, *and* have time to sleep!

After a seeming black-hole of packing, unpacking, and reshuffling, I’m finally all moved back into MIT! It was quite a tiring day; I was exhausted by the time I was finished. But of course a little fatigue is no match for a short power-nap, which can do wonders. After a little while, I felt awake, energetic, and ready to go so I took a little walk around next house and the MIT campus. A little later that night, some good friends and I decided to go party hopping, as it being MIT’s rush week and all. We visited PBE, but left after waiting because the line to get to their rooftop party was too long, so then we stopped by No. 6 club and had some fun dancing there. A few of us decided we were hungry afterwards, so we decided to head to LaVerde’s, which was to our dismay closed. On the way back we found that PBE’s line had disappeared, and we got in with a minimal wait and danced a bit more on their roofdeck (great view).

It’s good to be back at MIT, but I’ll certainly sleep soundly tonight!

As the summer is coming to a close (wow, only a few more days before I head back to MIT …!), I thought it reasonable to summarize what I did and did not do. Back in June when the summer was still young, I blogged about a bunch of goals that I had for the upcoming months.

Things I said I was going to do and actually did:

• Pre-learn some of my classes (got particularly far in 2.004 and studying for 6.142 (a robotics class I want to take), but not far at all in 6.003). The idea is that I would have more free time during the semester (hopefully)
• Watched some TV
• SLEEP!!!
• Run and bike fairly often, more of the latter
• Had a good internship, and enjoyed living at home for the summer

Things I said I was going to do and didn’t:

• Learn Blender3D
• Build an electric bicycle. Oh well, there’s always next summer …not to mention the school year
• Develop perfect pitch. Didn’t really pursue this one too much, so it might be possible yet!

Things I didn’t expect to do at all, but ended up doing:

• Learning to play electric bass guitar
• Starting to program a very simple operating system kernel, along with a good friend MS
• Growing a goatee (!) :- )>

I’m really looking forward to going back to MIT and having a great year! I plan on trying as many new things as possible and trying to keep an open mind about everything. If you see me not doing that, please pull me aside and tell me what’s up.

Cheers all!