spring crew started today, so tom got up at 5:30 to go. being the light sleeper that i am, i woke up to... and never went back to sleep. i gave up on trying to snooze and got out of bet at 6:30am. after breakfast and a shower and some email and some procrastinating, it was still not quite 9:00am.

being used to waking up at 11 or noon, i didn't quite know what to do with myself. the weather was great, so i went for a little walk. actually, it turned into a huge walk. i walked from MIT to paul revere's grave (downtown). i don't know how far that is, but it's way out there.

70 degrees today. sitting for 2 hours of hot dosimetrey action was not fun.

i emailed provizer back and forth throughout the day. i'm going to volunteer some time (what??) to his website, and in return he's going to lend/give me some of his leftover gear from free radio allston. his belden antenna line and a frequency counter. probably $150-$200 worth of stuff. so that's pretty cool.

plus, he wants to meet and talk about broadcasting strategies. that's really cool.

i watched a talk today given by steve provizer, founder of free radio allston. of course, this got my pirate radio interests raging again. fickle fickle fickle.

he talked about community voice and the FCC and how low power broadcasting needs to happen. so like that, i'm on the FRB and brewer's websites pricing gear. i sent steve an email asking him some questions i could never get dunifer to answer.

free radio allston was the big micropower station on the east coast for about a year until it got raided by the FCC. afterwards provizer founded for an organization called citezen's media, dedicated to getting minority and controversial subjects on the publically accessible media.

for the first time in over a month, i went to bed before 1:30am.

jen dumped me.

for some reason i slept forever, waking up at 1:00pm i was late for the thing at the museum so i wolfed a bowl of ceral and i ran over.

advertising an event for kids in the boston globe means a big turn out.

mike did a demonstration called 'what is a robot' while i MCed the mock contest. there were only six robots there, so the kids kept seeing the same matches, but they loved it. we shuffled about 500 people through that room in two hours. it was fun being on the mic and announcing. i got to use my dumb voices and incite the kids into cheering like idiots. it was fun.

it got hot though. the ventillation in that room was not adequate for wall to wall packed people.

i enjoyed working with the kids. robotics is something that is ridiculously easy to make a big hit with kids. even the robots that didn't do anything but drive across the table were a huge success. the robot mike and i put together on friday broke and kids still wanted to see it. i had a lot of fun. the museum people loved it, and are already trying to get me down in writing to be the MC next year.

i sent a big long email to dave, the guy who tried to convert me to christianity last night, with my analysis of the newsweek article he posted to me and a link to an atheism website that i think illustrates some of why i believe what i believe.

i studied a lot today during the day, so i gave myself the evening off. guy drove in and we went to the pour house for half price burger night. full meal for two people, nine bucks. (and that includes a $4.50 mudslide)

we got ice cream and came back here, but there really wasn't anything to do so we nerded out. i started playing net quake 2 and he watched.

yesterday i only played for a little bit and i was really bad. today for some reason i was actually doing really well. guy eventually left and i sat there playing quake for another hour.

so there went my evening... it was fun, though. i haven't played net games since coe, so it was a nice realease. it was also a monumental time sink. so i shouldn't do it again for awhile if possible.

after midnight, i got an message from some guy that said "do you know jesus?" i knew immediately where this was going, but i played along anyway. "jesus who," i said.

it turns out it was this 18 year old kid trying to convert me to christianity. i told him that i was up for a rational discussion if he was, but if he was just going to preach i'd block him. so he agreed and we had a peaceful discussion that lasted until 3:45am.

he seemed like a nice enough guy except that he was mildly homophobic. the entire discussion broke down on the issue that supposedly god had come to him and told him that the bible was correct. i don't know what to say to an argument like that. it's certainly anecdotal evidence and won't serve to convince anyone, but my influence on his ability to reason is stopped there.

we agreed, after his father made him get off the computer and go to bed, that we would email some reading material to each other and comment. we'll see what happens. he sent me something tonight from newsweek which supposedly is a scientist proving that science shows that christianity is correct.

well, i didn't say he was the smartest guy on the block...

dave and his girlfriend drove over today and we decided to go eat at the other side. this sounds familiar... i just love that fruit plate.

anyway, it took us about 20 minutes to find a parking spot on this side of the river. they enjoyed the food, and we talked about atheism, physics, noam chomsky, and a variety of other stuff. dave's an easy guy to talk with because he's very agreeable and kind.

we walked back to MIT and i gave them a tour of the campus. the jello imac contest was today. entries ranged from full-sized mildly resemblant (is that a word?) to small things that were difficult to distinguish from regular jello shapes you would eat.

it was cool that the contest was today and that we happened to walk by it, because dave and his girlfriend were very impressed by it and i think it gave them a good impression of MIT.

