In my brother’s class who would sneeze all of the time (reminds of me of someone I know in college). My brother told me this story today, of how he got so ticked off by his continual sneezing he decided to keep track of how many times he sneezed in a day. By the end of the year, my brother had compiled quite a hefty chart, tracking this kid’s sneezing habits from the first day of classes to the very end. Absolutely hilarious.

The kicker was, at the end of the year, he presented the dude with a Microsoft Excel graph tracking his habits throughout the school year. According to my bro, the kid thanked him with a snicker and continued on with this daily activities. My brother even showed me his data tables, including one specially marked section where he counted how many sneezes the kid had during the final exam. Man, I’m still laughing just thinking about the whole enterprise. If I had thought of this during high school, I would totally have done something like it!

The Fort-Awesome folks and I have been watching this new show on Cartoon Network called “The Venture Brothers”. It’s absolutely hilarious. Apparently, the creative team behind the animated and live action versions of the “The Tick” are responsible for this maniacal parody of late-sixties teenage boy adventure shows (like “Johnny Quest”).

One of my favorite shots from the show

“Johnny Quest”, and various Marvel Comics references are abound as Doctor Venture takes his fraternal twin sons on really weird adventures, often confronting ridiculous villains. However, the true highlight of the show is the family bodyguard Brock Samson. Brock’s philosophy is “kill first, ask questions later” which leads to some hilarious scenes.

Whenever Brock goes berserk the entire show shifts into overdrive, the parodies get taken to extreme proportions but are so fitting and funny you can’t help but bust your gut laughing.

Bottom line, if you grew up watching reruns (or actual first runs) of “Johnny Quest”, or “Space Ghost”, ever read The Hardy Boys or any comic books, watch this show. You will get more than just a chuckle. If you haven’t read or seen any of the material the show references, there is enough original content and humor to keep you interested. Either way, it’s highly recommended.

I decided to watch Zhang Yimou’s (of “Hero” fame) latest entry in the Wuxia genre yesterday, “House of Flying Daggers”. While I was at first expecting a sort of rehash of “Hero” with a different plot, I was delighted to see that he made an effort to change things up.

Yimou still seems fascinated with depicting thousands of flying objects (arrows in “Hero”, daggers and bamboo pikes in “House of Flying Daggers”). The CG in the movie is subtle but makes for breathtaking scenes. The “echo game” scene is reason enough to see this movie, the effects are absolutely beautiful. Most interesting of all is that we get a very bitter love story in this one.

The fighting takes a significant back seat in HOFD, only accentuating the tension during certain scenes. It’s more about the love that gradually develops between the two main characters who are less and less what they seemed to be in the beginning of the film.

If you liked “Hero” or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” you may want to check “House of Flying Daggers” out. It should be hitting limited release around December 3rd or so.

After watching about 6 to 7 hours worth of “election coverage” from several news stations, I decided one thing: 99.9% of all pie charts could have their data best respresented as other types of charts. See the figure to the right for a better idea of what I mean.

Proof of My Observation

I just got back not too long ago from a Kung Fu seminar with my instructor’s instructor, Si Fu Wong. The main focus of the two hour session was to improve the form we had just learned, basically a set of steps made to strengthen the body of beginner long fist students. Listening to Si Fu Wong, I realized how much Kung Fu has brought to my life. In particular, I wondered how different things would be right now if so much hadn’t happened to me during my formative years (i.e. my early teenage years).

If things had gone just a tad differently, I might have not taken an almost 10 year hiatus from Kung Fu before taking it up again early this past summer. I may have ended up studying martial arts in China instead, maybe even getting a degree in it and then coming back to the States to teach. That would definitely have been a possibility and something I find totally acceptable even in comparison to getting an MIT education.

As for reality, there’s much to catch up on in my training, and still an inexhaustible amount of stuff to learn. I hope I can stick with Kung Fu for the rest of my life without any more extended “breaks”. It sure as heck means a lot to me.

As I was walking in the basement of the Infinite the other day, I thought about all of the times in the past month and a half that I’ve thought about blogging something and haven’t. The story usually goes like this: I’ll get ticked off about something, think to myself “Darn it, this is ridiculous, I’m going to blog about this” and go on with my day with a firm resolution to blog. Except that, the more I think about said subject that upsets me, the more I realize that its just a passing fancy. After that hits me, I end up not blogging anything.

I’ve had lots of these types of situations as I find myself walking up and down the basement of the Infinite. There must be something about that long, cavernous hallway that makes me more introspective than usual. I’m much better off for it though. Despite creating a lack of content on the site, it has helped me to get over a variety of nuisances that would otherwise have bothered me for the rest of day.

Yeah, I’m still alive, despite not blogging for over a month. Life’s been pretty uneventful these past weeks. Term started, I’m taking classes, trying my hardest not to fall behind. The usual.

Overall, I have to say I didn’t like being ripped away from such a great summer. Life was peaceful, decent weather, nothing to do when I got back from work. Now, it’s the perpetual rush to get that next problem set in before they throw the next one at you. This sucks.

The only things saving me are Japanese I and Kung Fu classes. Going in, I thought that maybe a language class at MIT might be a little slower paced to allow everyone to properly learn the language. Boy was I wrong. It’s just as fast if not faster! The beautiful thing is, we’re all learning it pretty well and having lots of fun doing it too.

So the story goes.

Every once in a while when I post to the blog I take a few seconds and peer into my servers logs to see if I’m getting any new visitors to the site. Apache’s logs consist of basically an IP address, day, time, and the HTTP header of each request sent to the server. Many visitors to my website (not just the blog, but wildfire.mit.edu in general) come to my site from Google searches.

