Peng moved out today. To next door. I guess he wanted to live with other Chinese guys. Or maybe it was my offensive odor. Tommorow Evan's friend from lab, Nick, moves in. Nick's a good guy, speaks with a thick French accent, and probably won't watch as much Discovery Channel as Peng did, so this is a good thing.

After Peng had left, Evan and I decided to clean out the fridge. After throwing out everything that was clearly Peng's, and everything that was ours but old, we were shocked to discover that only four things remained in the fridge:

A can of soda, my milk, some butter, and a jar of minced garlic. This apartment is such a screw-job.

So the FAA relaxed their restrictions a bit and is allowing large model rocket notifications again, just in time for today's launch. Mikkel and his girlfriend Lindsey accompanied me out to Amesbury for my second CMASS launch. Mikkel had some rockets of his own this time, including the hillarious "Snitch" UFO rocket. I lost my best rocket due to high winds [*weep*]. More about the launch here.

Ever since the 11th, the FAA has flatly denied all requests for rocketry waivers and notifications indefinitely. Today, however, Bill informed CMASS that we may be granted a large model rocket notification for the launch this Saturday. This is progress, and it means that I can launch my Initiator on the F25 that I've got laying about - my largest motor to date.

And in case you're wondering, no, my life does not revolve around rocketry. I just don't have anything interesting to tell you about plasma physics right now.

Today's landmark events (just to give you an idea of how blissfully trivial my daily life is now compared to the recent couple months of excruciating stress):

The construction plans for the warehouse got approved, a plumber agreed to fix our drain and run pipes to the kitchen.

I finally got past level 6 on Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo 8bit.

Mikkel came over and I helped him build some of his new rockets in preparation for Saturday's launch. Also I found out that my missing PML order is actually in the mail and on its way!

Also on the rocket front, Carl of the Rocket Team agreed to fund my HPR endeavors as they will act as a good payload testing platform for the team.

Ashley said, "Ahhh PB&J. Sweet life force."

Wellesley College CSA Hosts Worst Party Ever
Behind-the-scenes coverage by Mouser Williams

So Heemin asked me if I'd help him with a DJ gig he got down at Wellesley for their Chinese Student Association. Figuring that this meant helping him carry his turntables, mixer, and records to and from the car and helping keep annoying frat types from making requests, I agreed.

As it turns out, the CSA can't get their own PA or even borrow one from anybody at Wellesley, so Heemin needs to bring his own. This involves so much gear that we have to get Jamie's van just to hold it all. And of course we have to move it all ourselves. And of course it's all stored in Heemin's third-floor apartment. A 12-cubic foot subwoofer, as it turns out, is really really heavy. As are the assorted amps, speakers, mixing consoles, and of course, the expected turntables and records.

But whatever, I've gotten stuck moving PA shit around for gigs before and I know how much it means to have someone helping with the manual labor. So that's fine. But of course to get both vehicles down to Wellesley means I have to drive Jamie's minivan, a.k.a. the world's biggest piece of crap on wheels.

The cheetah-print steering wheel cover was mildly amusing, until I realized that it was making my hands smell like cheetah ass or something. The cloth that veils the hard metal roof of the van, in a shoddy attempt to create the illusion of comfort, was torn in numerous places and was hanging down right in front of my face, both tickling my nose and preventing me from seeing anything.

Strange noises would frequently eminate from the van for unknown reasons. The key doesn't open the driver side door. The windows don't roll down, which made paying the Masspike tolls a challange. And to top it off, I had no idea where I was going, not ever having been to Wellesley before. I had to tail Heemin the whole way there. At least Jamie left a great mixtape in the deck.

Wellesley is out in the middle of nowhere, as far as I can tell. Going there from Boston you never really leave town per se, but you enter a sort of endless suburban nightmare and the towns sort of all run together. The campus is nice, though. It's much more of a non-city campus than MIT or even Coe. The roads are thin and windy, there's lots of green and hills and a stream of some sort. Beyond that I couldn't tell much because it was dark.

The space for the party was acoustically horrible, but otherwise a reasonable venue. The organizers consisted of an army of very short chinese girls who seemed very stressed out. Heemin's prediction that I would be the tallest person there by a good foot was confirmed.

After unloading the metric assload of audio gear, Heemin springs the best part of the evening on me. The other DJ, who was supposed to meet us there, is still in Boston and his ride has bailed on him. So I have to drive back and get him. Bear in mind that I really have no idea where I am or how to get back to Boston. Not to fear, Heemin will draw me a map, he says. Unfortuantely, he doesn't know the names of any of the streets. After constructing something that looks like a carribean treasure map and lending me his car for this trip and his cell phone for when I get lost, I'm off.

Heemin's jeep is much more comfortable than Jamie's POS van. His also comes with good music, but also has luxuries like working windshield wipers, working power windows, and brakes. I make it back to Boston without difficulty, and no thanks to Heemin's map, but it turns out that the address he's written down where I am to find "Lars" does not exist. I call Lars on the phone and ask him where the hell he lives and he sets things straight.

Lars, who is British but pronounces his name the Norweigian way, "Larsh," throws his records into the back of the jeep and his girlfriend into the front seat and off we go. They have a good laugh at the treasure map and turn out to be very pleasant. Larsh is an exchange student in course 6 from Cambridge. His girlfriend is finishing up economics at Cambridge.

Anyway, so we get back without a hitch and the tiny Chinese girls are very relieved, as it seems that they are much more interested in hearing Larsh's hiphop than Heemin's trance. We made it back with about 10 minutes to spare before the party began. Which is to say about 45 minutes before anyone ventured onto the dance floor.

Heemin had indicated in the aformentioned "deal" that there would be dinner provided inbetween when we set up and when we started, but due to the Larsh complication, I got to miss that part. So my diet for the evening was potato chips and water from the bathroom sink. Yum.