also, it says something about MIT that there was a well-attended student contest held during spring break.

we also went to the MIT museum. i had to leave them in the gallery of hacks so i could get to my research meeting. the meeting was a flop. guy had worked on his coding demo all night (literally) but choose to put it on a corrupt floppy disk rather than FTP it to molvig, so when he demoed it to us today, it didn't work at all.

also, i still haven't done that homework he gave me last month... so we're supposed to bring good stuff for monday's meeting.

i fell asleep after i got home because i had to wake up early to meet dave. promptly after falling to sleep and having a bizzare dream, mike allen called and woke me up. i forgot that we were making robots tonight for the demo at the museum.

i ran over there and we worked from 5:30 until midnight. mike already had a chassis built so he just programmed it and put some sensors on it and it was done. i tried to build a cool chassis but gave up at midnight with one about 90% done. it needed rubberbands which we couldn't find, and we were both tired. so i gave up.

that's ok, though, because there'll still be 6 robots at the demo. i got a free black t-shirt (for organizers only nyuk nyuk) and on sunday we demo the competition to 300 screaming kids for two hours. ouch.

rolf and i decided that this is something you never hear anyone say. ever:

"man o man, am i limp."

i actually got some studying done today, and that felt good. i've been slacking too long. i read a bunch of the chapman and cowling kinetic theory book. i think i'm reading the wrong thing though, it doesn't seem to be topical to what we're doing.

i managed to convince rolf to leave arsdigita for an evening and we went to the other side for dinner. mmmm... fruit plate...

other than that, nothing happened today. boring day.

NASA had some conference at american university in DC today, and it was all televised. most of it was slow and boring, and i didn't watch it. but listening to buzz aldrin was cool, and bill nye was on and he is one hillarious mo fro.

i went downtown to the coinshop to get some folders for the coins i had bought last time. i actually found a much better shop; one that sells only coins. it was very much more clean and professional than the shop i went to last week.

my intention was to buy four coin folders and maybe a pricing book. i left with about $100 worth of coins, including one of the three remaining lincoln cents i didn't have.

i now have some great indian head cents, but it's not really what i should be spending my money on, especially considering that i haven't been paid yet for my research. those $4 and $5 pennies add up quicker than i thought.

had dinner with guy and went to check out his apartment up in malden. it is huge. guy is loaded. much more than i thought. the fancy car didn't convince me; the apartment did.

*

guy has a really cute cat, that enjoys being inside a small cardboard box. i tipped the box over on him, and then let him out and turned the box back over, and the cat jumped right back in. the cat, tony, still likes to play. young cats are fun that way.

guy and i came back to MIT to go tunnel hacking. we had found 3 computers sitting in the hall as trash on the way out, and we were going to grab them and bring them to our office. but as we approached them, some other guy came and picked up all three and put them in the trunk of his car. !@*&(

we wandered around in the subbasement of building 9 where the hacker murals helen and i found yesterday are. we found our way up on top of the ventilation equipment where the grafitti is and i got mechanical grease all over my favorite jeans.

came back and recorded the bill nye portion of the nasa reruns from today's conference.

"the world is half women. my mother, for example, is a woman. just off the top of my head."

i slept like a rock. i didn't wake up until 1:00pm and that felt great. i woke up feeling refreshed for the first time in ages. tom came home from philly shortly after.

i pretty much pissed off all of today, i didn't work on my research at all. helen called in the evening and we went out for ice cream. she was on the way home from chicago (where abie is from) to jersey, where her parents live.

after ice cream, we went roof and tunnel hacking. we wandered all over campus and found lots of new spaces, and she showed me "lobby 3" hidden in the top of main campus. we found a door to the roof of 26 that was not only unlocked, but wedged open with a cinder block. 26 is the 6 story building with the radio telescopes on it. for some reason i was having a real problem with vertigo, though i've never had that problem before.

we went to the subbasement of 9, which i had only peered into once before. apparently, this is sort of a special location for the MIT tunnel hackers, there are a number of fancy murals painted on the wall in one corner glorifying the art of tunnel hacking.

one is a parody of a jack daniels ad featuring "jack florey," a non-existant MIT personality famous for his hacks.

when we got up today, we drove to the movie store to return 'the big lebowski' and we rented 2001. jen had never seen it before, but she likes stanley kubrick. she didn't pick up on the monolith symbolism, and as a result was visably annoyed with the ending. i tried to explain it to her, but i didn't do it very well. anyway, she ended up saying she liked it a lot. so that makes me happy.

first, i've got her reading sci-fi books, then watching sci-fi movies.... maybe she'll start coding HTML next. but i doubt that.

i said my goodbys to patty and we drove off the the airport at 4:30. of course, arriving at the gate we found the plane to be delayed until 7:45. this sounds very familiar...