Interestingly, the most common search performed that draws people to my site is for “Ariel photos”. Type that exact phrase into Google and my photos section is the fifth page down from the top. Now, that’s pretty neat and all, but my real beef is the shear amount of people who visit AND go through my photos as a result of such a search. It’s not the same people either (judging by variety of IP addresses). Thus, I wonder:

TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO SEARCHED GOOGLE FOR “Ariel photos” AND ENDED UP HERE: WHAT WERE YOU REALLY LOOKING FOR? GO AHEAD, LEAVE A COMMENT.

It’s simply mind boggling, there’s no way my drab and often uninteresting to all but those intimate with members of Fort Awesome photos could draw so much attention. I’ve decided I had enough and must post about it. There’s no other way of getting to the bottom of this conundrum. Here’s hoping some daring visitor bothers to post about what he or she was truly seeking out on that great bastion of Internet knowledge known as Google. Oh, and for those who are looking for pictures taken from airplanes: you should have typed “Aerial photos”. Just a heads up.

I had completely forgotten about another major experience I had this past week. I’d overcome my distaste of Dr. Pepper! I always thought Dr. Pepper tasted like medicine. You know, that awful bitter taste that makes you squint as it goes down your throat. I don’t know how Dr. Pepper had been made to taste that way in my mouth. I tried it when I was a little kid and thought that was how it tasted.

Being a little older now, and possibly a little more open to things, I finally decided I was going to give it another chance. I grabbed a bottle of the stuff while I was LaVerde’s and planned on giving it a shot. Back at work, I poured a little in a cup and tried it only to discover Dr. Pepper tasted nothing like medicine! Bah, my childish self had me fooled all this time!

Suffice it to say that I have now added Dr. Pepper to my soda repertoire. Jim describes its taste as something like Coca-Cola mixed with orange soda. I’d say that’s about what it tastes like, which is ten times better than any bitter medicine.

I had a rather bland experience this past Thursday. The state had called me up for my first ever spout of jury duty. I was to arrive at the Edward J. Sullivan Courthouse at 8am. Since I was walking down to that illustrious den of justice, I got lost (naturally). I ended up getting there 20 minutes late, already tired of the whole jury duty experience.

What awaited me was an arduous journey. After getting some advice laced with a bad attitude from the police officers in charge (which always seems to happen to me in government buildings, go figure) I sat down to await orientation.

Soon thereafter the group of about 100 folks or so piled into the assembly room to have the job explained to us via an informative video. Then came the waiting.

For the record, I don’t mind doing my part in the justice system. I mean, ten times out of ten I would have showed up jury duty (hopefully on time after the first few attempts) and sat there waiting to get called up. It’s just that, man, that was a very long and boring period of time. After blowing away like 5 hours, we were told that all trials for the day had concluded without the need for a jury.

By the end, I must admit that I wanted to get called. It wasn’t so much because I was eager to commit myself to a trial that may keep me busy for days, but because I wanted something to do. It was a curious feeling. I’d never felt to crippled by boredom. Hell, I had read the “Metro” newspaper almost three times front to back by lunch time!

I wonder how many other people in the waiting room felt the same way. Maybe next time I’ll start asking people, if just to pass the time.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve put anything up in here. Not too many exciting things have have happened that merit an entry. I’m pretty much just in my usual routine of UROP by day and RA by night.

I did find a new Kung Fu school though. It felt good to finally find a place that was really similar to where I used to go in Miami. My first class was this past Wednesday and I must say it was a real shock to realize just how out of shape I really am. It’s going to take a while before I’m anywhere near where I used to be in the martial arts. Despite that, I look forward to the challenge.

Oh yeah, and the folks back home (Mom, Dad, Adrian, and Andrea) finally decided on a house! That’s right, our first house in almost 8 years (we’d been looking over the last several months). Supposedly it’s a very nice colonial style home. Unfortunately I won’t be able to visit until my RA duties are over, so I won’t be able to help with the move. I’m looking forward to checking out the new place!

This weekend, amidst the billion other things I was doing (including bringing my computer back to life and grilling) I managed to keep track of the barrage of licensing announcement happening over at Anime Expo.

For those of you who don’t know, Anime Expo is one of the largest, if not the largest anime convention in the US. During its festivities, some of the year’s most lucrative licensing announcements in the industry are brought to bear. I for one, was really surprised at just how many shows were announced, and how many haven’t finished airing on Japanese television yet (or haven’t even started).

I’m pretty glad the American industry is starting to release such a good cadre of recent shows. I think it’ll really help fans get a taste of what kind of anime is being shown recently, and help open them up to new genres and techniques instead of having them stick to the Trigun and Cowboy Bebop fare (which are all well and good, but variety is sorely needed in the American fan community).

I can’t wait to see what they manage to announce at Otakon (the East Coast’s largest convention)! I don’t think the US companies have anything left!

I had a pretty odd Fourth of July this year. I think I’d probably chalk most of that up to it being the first Fourth of July that I spent away from home. I don’t think I’ve ever seen fireworks without my dad, mom, brother, and sister beside me discussing the brilliant patterns in the sky and what fun adventures we’d have the following summer.

This year I boldly went forth and did something I’ve never done before: barbeque grilling. Now, as you all know, grilling something on the barbeque isn’t really all that complicated. I’ve primed some meat for my dad before on the gas grill at home, but I was never really in charge of anything like cooking up a set of hamburgers and hot dogs for a group of people.

