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!

In all of the hectic flurry of studying for finals, declaring my minor, and choosing my classes for next year, I forgot to upload a few pictures that I took! Boston is quite pretty in the Spring when green, leafy things grow from the ground and on trees. Here are a few pictures I took:

And here are two panoramas that I took by stitching multiple images together (click for a larger view):

Here are a few more pictures I’ve taken this semester. They were all taken from around my dorm, looking across the Charles River – which happens to be BU. This is a pretty good picture of a part of BU’s campus. And thanks to a high school friend JK who goes to BU and gave me a tour, I actually know what a lot of these buildings are . A lot of times when friends and I go running, we end up around this area:

Road construction across the river at night:

The view from my dorm’s lounge:

Here are some more photos I’ve taken around the end of IAP/early Spring semester. They’re all of the the usual subject matter – the city of Boston! All of these were taken from Next House, except for the last one. Enjoy!

Perhaps I’m addicted to photography… I’ve been having a lot of fun this IAP taking pictures of MIT and Boston. I still have many more pictures that I’d like to share on this blog, but here are just a few of my favorite recent pictures. They were all taken from the lounge in my dorm, at different times and on different days.

The first pictures are on a bright, cold, and crisp winter day.The pictures near the end are ones that I just took this morning at sunrise. My addiction to photography has been strong enough lately to coax me out of bed at inopportune hours of the morning and prevent me from partaking in my much-appreciated sleep. Anywho, I’m really glad I got up this morning, because these are some of my favorite pictures. The sunrise ones were taken between 6:00 – 7:00 AM.

I have free time! These past few days, I’ve taken various pictures from around campus. The last two are long-exposure pics with some tone-mapping signal processing applied. I like photography!

Here are some various photos of Boston that I took throughout the semester, mostly before I had this blog. Since this blog is partly about photography, I felt it appropriate to upload them!

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!

I’m finally done with my finals, and what a fantastic feeling that is! I had four finals this semester, which is a lot. Judging from talking from most of my friends, the average is usually around 2.5-3. Some of my finals however weren’t all that bad; two of them weren’t cumulative, they were just unit tests, which certainly makes studying for them less stressful! Anyway, now that I’m done I really have nothing that I have to do. It isn’t very often in my life when this happens

Now that finals are over, I can look forward to going home and having a nice relaxing winter break with my family and friends. Right now I don’t really don’t have any specific plans, except that me and some other friends are likely going to go and visit my old high school to say hi to past teachers.

And then, after break, it’s time for IAP (Independent Activities Period, MIT’s month of january in which there are no regular, official classes, but you can take other fun classes if you want). I’m doing the 6.370 BattleCode competition with some friends. BattleCode is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) competition, based on programming a computer to play a starcraft-like video game. I’m really looking forward to this, it should be fun! It’ll also be a great way to re-acquaint myself with Java, which I haven’t used nearly at all this semester. Also, I’ll be teaching a 3 hour course on PHP during early IAP, which I’m very excited about!

There are so many other random things I want to do over IAP. Here’s a list of some things:

1. Go to a bunch of cool programming/IAP classes
2. Explore Boston!
3. Play the piano a lot
4. Go running often
5. Work on cool projects (in addition to BattleCode), likely with SIPB
6. Get plenty of sleep (hopefully!)
7. Refresh myself on Newtonian physics (preparation for 2.003, a class I’ll be taking next semester)
8. While I’m at it, if I feel ambitious, try to start teaching myself some of the material for my classes next semester