the pittsburg airport is remarkably like a mall. so we went to the food court and ate dinner at TGI friday's. the greeters groked my hair, it was funny.

i didn't get into the plane until 8:20. my flight was scheduled for 6:15. eastwind sucks. of course, jen had no problems with eastwind when she took it... in fact, she got here early. weird.

they're unreliable at best, anyway.

i got home just in time to rush off to radio show. i played slow, ambo music for the first hour in honor of eastwind's slow service. it actually ended up being the best show i've done yet. maybe it had to do with the 'alice in wonderland' excerpts i played over the music, or maybe it was because i didn't talk much.

i got some of the coins i won on ebay.com today. fun!

the plan today was to see two nearby frank lloyd wright homes, fallingwater and kentuck knob. fallingwater was an hour and 45 minutes away, so we got up early and immediately got in the car.

the weather was somewhat dissapointing. it was raining lightly and foggy in places. i slept for most of the ride; jen and i had stayed up late last night.

i'm not sure how to describe fallingwater to do it justice. it was so good, that i didn't even think to take pictures. i was in awe the whole time. i had my camera in my pocket and i never even thought about it. everything about that house is magnificent. looking down from the south terrace over the waterfall is great. the interior and furnishings are beautiful. it's just like i remember it from reading about it, only 100 times better.

i picked up a lot of ideas to incorporate into the house i've been drawing plans of in various notebooks for the last two years.

even though there aren't that many rooms at fallingwater, it's huge and that is immediately recognizable. it spreads way up the hill in five stories of varying size. every living and bed room has a terrace, and the bottom floor is the water. stairs lead town to it in two places.

even though we were there on a gloomy, rainy winter day (well, technically it's the first day of spring, but it felt like winter...), fallingwater was astoundingly beautiful. i can only imagine how amazing it would be during fall or summer, when the surrounding forrest had color.

the tour of fallingwater is surprisingly complete. they take you to almost every room. after the tour, we were free to wander about the grounds but unfortunately we had scheduled our tour of kentuck knob too early and we had to leave immediately.

*

kentuck knob is perhaps a more realistic house. you could see someone actually living there. it's on a more modest scale. i found the name to be a bit weird and a bit obnoxious. the area it is found in used to be called 'little kentuck' back when kentuckey was spelled without the 'ey.' the 'knob' referrs to a hill with no trees on top. kentuck knob's first owners planted 10,000 trees in the vacinity, however, so it really isn't a knob anymore and it's certainly not in kentucky.

the owner (a lord in the british parliment, actually) is a collector of fancy furniture, and thus has a lot of wright's work in the house that wasn't originally designed for the house as well as some great sculptures and artworks by other artists. kentuck knob has only been open to the public for about five years.

of course, the building was as beautiful as any of wright's creations, but it was no fallingwater. in retrospect, we should have seen it first to avoid anticlimax.

*

since we hadn't eaten anything since the pancakes at breakfast, we were starving after we left. we stopped at a cozy resteraunt called 'the stone house' near kentuck knob. it was good food and a nice fancy sunday church atmostphere, but our waitress had this weird deformed thumb with a claw-like nail on it. yucko.

we made it home after dark, and went out for ice cream and a movie. the big lebowski. despite all my attempts to give nichol a hard time and make her think i didn't like that movie, it's pretty frip frappin funny.

"what the fuck is this?"
"obviously you're not a golfer."

patty made fun of me for sleeping in until 11:00, when in fact i was thinking about how early i was having to wake up. she made us fancy french toast which was really good.

jen and i took off for the 'home and garden show' in downtown pittsburg, which is where giffin interiors had built the frank lloyd apartment. i took some pictures on the road.

we parked downtown and decided we wanted to eat some more before we went to the show, so went to a great italian place in the strip. it was a cool family place (our waitress addressed the cook, "hey dad"). very tasty, and cheap.

the homeshow was a short walk away. it was full of everything you'd expect to see in a home show. i was looking to see if anchorwall had a booth. every other retaining wall place in the world did, but not anchorwall. i was hoping my "i made your website" status would get me an extra free pen or something. oh well.

we really walked straight through the whole deal to get to the frank lloyd wright exhibit and then left immediately; we didn't have much interest in the rest of the show.

wright designed an apartment complex for pittsburg called 'pointview' which was to look out over the point at which the three rivers join (now occupied by three rivers stadium). for whatever reason, the building was never built. however, the blueprints have been around in books for years.

giffin interiors, the company created by jen's uncle gordon, actually built one of the suites for the home show. the line to walk through it was 20 minutes long, and it wasn't very big. i think we were only inside for about two minutes. all the same, it was great. it was so much better and different from any other apartment sized living space i've ever seen.