This years Fourth was something special. I had to do grill. There was no choice. I planned the event as part of my RA duties, and by God I was going make it happen. There were a number of obstacles in my way, including an electric barbeque unit that makes the experience as pansy as trying to cook a steak with a single lit match and a heavy dose of apathy from almost all of the dorm’s residents.

In the end, my friends (whom I thank most graciously) came by for some burgers and hot dogs, and not much of anyone else. It sort of sucked, but to be honest I had some fun grilling a bunch of stuff myself for the first time. I missed my family dearly, but I got a great view of the fireworks from Killian Court here at MIT. That part of campus is right on the Charles River, literally a few hundred feet from the barge that was launching the fireworks. It was certainly a sight to be seen.

Just as I was getting ready to go to sleep I realized I haven’t posted here in a while. Well, there’s a perfectly good reason for that, my laptop met with disaster once again last Thursday and I’ve been a bit busy since then. As I was getting ready to head for work I noticed that the mp3 I was playing stopped and my computer began to emanate a very shrill buzzing noise.

As I picked up the sound, I knew it was over. My hard drive had died once again, in much the same way as it did this past February. Needless to say I was truly upset. I phoned Dell right away to obtain a replacement and managed to get it the following day. I’ve spent half the weekend reinstalling Debian and am just now getting back on my feet.

It’s funny how bad things tend to pile up on bad days sometimes. That very same day I managed to get a pretty nasty burn on my hand from a soldering iron I happened to drop on myself (the blisters are only just now starting to recede a bit). Yet, who am I kidding, this was merely a blip on the radar. I’ve been through much worse, and everything is almost back to the status quo.

On a brighter note, the Summer crew has finished the entire two seasons of “Sports Night” and we’ve now moved on to “The West Wing”, another fine television show by Aaron Sorkin. We’re certainly enjoying the exploits of Martin Sheen as our dear make-believe PotUS.

A bunch of us are watching a show by Aaron Sorkin called “Sports Night”. Gautham just recently picked up all of the DVDs to the show (it was canceled after two seasons in the late ’90s). I have to say the show is pretty darn good. We just finished up the first two of six DVDs, and it just keeps getting better and better.

This Sorkin dude makes some pretty decent shows. My dad and I watched a few episodes of “The West Wing” when I was home a few weeks ago, of which I was also thoroughly impressed (and which Sorkin also created). Depending on how the rest of the “Sports Night” goes I may just have to pick up the set myself. One thing is for sure, it reminds me of how much I miss Sports Center on ESPN. MIT Cable why must you suck so much?! Give us our ESPN!

I spent about a couple of hours tonight with Gautham and Jim watching and learning from them about the perils of a Myth TV installation. For those of you who aren’t in the know, Myth TV is a linux-based personal video recorder (PVR for short, basically a TIVO). While they hacked on that, I managed to upgrade to the latest Debian testing release of Gnome 2.6.

Despite the fact that it’s late at night, and the things my friends do when seriously working on a project (often under Linux) are complicated, I have to say that I’m always filled with a sense of fascination and enthusiasm. There are no other times when I feel more excited about my major and all that I have yet to learn than when I see Mar, Jim, Riad, Gautham, or Hippo trying to do something new on their computers or with some new electronic component.

I hope I can always learn at least one new thing from them everyday. I figure, at that rate I could spend the rest of my life learning about computers and never even scratch the surface of all there is to know.

Oh yeah, it turns out that the ivtv driver wasn’t working properly because you had to load the tuner kernel module before loading the ivtv module. That seemed to fix the problem they were having really well. Apparently, kernel modules often have “hidden” dependencies with other modules that aren’t entirely documented everywhere. One new thing everyday…

I read this article over the weekend, and just saw it posted to Slashdot today. It’s kind of a follow up on the last article I mentioned about anime, but this time focusing on the explosion of manga in the US.

I just so happen to agree that for now manga is just riding on a bubble that will burst eventually. However, I think its an important influence to popular American culture, and will hopefully leave some lasting marks. Manga is a very important medium to the Japanese and, like anime, isn’t just stuff for kids. It’d be a shame to let some great stories/works of art as well as a vital source for dispersing information go unnoticed.

I just found this link to a feature article over at the University of Texas, where anime scholar Dr. Susan Napier works. This is a pretty good read for those naysayers who are always giving me crap about my interest and fascination with Japanese animation. Dr. Napier goes into a little about the origins of anime, why its so popular, why its worth watching, and how its helping to shape global culture.

Dr. Napier’s book was the principle textbook of the class on anime I took this past Spring term, SP.270. She has some interesting interpretations of “canonical” anime material, it’s a worthy read if you’re interested in studying anime as well as enjoying it.

In the few hours of spare time I have between work and sleep these days, I’ve managed to tackle 10 anime series simultaneously. I’ve never watched that many shows in parallel before, but I figured I should give it a try since I always feel like I missed out on some shows that end up being pretty popular.

Without further ado, here’s my list of summer anime series. I’ll probably add to it as time goes on too, but for now (in no particular order):

Some of these are long running (i.e. Naruto and FMA), while others are in genres I don’t particular frequent. We’ll see how they all end up, some of them are actually really close to being over already as they’re only 13 episodes long. My DVD backlog is also starting to pile up, Hana Yori Dango is screaming at me to finish what’s available in the US.

As I was leaving work to grab some lunch yesterday, I met one of my co-workers just outside the lab where we noticed something curious. A bird had managed to get inside the building (the basement really, where we work) and was trapped. It was furiously flying around pecking at the window in a futile attempt to get out. The bird was some sort of finch, not a pigeon or anything, although a pigeon on the outside was staring at it through the window.

