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!

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!

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!

I’m currently running the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop (simultaneously with Windows XP and Windows 7). Here’s a screenshot:

One great thing about Ubuntu is that it makes multiple desktops very easy. Windows 7 has quite a few handy tools to navigate around given your single desktop, more so than Ubuntu. Ubuntu, however, gives you multiple desktops:

‘Tis all for now!

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!

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!

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!

• A lot can change in a week
• Catching the flu sucks
• Cheerios are tasty, and so is coconut cake

Is it always striving to do better, no matter how “good” we are now? Is it finding new things to do or meeting new friends? Do we have the right to be happy when we know that other people around the world are suffering? If we cured cancer and ended poverty, would we finally be happy? Or is happiness something internal to ourselves – a sort of feeling or pride in one’s hard work ethic? The concept of constant betterment, always trying to make ourselves better in every way. Is it this quest for perfection that brings us joy?

I don’t think that this makes us happy. Continual self-improvement necessarily implies finding fault with oneself, in order to know which direction to travel in to do better. And there will always be fault; no one can ever become perfect. So, those who strive to become perfect will always be focusing on the negative, only seeing how they can do better instead of what they have now. This does not sound happy; it sounds depressing. I think that happiness is quite the opposite of striving for continual self-improvement; it is contentment and appreciation for what one already has. If we forget our aspirations and desires for a moment and take a step back from it all, we’ll realize that we have it pretty damn good. And that’s something to be happy about.