it's a shame the place was never built; it was swank.

after leaving, we had some time to kill, so we drove around pittsburg and the surrounding area for awhile. it really is a pretty town. jen says it was unusually clear today, however. because of the ever present steel industry, there is a lot more steel in the infrastructure than in any other town. lots of brightly painted old steel bridges. it has a unique feel to it. old, rustic - literally.

on the south side, we found a store that was apparently selling pimp outfits. the guy in yellow has a shiney 9-milli.

we went home for a bit but left quickly to go have dinner with jen's aunt and uncle, deb and gordon. gordon's the one who owns the company jen and her dad work for.

and he's loaded.

his house, while perhaps not decorated in my favorite decor, was full of cool gear. one of his sons, andrew, has a nice music studio in his room including a 12 channel fostex. *drool* 56 inch TV, hot tub, computers for every family member. it would be nice to be that wealthy.

some day, perhaps.

we had a great dinner with tuna steaks, reagular steaks, salmon, chicken, yum. they're great people. the conversation seemed to concern me and my life a little more than i care for, but then again i guess i was the guest (of honor?) so that's ok.

his other son, drew (?), was very interested in 6.270 and i showed him the website.

i noticed after i got home that i hadn't shaved in forever, so i had this big ugly beard thing growing. embarrassing for a first impression, but oh well.

i didn't have much of anything to do today except pack and leave, so i slept in. there's something new...

i packed slowly throughout the day and watched a lot of nasa TV. the tape of friendship seven's launch was playing as i was supposed to be leaving, but i stayed to watch it at the risk of perhaps missing my plane. watching nasa TV has taken on a new enjoyment since i decided that i'm serious about trying to become an astronaut.

i did finally rush off to the airport only to discover that my plane had been delayed from 6:00pm to 7:45pm. i had a caucasion at the bar and some pizza.

there were firetrucks on the runway, and a couple of fireman wandering about the place with axes. it was unsettling, but i never did see a problem.

there were apparently mechanical difficulties with my plane, which was the cause of the delay.

i ended up getting on the plane at 8:15pm. eastwind has no seating order. that was odd. it was also a very un-full plane. i got a row to myself and the desired forward window seat. 737s blow.

i guess someone got on the plane that wasn't supposed to, or so they thought, because they came through and made three manual counts of the people on the plane and then asked to see everyone's boarding pass. they didn't end up taking anyone off the plane, so i don't know what the deal was. i was on the ground, in the plane, for an hour.

i read my new kinetic theory book that arrived today during the flight, and arrived at 10:15pm. jen was there to greet me and off we went. we had planned to go to the home show tonight, but i was so damn late getting in that we couldn't. so we just went to her parent's apartment and chilled out.

her apartment is a lot nicer than i imagined. nice location, good view, and not that small. it was nice to be away from MIT for awhile, and good to see jen.

so what does a big nerd like me do after accomplishing his biggest long-term goal (getting to MIT)?

he applies to be an astronaut.

ok, i didn't apply to be an astronaut. keep your pants on. but i was randomly browsing the NASA website when i found a section on 'how to become an astronaut.' i figured it was impossible for someone like me, but i read it for amusement value anyway.

turns out, mission specialists just need an advanced degree in *any* physical science. i'd pass the physical, my height is within the allowed range (barely), and i watch more NASA TV than anyone ever. so i think they should let me in.

of course, i'd need that advanced degree first... and i'd need to figure out a good way to relate my research with something space-related. actually, that's not really necessary... there's plenty of radiation in space, and dosimetry plays a big role in space flight.

based on reading about the selection process, i think i could get as far as the personal interviews. that's where the real weeding takes place. getting that far, i give myself an 85% chance. getting past the interview? < 1% chance.

but isn't it worth trying, anyway? i figure i'd drop just about anything to have the chance to go into space, even for a few days. and who knows - with that new space station being completed right around the time i'd get my doctorate... !!!

it's weird that i'm even thinking about this. before today i never thought of it as a possibility. it's what every seven year-old wants to do. "when i grow up, i want to be an astronaut." everyone's said that. i probably said that a lot. space still fascinates me.

that'd be a weird turn of events in my life, eh?

despite it being unlikely and strange, i think i'll try it. all i have to do is get that last requirement - the degree. with a doctorate, i can apply immediately (assuming i don't grow an inch in the next 4 years). with a masters, i need two years of professional experience in the field of my degree... whoops! there's the catch.

there are no professional nuclear engineers with masters degrees. it's a doctorate or nothing job field. so... the possibility of my becoming an astronaut requires that i pass my quals and get a doctor of science.

maybe this will function as additional incentive to study harder and not gimp-up tests like i did yesterday.

random thought: i'd have to cut my hair for the selection interview... this wouldindeed be a big change in my life.