This was a pretty weird situation, which both Chris (my co-worker) and myself found kind of funny. We tried to pry the old windows open that the bird was tapping on, but had no luck as they probably hadn’t been open in 60 years and were rusted shut. We came up with a plan to “cage” the bird with a garbage and piece of cardboard and then escort it outside to set it free. After grabbing the right materials, we managed to get our little winged buddy into our makeshift cage and lead him outside, to the cheers of some other lady from a lab.

A pretty trivial event overall, but you should have seen that totally hilarious scene with the pigeon just standing there staring at this bird. I guess its the little things that keep us going sometimes.

So I got the RA position I was gunning for before I went home for the Memorial Day weekend. We just finished up training which took up the better part of yesterday and today. It seems MIT is moving to a more traditional peer supervising scheme seen in many other colleges and universities.

I am now responsible for a lot of the stuff that’s going to be happening in the dorm over the summer. I’ve gotta hold activities weekly along with any counseling/mediation roles that may come up from time to time while I’m working. This is strictly a night job, so it won’t be interfering with my UROP schedule, but it will be a challenge to get everything organized, planned, and executed week after week.

Overall, I think this is just what I needed to keep me from boredom this summer (besides the copious amounts of anime I have in the queue). It won’t always be a blast, but it’ll sure keep me on my toes.

I just sat down in Miami International Airport to wait for my dad and discovered that there’s free wireless throughout the airport. As soon as I realized I could ssh, I just had to post about how utterly hot this is!

I’ve mentioned in other entries about the concept of respect and how I think the majority of people here at MIT simply don’t have it. Another example helping to prove my statement presented itself just yesterday. A friend of mine left for the weekend, while the rest of the people in the dorm were moving in and out of their rooms and preparing their kitchens for the clean-out crews that are expected to circulate soon. Upon his return, he found some of his food had been removed from the refrigerator and placed on a counter. Since he was gone for a while and nobody knew who’s food it was, it ended up rotting where it sat.

Now, he has every right to be upset about his food, however he has no right to show such an egregious lack of respect as he did in his subsequent actions. While checking my email at work yesterday, I notice a message in my inbox from him basically blaming a small group of us (his friends and nearby floor mates) for the loss of his food. After reading this, I felt most certainly insulted. Does it make sense to blame your friends for throwing out your food while you were away on vacation? What about the various other people who are constantly in that kitchen (which is a public kitchen used by all dorm residents by the way)? Personally, my friends would be the last people I’d blame for not respecting my property. In the end, it turned out two people he sent the message to did have something to do with his loss of food, however this “evidence” does not excuse the intention and spirit of the original email.

I’m still a little in shock about it, to be quite honest. Where I’m from there is a sense of camaraderie and family amongst friends, they are the people you’d least expect to do anything harmful to you. In Miami, your friends meet your parents right away and kiss your mom on the cheek when they come to visit you. Respect is something held very dear to everyone, and little emails like the one I received yesterday are enough to cause large-scale arguments. In fact, it is often seen as a very low-class thing to do. Most other people around here didn’t seem to mind such a trivial thing, but to me it meant a lot. Why can’t anyone understand that? Is respect and honor just lost to them or just held in a very loose fashion? I guess I’ll just keep observing, thinking, and interacting: hoping that someone out there will be able to understand how important these “little things” are to me.

Well, term has finally gone. Looking back I’d have to say that I learned a lot and probably worked harder this term than any previous one. Ten all-nighters later it’s finally done and I can get back to doing a few things I’ve been neglecting, like this blog, the rest of my web page, tons of anime, and the Random Hall weather station.

All in due time I guess, first I have to organize all of the stuff people gave me to take care of over the summer and get ready for my trip home on Thursday (I’ll be gone from the 27th to June 1st). Oh yeah, and golden oreos are awesome, much better than regular oreos. I never really liked the chocolate cookie outside of regular oreos.

This has to be like the ninth or tenth time I’ve pulled an all-nighter this term to get a critical assignment done. I’m really sick and tired of this, when will term end?!

I just found out that L’Arc En Ciel’s new album will be appearing in the US on June 29th. Looks like this may be a little bit of a breakthrough for the group. Although I seriously doubt anyone besides anime, manga, and J-pop/J-rock fans will pick it up.

Oh well, more on my utter lameness at updating this blog later. I have to get back to my final project.

I’ve been listening to L’Arc En Ciel’s new album “SMILE”, released this past Wednesday. I never was a really big fan of Japanese rock bands, they all seemed to ’80s for me, or just too gimmick-ridden. However, SMILE really surprised me. I had heard the second song of the album as the opening song to Full Metal Alchemist and was quite impressed.

The rest of the album is on par with the aforementioned song “READY STEADY GO”, good beats and guitar work with smooth vocals from the ever-popular Hyde. Give “SMILE” a listen if you’re a fan, or even if your curious about what a Japanese band sounds like.

You know you’ve been coding in assembly for too long when you wake up in the morning (in this case yesterday morning) at 7:55 and think to yourself, “Aw Man, it’s 0x7F already?”.

Whoa Day.

Well, spring break is pretty much over for all intents and purposes. I spent every day of the week working on my lab assignment, roughly 6 hours a day for 6 days. At least I can say I had some fun evenings watching movies with the spring break running crew: Jim, Riad, Mar, Hippo, and Sam. Thanks guys, spring break was bearable while in your company.

