Now that finals are over, I have free time again! It’s really great to be around MIT and have absolutely nothing to do. That doesn’t happen very often! Coincidentally enough, there was also a massive snow storm on Friday, the day after my exams ended. We usually get less snow in Boston than in the more western parts of the state (such as my hometown), probably because Boston is so close to the ocean. However, we certainly did get our fair share of snow during this snow storm! Here is what Boston looked like the night before the snow started. This is what the Harvard Bridge/Prudential Center area usually looks like from my wing’s main lounge:

And here is what it looked like during the middle of the snowstorm on Friday:

We could hardly see across the river! In fact, visibility decreased even more after this picture was taken. And the Charles River began to freeze over.

Another view across the river, this time of part of BU’s campus.

Road conditions got considerably worse than this as the storm went on. I took these pictures earlier in the day.

So, with some intense snow outside, what is there to do but have a loud music/dancing/disco party in the main lounge? None of my friends and I could come up with any better ideas, so this is exactly what we decided to do! We got a hold of some ridiculously loud speakers, cranked them to full volume, and had a great time. Though there wasn’t really very much dancing, there was certainly a lot of loud music! Here are (some of) the culprit speakers (no, the hat doesn’t make any noise. Our speakers were just being festive, that’s all):

ALso, since I have a disco ball in my room (hooray!) …

… I decided to take it out to the main lounge to enhance the party experience :

It was a pretty good time! We could hear the music throughout at least half of the 5th floor, and it was audible as well a floor below us. I love loud speakers!

That night, some friends from my wing and I decided to go sledding, which was also a lot of fun! We found a great incline on campus, took our sleds, and had some fun. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera with me (didn’t want it to get wet!), so I don’t have any pictures of it.

The next day (Saturday) was when I was scheduled to leave MIT and go home for winter break, which necessitated some packing. Here are some of the bags that I packed in my room. To be quite honest, I’m not really sure why I bothered to take pictures of this; perhaps it was because I was bored. Or perhaps it was because I secretly feel guilty about not blogging enough in the past few weeks and so I’m subconsciously trying to compensate my blogging about everything, including the rather mundane details of packing. Or perhaps I just like taking pictures with my camera. I leave it up to the reader to decide:

While packing, I found my friend Keldin eating pasta in the main lounge. Here’s an intense action-shot:

Oh, and on an un-related side note, we’re going to set up a public Athena machine in our main lounge! How exciting. It’s not set up yet, but here is a picture of the beast-to-be, eagerly awaiting it’s Athena-ification:

This computer used to belong to a friend down the hall (me and some other friends got it for him off of Reuse as a birthday present last year!), but not that said friend has another computer, he doesn’t really need this one as much. It’s a Pentium III, but it does have a nice dedicated graphics card that is capable of smoothly running desktop-effects on Ubuntu. It will make a fantastic Athena machine.

So, that’s it for now! Right now I’m back at home, and it’s snowing again. I think we’re going to get around another 6 inches of snow, and judging from how hard it’s snowing right now, I’d certainly believe it. Cheers!

For those who don’t know, I have a computer server in my room (basically a computer that’s connected to the internet that sits around for a while and waits for requests) called electron-monkey! It’s an old Dell Optiplex GX50 1.1 GHz Celeron processor. Here are some pictures of my good old buddy:

The computer, under my desk:

My keboard:

You may ask, why do I call this computer electron-monkey? To be honest, I’m not really sure myself! It sounded like a good idea at the time… and computers do sort of “juggle” electrons… sort of…

I had previously been using electron-monkey as a webserver, so if you went to http://electron-monkey.mit.edu, you’d get the website that’s on my computer. It wasn’t running Windows; instead it was running a distribution of Linux known as Ubuntu that’s quite popular and known for it’s user-friendly-ness.

I was certainly very happy with my Ubuntu system, but being the daring and fearless adventurer that I am, I decided to try and install Athena on electron-monkey . Athena is the computer operating system developed here at MIT, and it’s what all of the computer clusters around campus run. It’s pretty useful for doing a lot of things, such as talking to other people across campus, using the internet and checking email, and running cool Athena-only software. I really like Athena, so I figured I’d install the Athena linux variant on electron-monkey.

Searching through some documentation online, I found that there’s actually an Athena install image available from the MIT website. So, I downloaded it, burned it onto a CD, and ran it on electron-monkey to install Athena. And the best part is, it worked!! Here are some pictures of my new friend, running our favorite operating system:

The IS&T Athena screen saver

The Athena login screen. Note that it automagically detected that my computer was electron-monkey.mit.edu!

Myself logged into Athena:

So, this made my day! This means that, while in Next House, I’ll theoretically never have to go to the Athena cluster again, because I can just use the personal machine in my room… unless I have to print something…

I’m still figuring out a lot of stuff about how Athena works, so right now my website (http://electron-monkey.mit.edu) isn’t functioning. There’s still quite a bit of tweaking to do, but I’m very happy that I have a personal Athena workstation!