so i went into the midterm feeling ok. i was full of caffiene and thinking clearly. i almost screwed up the cauchhy integral problem but managed to figure it out with 10 minutes remaining. i was the first to hand in my test, and i felt good about it.

then as i walked out moogly-oogly handed me an answer key. this was a cruel thing to do, because i immediately went from feeling really good about myself to understanding exactly where and how much i had fucked up - everywhere, and a lot.

there was one question i got completely right. the cauchy problem i got right except i forgot to cancel something. everything else i pretty much gimped up one way or another.

so now i feel stupid again. it really depends on how everyone else did. i haven't talked to anyone else yet, so i have no idea how the curve will go.

tonight found me reading websites about abandoned missile silos and drawing architectural plans for my earth-sheltered 'house of the future.' i wasn't in the mood to study. besides, it's 45 degrees outside today and it feels like summer.

tom and i walked across the bridge to the pour house for dinner. i had no idea it was st. patrick's day until we got there. i was wearing all blue.

at least it was a blue teeshirt and not a parka.

it's getting down to crunch-time on this midterm, but i don't know what to study. memorization isn't useful because it's open book. so i read through the book and noticed where each topic was... and that's about it.

molvig is back, and i called him today. i managed to BS my way around the fact that i hadn't studied all week. told him i was studying for my midterm. los alamos has "committed to my funding" which basically means that i still don't have any money, but i'm guarenteed to get it. molvig says all that needs to be worked out are "the details. famous last words."

so tomorrow, we'll see if i am going to flunk out of MIT or what.

i felt really sick all day. maybe it is the impending doom of my 22.55 midterm, or maybe those pancakes i made were tainted.

rolf and jen are going to live together! we tossed around the idea of maybe getting a three bedroom apartment and me moving in too. however 3 br. apartments are hard to find. rolf is looking into it all. even if they just get a 2 br. and i stay here, i think it's likely that i'll be a weekend resident.

so the plan is that rolf will find the place and move in, then jen will move in some time near may 1. i'm so excited!

for whatever reason, i'm feeling depressed today. i'm all down on myself for not having focus and not knowing if i am good enough to make it passed my qualifying exams, etc.

talked with rolf for awhile about it. sometimes i wish that i didn't have the obligation to MIT and could move from place to place doing as i please. rolf's got a pretty smooth situation right now. when he's done with cambridge, he's gonna move to bozeman montana because it's pretty. that's the coolest thing i've ever heard.

i've got this backburner desire to get a motorcycle and drive around the country on it. i don't know why. maybe i want to be like robert pirsig, i don't know.

it's weird, i think i'm probably the personleast-likely to ever be seen on a bike, but on the other hand it really appeals to me for some reason. maybe a convertable with suffice.

but anyway, i'd have to be obligation-free for that, and i'd have to have a lot of money.

i can't do anything like that right now because i don't have any money and i can't leave MIT while i have the chance to get a degree here. i think as far as being in "the system" goes, i'm doing pretty damn good. and there's no way i'll ever throw that away. but i'd still like to live "free" for awhile sometime.

the pi party was somewhat of a letdown. there wasn't really anything pi-related going on. i was chatting with rolf last night at 2:00am and he said something about it being 3/14 1:59 and that we should have the pi party now. but i misunderstood him and thought he was telling me that the pi party was today at 1:59pm. so i walked my dumb ass over to harvard at 1:45 and found arsdigita in the middle of a busy work day. duh.

so i walked to the T station and went back home, feeling stupid.

i went back to the party around 6:00pm. there was really fancy food, and a concert on the $50,000 piano by one of the guests. everyone there was over 30, and noone was talking about pi.

i ended up upstairs helping rolf code perl for his client.

apparently, after i left, the hostess (eve) got really drunk and started reading off the digits of pi, but i saw nothing of the sort.

so my little foray into ebay last night ended with my winning three auctions by the time i woke up this morning. now i have to send away my $20 to various people and they'll send me some nice coins that are missing from my collection.

this reignited my interest in coins, so i looked up the local coin shops in the yellow pages. there are about 8 of them in boston, and they're all on the same block of the same street downtown. i guess it's the 'coin district' or something. maybe that's a feature of older cities or something, but it seemed odd to me.

i finally remembered to go to my 6.270 meeting today. i hadn't been to one yet, and last week i didn't even remember that i had forgotten to go! anyway, i went today.

we mostly talked about ideas for the contest table. there was one suggestion that was just bad, and i suggested an improvement and then the debate went downhill and nothing was accomplished.

eventually everyone left but mike and i, and we sat there for an additional hour talking about robots and electronics and contest ideas and the 6.270 website. mike's probably the most hobby robotics knowledgable person at MIT, so it was good glean information from him.