Sometimes it hits me pretty hard that the only thing I’ve been doing all spring break is working on a lab assignment. Its pretty frustrating to think that I could actually be enjoying my time off (despite not really going anywhere) instead of pulling my hair out over little bugs in my assembly code.

Sometimes it seems that the tiniest set backs in 6.115 can lead to huge amounts of time wasted in copious levels debugging only to find out that some of the debugging steps caused more bugs! Pardon my frustration, I just wish I had the stupid thing done already. Oh well, I guess I’ll just keep on trucking…

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this thing! Spring Break is officially underway, although I won’t be able to go back home this year. Instead I get to snuggle up to my lab kit and finally start my next lab for 6.115. Not exactly what I expected out of my break. These past few weeks haven’t been much fun: lots of work, and not a lot of sleep. A pretty depressing time overall, here’s hoping I can recoup and finish strong this term.

Look for a new story about the Admiral’s visit in the next week or so.

My computer having died over the weekend, I endeavored to slowly work on fixing it while I did homework earlier this week (the repairman faithfully replaced my motherboard and HD on Tuesday). However, the hoseage just kept on hitting me. A test tomorrow along with my hardest problem set in 6.012 yet this term also due tomorrow. Not to mention a 6.115 lab I’ve barely started due to my computer problems and general focus towards completing the 6.012 due on Tuesday and then a 6.012 exam on Wednesday.

The pressure to get it all done is driving me batty. Despite that, I’m gonna give it my best shot and hopefully deal with things one at a time.

I really wish ACPI would work on my laptop…

Went to see “Tokyo Godfathers” with the anime class tonight. Kon’s work really impressed me, it was touching, serious, heartfelt and yet whimsical at the same time. It reminded me of an urban Garcia-Marquez story come to life. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had a really great time and now know my way around enough to find the Kendall Square movie theaters the next time there’s more anime in town on the big screen.

If you haven’t seen it, check it out, “Tokyo Godfathers” directed by Satoshi Kon. Quite the brilliant work, I really should check out both “Millennium Actress” and “Perfect Blue” I hear they’re really great too.

When I woke up this past Saturday to check my email, I had no idea I was going to be in utter worry about my data and my computer for most of that day. Still groggy from waking up, I had opened up a web browser and went over to new egg to check out a drive enclosure that I wanted to order to replace my busted external HD. As soon as the page loads, my hard drive starts to click, and my computer basically fails to page from disk resulting in a crash.

Attempts to restart the computer and even boot into Knoppix and mount my drive through Linux failed. Then the last bomb came in the form of my motherboard going down and me not being able to even turn on my laptop.

Now, I wasn’t so worried about my computer per se (I do have this server after all), but I was terribly worried about my data (which I hadn’t backed up since December). In utter depression, I sent out a call to the fort to get a laptop HD adapter that I could use to at least try and salvage what was on my drive.

The drive ended up being totally borked. Essentially, the read head could not seek properly to its start position on boot, leading it to just fail. After running around campus trying to come up with a solution to get my data, I had all but given up and was watching Spawn (the HBO cartoon, awesome!) when an idea hit me. “What if I shake it? My data is screwed up enough as it is, shaking the drive lightly shouldn’t hurt my chances anymore,” I thought to myself.

It worked.

I got my data off thanks to my good buddy Gautham who lent me his computer resources and CD burner for the evening. Now my data is safe, and all I have left to do is wait for Dell to call me back with an appointment time to replace my motherboard and HD (all for free of course with my service and support plan). I think I’m finally going to make the jump to full blown Linux usage on all computers and just use Windows as a “game partition”. All in all, my depression turned into excitement.

Coming out of class today I heard one of those abominable Nextel phones being used. You know the sound, (beep beep) “Hello?” (beep beep) “Yo Bob!” (beep beep) <garbled voice>, etc. Quite frankly I can’t stand it anymore, that annoying beep has got to be one of the worst engineering decisions ever. Sure, it’s great marketing, everyone knows you’re using a Nextel phone when you press that button and the beep goes off. However, you can hear it everywhere, it’s always the same and has to happen every time someone uses the walkie-talkie feature which is quite a bothersome element. What’s up with that? It must bother other people as well (unless they’ve learned to filter it out). I’ve decided to not be complacent about it, I refuse to accept the Nextel beep as part of the daily background noise of my life! Nextel, make your employees (particularly your engineers and phone designers) take a human factors engineering class, and get rid of that pernicious beep. For crying out loud!

Here’s a little taste of this 21st century plague: (Beep)

I woke up pretty late this morning, my first class being at 1pm I decided to sleep in a little as I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep this weekend. I expected things to go smoothly, but my day got really long after classes. I just spent the last 4 hours at work getting ready for soldering clinics, an operation which I thought would only take me an hour and a half at most. Anime viewing and discussion for SP.270 starts at 7:30pm and doesn’t end until 10:00pm so the rest of my night will be spent doing that, plus laundry and (hopefully) dinner when I get home along with some tooling if nothing else gets thrown in my way. Boy am I tired.

Last night I decided to watch Blade with a couple of folks in the kitchen and ended up staying up too late for my own good. As a result, waking up this morning for church didn’t feel too great. As I was waking up, I tried to do one of those things where you wake up to your alarm then set it for 15 minutes later and try to sneak in a little more sleep. However, for some reason I didn’t set the time right the first time, noticed it, and tried to set it again. Basically, through my frustration in setting my alarm, I ended up waking myself up on time. I guess the alarm did its job in the end…

Can you tell that term is wailing on me yet? The gap between entries should be enough of a clue that I’m already swamped with classwork despite only two weeks of the new term having elapsed. Anyways, now that it’s Friday again, I figured I’d give more of a lowdown on how classes are going.