i'm upset with myself. i didn't do anything today. i only left the building once, and that was to go watch a movie i've already seen by myself. i didn't do any work. i just sat around and watched TV and surfed the web.

i woke up early today so i could run downtown to one of those coin shops on bromfield (of which there are > 4). they really didn't sell to my type of collecting; they were more baseball cards, political pins, etc... plus some coins.

they didn't have the chronological books of coins that i am always looking for and have only found once in a store that has since gone out of business.

they did, however, have big buckets of old coins through which i searched for about an hour. i ended up buying a handful of silver quarters, silver dimes, silver war nickels, and mercury dimes. i also picked up a random assortment of foreign coins from countries i didn't already have and a whitman folder for those indian head pennies i won from ebay.

i'm so flighty...

i ordered more memory for my camera from buy.com, and i'm an idiot. i knew that my camera only supported 2 and 4 meg cards, but their website listed a 16 meg card and said that it worked in my camera, so i bought it. well, it came today and it doesn't work and i'm pissed.

also arriving today was a shipment of rubberbands from debello. hundreds of them, all too small to fit on the megaball, so i had to put them all on microbuddy. it grew by about 2 or 3 cm, and is now larger than a baseball. also in this shipment were about 50 rubberbands too small for microbuddy, so a new ball was born! still working on a name for it. suggestions? nano-pal is the only thing i came up with so far and i'm not sure i like it.

cauchy integrals are really cool.

i was talking to rolf at about 11:30 tonight and we decided that we were hungry. boston is one of those weird cities (read: not new york) that shuts down really early. the only places we knew of that were open for food were uno's in harvard square and the pour house over in the back bay. rolf decided that he was lazy, so i went there and we went to uno's.

as i was leaving, i noticed that i had forgotten my ID card, but i was going to just catch the last subway so i didn't turn back to grab it.

this marks the third time (out of three trips) that rolf and i have eaten at uno's in the last three weeks. we want to make a movie about hackers that is realistic yet exciting, and it must include kung-fu, skateboarding, and porno as well.

back at arsdigita, phil asked me, "when are you going to start doing something useful." implying that somehow coding tcl database apps was more useful than nuclear physics research. hrmm...

i finally figured out the proper pronunciation of 'samoyed' and it's just like it looks: SAM-oh-yed. at least, that's how phil says it. i had always imagined those dogs being really expensive, but it turns out they're not because they're not what most people want in a dog. they're bigger than most people want their dogs to be, but they're no good as guard-dog types; they're not aggressive at all.

phil says a samoyed puppy costs $500-$1000, which means that i want one.

rolf and i finally watched my DVD of brazil. it's actually a different version than the american VHS one. there's about 10 minutes of new footage, and a few parts are missing. i'm not sure which i like more; i'll have to watch it a few more times first. 36 inch TVs rock.

afterwards, it was 4:45am and i had clearly missed the subway, so i walked home. when i got to ashdown, the fact that i had forgotten my ID card became a big problem fast. there is no desk worker at night, and no one to let me in. MIT is unlike coe in the sense that you can't call security to have them let you into a building.

i went to the 24-hour coffeehouse in the student center. and hung out there until 6:30. i went back to ashdown and waited for someone to come down and let me in. some random guy came at 6:45. ugh.

i swear the world is just out to scare me or something.

last night / this morning, at about 2:00am, i suddenly remembered that i hadn't done my 22.55 homework due today. this was a big problem. i immediately stopped trying to install netBSD onto my macSE/30 (well, actually, i put another 45 minutes into that. i'm an idiot sometimes.) and made the decision to sleep now and wake up early rather than stay up late working on the homework and then sleep.

so this morning, i got up at the cruel hour of 9:00am, and immediately started working on the problem set. ok, actually, i ate breakfast and watched springer first. i'm an idiot sometimes.

anyway, i did a rough job on the homework but at least respectable enough to turn in, so i rush off to class (after watching half-baked and taping it for jen. it was the one where he makes the french toast and accidentally puts in green food coloring instead of vanilla).

of course, first thing out of the prof's mouth is that he's postponed the due date to friday. so i didn't sleep and missed lunch for nothing.

went to tim goorley's RST seminar today. ("there are some who call me... 'tim.'" greetings, tim the enchanter. what does everyone else call you?) tried to figure out why tim is in the society for creative anachronism. he has swords and battleaxes and armor and stuff in his apartment. it's odd because he totally doesn't seem the medieval type.

matt told us a fun story from when he flew apache helicopters in bosnia. he used to be given assignments like, "go to this location at this time and pick up three men." and they wouldn't tell him anything else. he'd be escorted by two additional apaches, he'd arrive in the middle of nowhere, and out of nowhere these three guys would just appear and get in the helipcopter. they wouldn't say a word to him, and he just flew them back to base. so there was a lot of firepower to pick up these weird guys in what seemed a very clandestine way. matt thinks they were hunting war criminals, despite what the military told everyone else.