6.012: I thought this class was going to get hard core a lot quicker than it has so far. Gautham and I were talking the other day about how the class seems unorganized sometimes. The material feels a lot like 3.091 (ah, those early freshman days…), yet it’s leaving my unsatisfied as yet.

6.115: This class just gets cooler and cooler. I have fun every lecture, and learn a bunch too. No wonder everyone rates Prof. Leeb so highly, I pretty much look forward to every class meeting. I had my first checkoff today, and felt pretty good coming out of it. I think 6.115 will open up a lot of opportunities for my own side projects in the future (maybe I’ll finally make those modems blink Jim’s been telling me to do for months now).

6.033: I’d say this class is a mixed bag thus far. Tutorial today was pretty cool, we learned a good deal about the fundamentals of networking (TCP, UDP, HTTP, and Sockets). Networking is cool, tutorial was pretty cool, but I’m still unsure about the class as a whole. Prof. Kaashoek is awesome though.

SP.270: “MIT’s Class in Anime” couldn’t be any more awesome. Everything I wanted out of it and more!

So far this term I’ve been the busiest I’ve probably ever been at MIT. It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to do the work given to me and right now I feel pretty good about not having that much spare time. I haven’t felt this way since high school.

The first day of the Spring term has now come and gone. I have hopes for this one, the classes so far look interesting in subject matter, and teaching style. We’ll see how day two treats me although it promises to be fun I think. Here’s the breakdown so far:

6.012 “Microelectronic Devices and Circuits”: Looks to be pretty hard core on the physics side. I think this class will definitely be a big challenge, but I have the feeling that I will have learned more than I ever wanted to know about the transistor. That’s a good thing.

6.115 “Microcomputer Project Laboratory”: Come on, it’s Prof. Leeb’s class! First lecture was fun, just like it was last year when I thought about taking it. It won’t be easy, but I think I’m in for one hell of a ride.

6.033 “Computer System Engineering”: I had my first recitation today, I like my (hopefully permanent, I’ll know later this week) recitation instructor I think he’ll make discussing assignments in class pretty easy. Everyone who’s taken the class in the past has lauded him, and he seems like he lives up to his rep. We’ll see how lecture goes tomorrow.

SP.270 “Japanese Animation: Still Pictures, Moving Minds”: It’ll probably be a blast, but who knows. First class meeting is tomorrow.

That’s the breakdown thus far. Stay tuned, more opinions as term roles on…

I decided to go shopping for books today, figuring I’d beat the crowd that will inevitably show up at The Coop and Quantum Books in the days to come. There’s something about buying textbooks that makes me feel hopeful for the term to come. After purchasing a book, I pear inside, almost like looking into the months ahead and seeing what lies in store.

Here’s hoping this upcoming term (starting Tuesday by the way) treats me better than last term.

I added a comments link to the bottom of posts about a week ago. Just making an official update entry to make it known to all the folks who kind of read entries and skip over the links under them.

Today was the last day of “The Art of Hitting” a physical education class here at MIT. The premise of the class is essentially “learn how to hit a baseball: correctly.” After almost four weeks of daily sessions Monday through Thursday, a group of about thirty people managed to get their swings good enough and get themselves comfortable enough to hit some pretty easy pitches into the back of the batting cages pretty regularly.

This class was definitely my escape from everything for the past month. When things got frustrating at work, or I was feeling particularly bummed, hitting class made my day. The funny thing is, it didn’t alleviate stress through any sort of violent contact with baseballs. What has always made sports a stress reliever for me is the “art” of the sport. Honing my skills through studying books and formulas is something I have done my entire life, but there’s something special about getting myself physically able to do something well. The sort of inner peace it stirs is something I miss very much from my martial arts days. I guess Coach Barlow’s class brought some of that back…

It’s been a while since I first watched a few episodes of an anime series called Prince of Tennis. Since then, in dealing with folks outside of the MIT Anime Club who watch anime, not too many folks have heard of it.

However, recently I’ve noticed Prince of Tennis is gaining some sort of fad status amongst a large group of people here at MIT. Not just anime fans, but a number of other people who don’t typically like anime as well. Not to say that I think anime should maintain some sort of cult status, but Prince of Tennis just seems like a really odd series to fixate on considering it’s really not a series that would be particularly good at getting people interested in the medium. These so-called fans post the results from the “Which Seigaku regular member are you?” quiz (which is two links above the official site when doing a Google search by the way) from Quizilla on their blogs and talk about how the show is “so cool”. It just seems so fake to me sometimes, I wonder if they really do like what the show is about, or if they are trying to elevate it to cult status or are making some vein attempt at forming an inside joke including some of the characters or concepts of the show.

I actually like Prince of Tennis a lot. It’s a typical sports anime in some sense, but many of the characters have unique backgrounds and interactions with each other. Not to mention that I have a soft spot for sports anime in general. Following Ryoma through his and the Seigaku guys trials and tribulations in the grand world of Japanese High School tennis is pretty fun. Part of the appeal of sports anime shows is that you watch the characters grow throughout the series, it’s not just about advancing the plot, but also about seeing the characters learn from their mistakes and grow up. I’m looking forward to marathoning some episodes before term starts (I have all 100 currently available episodes), I have a long way to go!

January is really starting to pick up for me in these last few weeks. Work in particular is starting to heat up. Now that I’ve finished up a few urgent things, I’ve got a couple of projects to work on in addition to prepping for 6.115 which all has to get done before the month is out. I would have thought that preparing the lab for class in the Spring was going to happen faster, but it seems we’ve taken our time this year (as opposed to our immediate setup as soon as I got back into Cambridge last IAP). That leaves me with a bunch of stuff to do this and next week. I was hoping to get a lot of stuff done this IAP and it seems that I’m right on track to do so. However, I’ve only been able to accomplish a lot in lab despite my hopes that I could get some personal projects done.

Oh well, maybe I’ll be able to sneak in a little time to work on those as well before the last bits of vacation are up before term starts. I am watching some more anime in the evenings though. More on “Tennis no Oujisama” in my next post…

So Jim was using one of the latest Knoppix distributions to setup a NILM machine at work and I was just blown away by how cool it looked. So, I took a Knoppix disk home and got a whole Linux distro running on my laptop (which I’m running right now, ssh’ing into wildfire to write this) in literally 30 seconds.

This thing is just too cool, it’s got a complete set of games, all of open office, and even alpha blending on the menus. Gautham was telling me people use this thing to test out new PCs before they buy them to make sure they’re Linux compatible. All I know is that I really really want to run Linux (not just a CD ROM distro) on my laptop now.

As I was washing my dishes today after a round of Mario Kart (which is highly addictive by the way), an individual who will remain nameless asked me if I was doing a “load” today. Essentially he was asking me if I was going to wash everyones dishes tonight or not. Quite honestly I wasn’t all that taken aback by his question, but it did put a pretty bitter taste in my mouth.

I guess I should preface this little tale of one person’s outright abuse of someone’s good will with the fact that I had been washing pretty much all of the dirty dishes (using the dishwasher of course) in the kitchen for about a year now. It was essentially something I felt like I wanted to contribute to the floor and at the same time make the process of cleaning my dishes that much easier by having a machine do it for me.

However, after arriving home from my Orlando Adventure I was greeted at first not by “Welcome back Ariel”, or “How was vacation Ariel?” Those came later, what I was told right off the bat by more than one person was “Hey Ariel, I’m glad you’re back! The dishes have been waiting for you” or “Yay, our sink will be clean again!” If that is not the absolute worst insult ever given to me, it must definitely be in the top two or three. Since then, I’ve decided not to do anymore dishes for anyone other than myself. Taking the necessary time to wash my dishes by hand is preferable to having such insulting comments being made to me just so I can make washing a little easier.

Weeks after I’ve come back, people are still taking me for granted and asking me such insulting questions. It degrades my honor, but what does anyone here really know of honor? Like I’ve told my parents back home, respect is not something all that common here in college. It really is amazing living here sometimes, and for reasons I didn’t quite expect when I showed up as a bright eyed freshman just a little less than three years ago.

So I finally finished watching “Enishi” yesterday and I have to say I wasn’t too impressed with the way things ended. The plot from the first season of Ai Yori Aoshi didn’t continue almost at all, and nothing else of much merit happened throughout all 12 episodes. The strength of the first season, the relationship between Kaoru and Aoi, took a back seat to fanservice and the usual antics of the minor characters that apparently decided to be more prominent this time around.

Man, I was hoping everyone would find out about Kaoru and Aoi’s relationship and things would get more interesting. It was fun to visit the world of the characters again and just enjoy the usual adventures, but I’m sure “Enishi” would have been a lot longer than 12 episodes if the creators decided to go somewhere with the plot. Oh well, maybe it was popular enough to merit yet another season sometime soon.

Next anime prospect: Chrno Crusade, Gonzo is doing lots of period pieces lately. This one is set in 1928 New York City, we’ll see how it goes…

Going to work and the nice bug I caught on my way back to Cambridge have left me less than willing to blog the last couple of days, but I’m feeling better and it’s Saturday so hopefully this is a positive sign for things to come this month as I have big plans for IAP. Right now, it’s probably the coldest I’ve seen it since I started going to MIT, the weather channel says it feels like -4°F right now.

After waking up this morning and catching up on some anime, I came to the conclusion that I had to make a decision about this cold weather. I could either cower from it by trying to stay inside all the time or simply come to accept it and continue to do the things I normally do. Quite honestly, I’d never really thought about the cold weather being anything more than a nuisance since I started living here. My freshman year was relatively warm compared to normal Cambridge/Boston standards so it didn’t really affect me much (besides the occasional piles of snow). Last year, I was so caught up with my first time working for Prof. Leeb that I didn’t focus on it too much. This year, I have no distractions, nothing really new to phase me. This along with the unusually bitter cold and my feeling sick has made me less than enthusiastic about getting up in the morning. However, I guess it’s time to come to terms with the way the rest of the country lives during the winter and get moving. I wish other people could have experienced what a Miami winter is like, temperatures only drop to 40°F briefly in the mornings and the rest of the days have a high of something between 65° and 70°F.

Oh well, I’ve gotta get myself some chap stick. More on anime later…

So all these other jokers convinced me to run this “awesome” game called Progress Quest. After listening to all of the hype, I endeavoured to find out exactly what this “sensation” actually is.

Turns out, it’s a “fire and forget RPG”, where you simply create a character and the rest happens on its own without any control. The entire point of the game is to see how many levels your character can gain, the point of the “game” is simply to watch your character progress much in the same way you watch your package progress while running SETI at Home.

Here comes the worst part. I decided to try it out. However, there is a positive light to this tragic story my friends, I wanted to run it under Linux. Yes that’s right, it’s time for Ariel to learn yet something else over IAP: using Wine.