i got lured into using ebay.com today. i'd heard about it, and i needed an additional SCSI harddrive for my mac so that i could get the netBSD to work, so i went online and checked out their prices. i didn't find any harddrives i wanted, but i ended up bidding on six different offers in the coins section. ugh.

i did some javascript work for rolf's friend "apple" awhile back. my payment was a pair of e's skateboarding shoes, an e's shirt, and a buttload of stickers. they arrived yesterday; today i wore the shoes and they are awesome. well worth 10 minutes of javascript.

the cool part is that these shoes aren't available to the public yet, so no one has them but me. heh

i spent all of today procrastinating. tonight i went out *twice* to do nothing but walk around. i ended up taking a bunch of pictures of the empty MIT tunnels.

woke up early again today to get jen to her plane. i went to the airport with her, but had to leave her there because i needed to finish the work i failed to do yesterday before i went to see molvig today.

this turned out to not be an issue, since molvig wasn't around. i found him in the busch room where the NED was having a "tell freshmen what nuclear engineering is all about" party with free ice cream, which i partook in. a projector was showing power point slides of salient NED research. one of them was the picture of the megaball in the CAT scanner. haha

molvig took off for los alamos today. he's gone for a week, and when he gets back, he'll have money for me! (at least, in theory) he currently owes me in excess of three grand.

my second radio show was tonight. it went markably better than the first one. i had a guest - geeta, who does a punk show on tuesday mornings. she went to her dorm and grabbed her playschool drum machine, then came and demonstrated its amazing abilities on the air. it was a funny bit.

had to wake up early today, to get jen to her plane. however, there was still about 6 inches of snow and slush on the ground. she called USair and they confirmed that all flights out of boston today were cancelled. so jen's here for at least another day.

i had to disappear for the greater part of today in order to accomplish some studying for the weekend. i left jen back at my suite and went to my office, where i stayed all day until about 8:30pm.

i returned to find that jen had returned the movies and cooked a fancy dinner of black bean soup in sourdough breadbowls. unfortunately, i had already eaten at the nasty "chicago" pizza joint (run entirely by turks), and had to pass on the breadbowl.

i felt bad about ditching jen for the whole day, but it turns out that she enjoyed the opportunity to spend the day by herself. she has to live in close quarters with her parents now, so some isolation was a good thing, for a change.

so i thought it would be a cool idea to get out of the house today... i suggested that we go walk around downtown boston, and just see what's there. when we left, it was snowing light flurries, but nothing bad... of course, i didn't check the weather website.

so when we pop out of the subway in downtown, it's snowing harder. after about 20 minutes, it's a monsoon of heavy wet snow/rain slush balls. we're both soaked.

and, largely because i'm a big dope, we didn't immediately go home. we went for dinner at the other side. i knew jen would like it, and she did.

the other side is just on the other side of the bridge from MIT (hence the name?), and to take the subway home involved going all the way to downtown to change lines, then coming back. walking saves about 25 minutes.

and, like idiots, we decide to take the 1/2 mile-long bridge on foot to get home. the windchill is about -17F, and it's now raining little ice balls. there is a heavy wind out over the bridge, making the ice come at your face sideways. to further the cold hell that we were in, the heavy slush on the road was splashed all over us each time a car went by.

and i only had my light jacket on.

jen was better off; she had a hood. when i got home, i couldn't feel my face and half of my head was covered in slush. literally. you couldn't see my hair; i had a slush helmet.

jen and i walked over to rolf's place tonight. i wanted her to meet him. bonus, she got to meet alex (The dog), and philg, and his girlfriend eve. we talked for a long time about jobs and publishing and the web and money. phil was nice in that he kept the conversation away from total-nerd stuff long enough that jen wasn't bored off her ass.

jen, rolf, and i ate dinner in harvard square. jen decided that rolf was "one funny mofo."

eve, it turns out, is a big fan of the number pi, which brands her instantly as a huge enormous nerd-butt. but then again, i have that pi approximation counter on my website... so we're both big math geeks. she's having a "pi party" next (on march fourteenth, or 3/14. of course, this party will be cooler in 16 years, when it will be 3/14/15) and invited me.

jen and i didn't end up leaving until about 2:00am, which is way past the end of the subway, so we had to walk home. that's a lot of walking for one day.

i went to the NED pizza social today, and molvig was there. turns out he's a pool shark. wow he's good.

i ate almost an entire large pizza myself. bring on the rotton ass... and of course, tonight jen shows up.

i went out to the airport to get her. yay!