So far so good, it even runs FASTER under Wine than in Windows XP! I expected (and experienced) an easy time setting up Wine and running the simple 6 megabyte file. I learned about yet another cool Linux tool and can now join the Fort-Awesome guild and run the program from wildfire while safely bringing my laptop to work without having to restart “PQ” every time I settle down somewhere.

Well, after reading all five volumes, I have to say that “Bleach” is simply awesome. It’s pretty much like “Yu Yu Hakusho” plot wise (well, at least to start) but it has an edge Yu Yu simply doesn’t have. Also, a lot of the plot points and details to the story are way more steeped in Japanese cultural concepts than that of “Yu Yu Hakusho”. The more I read, the more I loved all of the characters. Many of the seemingly unimportant ones end up being übercool and important people later on along the same vein that the “Naruto” manga is currently developing.

The author is a pretty cool guy himself. The little notes he leaves at the end of a few of the chapters are pretty interesting. He even has a background song for each character that he uses to visualize each of their moods. What made that really cool, was that he chose popular American songs for many of the characters, including songs from even Radiohead.

Viz LLC has apparently licensed “Bleach” for US distribution. I hope they release it soon, I can see it becoming pretty popular.

On my way back to Cambridge yesterday, my trip took an interesting turn when I landed in Orlando for my two hour layover before connecting to Boston. Previously, in Miami, when I got my boarding passes I noticed that I didn’t have a seating assignment for my Orlando flight. Adopting a healthy level of wishful thinking, I figured the lack of seating assignment was a result of possibly staying on the same plane and simply waiting a few hours to get it cleaned up before going on to Boston.

Boy was I wrong.

Instead, the flight was overbooked, and I was one of three that didn’t get a seating assignment. However, they asked for volunteers to give up their seats in exchange for vouchers, which two people did. However, that wasn’t enough volunteers to land me a seat. In the end, I was stranded in Orlando until the next available flight which was at 7:25pm (mind you all of this hullabaloo was happening at 10am!). Considering I had arrived in Orlando at 8am, I would end up spending 11 hours in the airport; with too many bags and not enough money to take a short trip to Disney World or Universal Studios.

Thank God I had my laptop with some anime left on the hard drive to tide me over for a few hours, not to mention a good book and some manga as well. That kept me going for about 4 or 5 hours. The rest I spent splayed out on the floor listening to music and watching people walk past me. It was kind of cool to just be an airport bum for a day, not really caring how people looked at you as they walk past you for like the fourth time.

By the time I had to board the next plane at 7pm, I was quite honestly almost crazy, not to mention I had caught a cold throughout the day and had only slept for 4 hours the night before in an effort to wake up for my earlier 7am flight. Overall, it was an interesting journey, and I learned a few things:

1. If you have to buy a ticket a few weeks before a flight (and you’re connecting), instead of paying extra to get back on the day you want, pay extra in time by flying a few days later. This way, you’re more likely to have a seat as opposed to some bogus “promise of a seat”. It may not be convenient in time, but you probably wouldn’t make it to your destination in time due to delays and over bookings anyway.
2. When you’ve been given the shaft by an airline, you get vouchers. One of them is for food, which you should use to its maximum potential. Therefore, always make some space in one of your bags and scope out all of the available food. Figure out how much food you can get with the voucher and then get it all at once (the voucher can only be used once at the food court, and you don’t get change back) and store as much as possible for later in your bags.
3. People get really scared of you when you’re watching them like a hawk. This kid asked to borrow my cell phone, I graciously let him use my phone but I kept my eye on him the whole time. He was so scared he almost dropped the phone when he gave it back to me (he didn’t even say thank you, that bastard!).

Oh well, I’m back now. On with IAP!

I was talking to my dad last night about how my web site doesn’t look all that good on his computer because Microsoft’s Internet Explorer doesn’t know how to properly handle the Cascading Style Sheets standard. It brought up an interesting argument: despite the fact that the majority of users use Internet Explorer, I don’t think it gives Microsoft the right to make and distribute a product that is not compliant with the standards prescribed by the W3C.

This Christmas break I’ve been learning a lot about many different internet standards, (CSS, and DNS in particular) and it’s help to firmly establish the rumination that had already been in my head about making things compliant with these standards. If companies don’t start adhering to the prescribed way of doing things, there will be much chaos and the pains will mostly be felt by the developers that will have to make a web page for every single type of browser out there that decides to do things its own way.

That’s why on my webpage, I’ve put a special message only visible to Internet Explorer users urging them to use a standards-compliant browser like Mozilla Firebird. Like I told my dad: “As a geek, I want people to learn about the internet and appreciate what standards-compliance means, that’s why I put the message up there.” Despite the fact that from usage and business perspectives Internet Explorer probably seems like the only browser that matters, I’m hoping that the increasing popularity of browsers like Firebird, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera will hopefully show people that a wide variety of pages will be seen as they were intended if they use browsers that follow, quite frankly, the rules.

I woke up this morning and proceeded to turn on the TV to be graced by an all day Mythbusters maraton. Man this show is so cool.

Basically, these two special effects guys get together and try to recreate urban legends in an effort to prove or disprove them. However, they not only recreate the exact conditions of the myth, after proving or disproving it they go ahead and try to reproduce the outcome of the myth. When they launched a crash test dummy out of a 3 foot diameter sewer drain like a bullet, I could not stop laughing. I wish I could apply everything I’ve learned in school to do the things these guys do. This show definitely has the same spirit to it that our own fire pipe and bathroom bombs (see the last two movies at the last link for what I’m talking about) have. I hope we can continue our own tradition of “explosive” antics this IAP. What do you guys think?