woke up at the unreasonable hour of 9:00am today. my new second mattress is helping me sleep. my back doesn't hurt anymore. i'm trying to push my sleep schedule back to something resembling normal because jen is coming tomorrow night. also, i had to do my homework this mornihg.

i went to my office to work for the first time in ages. many of the problems i couldn't solve last night were cleared up quickly with the wealth of textbooks in my office. however, there were still several problems that i didn't solve. i turned in the assignment considerably less than complete. i expect to do poorly on it.

but since dr. mooglyoogly (it's migliuolo, italian, somehow pronounced me-You-leo) is under the impression that this problem set was too difficult, that probably won't matter.

during class, i asked a stupid question. it took me about 2 seconds to figure out the answer after i asked it, and i never should have opened my mouth. but even despite this, i found it astoundingly rude when greg turned to me and said, "don't ask stupid questions, moron."

i was instantly unimpressed with his attitude. it's not that he doesn't like me - he lent me his complex variables book after class so i could learn koshi integrals, but he's just sort of an asshole sometimes. i was talking to evan and ben on the way to the office about it, and it turns out greg has done similar things to other people. evan once asked greg to explain something to ben, and he responded, "ben won't understand it."

ben said, "that was the last help he'll receive for 22.581." turns out ben was tutoring greg for a class when he said that.

gotta love that MIT arrogance.

i avoided going to molvig today because i hadn't done any work for him either. but stupid me, i invited him to the house dinner tonight about two weeks ago and forgot. so when i show up for my monthly free gourmet meal, there he is.

and of course he asks me how the work is going and if i went to the library to check out the two books her recommended to me... oops.

that aside, we had a good chat about the future of guy and i and the research. things are looking good. soon i will be done with this self-guided studying of kinetic theory, and we'll get to start coding. of course, before that, i'll have to get off my ass and do the work...

...and instead, tonight, i read some tolkein, some dawkins (who i have firmly decided is my hero now and my favorite thinker, replacing asimov), and worked on two new sections of my website. the cruciflex™ and the scientific zealot section, inspired by dawkins.

rolf and i went to the tandoor house today for some lunch. the buffet was cold, and they couldn't give us new plates for a return trip. in iowa, this was illegal. here it's just bad business etiquitte. our waiter didn't understand what we were asking for, and instead brought the check. so after one cold plate of all-you-can-eat indian, we left.

went to dinner with lance and pals. steve, peter, david, lance, and i went to a vegetarian resteraunt called 'the other side' and had a great conversation. the lighting in the other side is all gelled, and different regions of the resteraunt are color coded. it looked like a scene from the neon-colored quake II.

steve and peter just bought a house, so we all jumped into lance's smooth car and drove to malden to check it out. the house is amazing, very large. we all sat down and watched some space ghost, then channel surfed and made fun of television programming.

for some reason every channel had a man with a big fat neck. one station had a man in a harley outfit cooking minute rice and cajun swordfish. the god station had a televangelist carrying a crucifix. the jesus on the crucifix had great abs, which led to my best joke of the week, the cruciflex™ (coming to a splash page near you soon).

for some reason, sitting around talking with a bunch of gay men ten years older than i am was a very pleasent experience. peter and steve, having just moved into their house a month ago, will probably have a house party soon and i'm invited. yay.

i screwed myself bad on homework tonight, though. i have no idea in 22.55, and the homework is due tomorrow, and my only hope to get a decent grade on it was to study with evan tonight at 7:00pm, which i blew off to go hang with lance et. al.

i knew the whole time that i was going to be screwed because of this...

so today was day one of my radio show,beeps & whistles. it went very well. i only screwed up once (had the CD player set to single song play when i was playing a set of mixed songs, so the song just stopped at a seemingly arbitrary point). i got 2 calls, one from abie to see how i was doing, and one from some guy who wanted me to play mix master mike.

i enjoy doing the radio show.

*

during 22.55 today, it became clear that i don't know anything, and the test is in 2 weeks. i got even more depressed about my lack of ability. and, then, of course, i had to go to molvig's office and tell him i didn't know anything about the research either.

i wasn't feeling so hot at about 3:00pm today.

but, somehow, molvig made everything allright. he explained that he didn't expect me to get this very quickly because it's a lot of material to cover in such a short period of time. i left there feeling confident again. thanks, molvig.

jen's mom sent me some rubberbands today for the megaball. *yay* also, she sent a snoopy comic clipped from the paper that mentioned turbulence. i love little gifts like that. i hung it up in molvig's office so we could both enjoy it.

just as i was leaving molvig's place, nina came in. molvig, being polite, asked, "do you two know each other?" it was hillarious yet tense. nina ended up emailing me about it later this evening, so i guess we're cool now.