Throughout the four hour party, Heemin and Larsh swapped back and forth on the turntables. Heemin was back to his traditional progressive trance records, and Larsh it turns out is a really good hiphop DJ. He scratches really well and made some really compex transitions that blew me away. During their sets, I tried to play crowd control and keep people from making assinine comments to them. Some of my favorites of the evening were:

"Is this Chinese hip-hop?"

Multiple occurances of "Are you guys ever going to play any trance music?" during Larsh's set.

Multiple occurances of "When are you going to play hip hop?" during Heemin's set.

No, seriously! It was like clockwork. Not five minutes after a transistion from one to the other, some jackass would come up asking if we were ever going to play [insert genre that was just played for 30 minutes here]. I think these questions came up at least 15 times over the course of the evening.

Towards the end of the party, the CSA had produced some guy who wanted to do some freestyle. I'm all for live acts and hip hop, but this guy was just whiter than white and so so so bad. When he came on, basically the party stopped and waited for him to be done. His dozen or so homeboy posers that came with him seemed to be the only people that enjoyed the performance, and after they were done they left again and the party resumed. He left his extra-wack background music CD with us which he had apparently produced himself. Title track: Elementalism. Ugh.

When the party ended, it was raining which made moving the gear out a pain. And the non-working defrost and wipers in Jamie's van made the drive home a bit more dangerous than I was comfortable. But we made it. Heemin was livid and declared it the last gig he would ever do. I remember that moment for myself, after a particularly lame sigma-nu party at Coe. People who want to hear J-Lo and "It's Raining Men" on repeat should just turn on the freakin radio and save their money.

After hauling all that stuff back up the stairs to his apartment, Heemin apologized profuseley for the lameness of the party and promised me free brunch on Sunday.

I've done lame parties before, but this one really took the cake. Wow. OK I'm done venting now, sorry for subjecting you to it.

One of my concerns about joining the MIT Rocket Team was that I don't really know jack about designing liquid fuel rocket engines. At this point, that's really all they're doing. So it was a big relief at the meeting tonight when Carl made a plea for someone to start thinking about payload design and avionics.

...which just happens to be exactly what I want to work on.

Today Mikkel and I drove out to Tewksbury, MA for a CMASS club launch. I brought four of my new rockets with me and made 14 flights. It was a blast.

I remember so clearly this day last year.

It went pretty much the same this time around, except for the part about me failing. So Molvig comes up and complains about students not having gone to the right places though he was unable to tell us where it was that we were supposed to have gone to meet with the faculty. And besides, they all came up to where we were anywhere, because that's where the beer was.

He pulls me into my office and says,

"Well congratulations, you passed. I think you did pretty well except for one thing."

I'm thinking he's referring to his 101 question which I cocked up pretty badly.

"Why the fuck did you take the biology question?!"

It turns out that of all the people taking the test, I was the only person who attempted the bio question, and I got a 25% on it to boot. That's about as bad as you can do on any question and the fact that I was the only one meant that there was no discussion of cutoffs or anything, just the entire faculty having a good hearty belly laugh at how badly I suck at biology.

I explained to him how my alternative was the math question, and how linear it was, and how I tried it for a long time and couldn't get it and wasn't expecting much in the way of partial credit, leaving me with no alternative yadda yadda. Just my luck, I guess, that the bio question ends up being so hard that no one tries it but me.

To put a positive spin on it, our department is so good at biology that only one person did poorly on the question. :-)

Anyway, so I passed my written qualifier and am now a Doctoral Candidate. That's an event of monumental importance and impact on the future of my life, etc. And someone who got more excited about stuff like that would probably be out partying.

Instead, I'm working on my rocket simulator code, which currently is accelerating my rocket rapidly beyond the speed of light - backwards - within 0.6 seconds. I'd say something is amiss. Or, as Jason would say, "That's faster than the speed of light, you idiot!!"

This was certainly not the Tuesday I ordered.

I woke up and Aaron told me that I should turn on the news. There I was greeted by images of the World Trade Center burning. The images of the plane burrowing through the tower caused me to skip breakfast. The images of the towers collapsing made me skip class.

I'm so awestruck by the absolutely unfathomable imagery that I am completely numb to the obvious tragedy of it all. All I did all day was watch replays. The plane flies through the building, the building crumbles, people run for their life. The plane flies through the building again, etc.

This can't be real, can it?! Where is Godzilla? Why is no one finding my /usr/bin/laden jokes funny?

By about 3pm I had so overdosed on CNN and the morbid fascination with the idea of skyscrapers falling to pieces that I had to take a break, pull myself away from it. I felt like some sort of armchair ambulence chaser or something.

I got Mikkel and headed over to campus to launch some rockets. I've been waiting to do this for the past two months. Ever since I got into rocketry this summer, I've been too busy to actually participate in it. This didn't stop me from ordering and building some models while I was studying [or, rather, as a substitute for studying]. But finally I get a good day to go out and actually do it.

There is usually some concern with rocketry about commercial aircraft in the sky. The bizzare fact that today there were no longer any planes in the sky only made the idea of launching today seem more appropriate. An ironic twist to this was that I had to wave off our first launch attempt because an F-15 was cruising above, watching the skies I suppose for more terrorist activity.

My entry into the hobby of rocketry can be followed here. Yesterday, I went to my first meeting of the MIT Rocket Team which is designing a liquid-fueled rocket engine to propel a custom sounding rocket to 200km. Definitely above the hobby level. Additionally, I'm positioning myself to be the president of the soon-to-be-newly-revived MIT Rocket Society.

All this and I've only launched rockets twice in my life, including today. Hah. Ever run into something you just know you'll love even before you try it?

The good news is that I finally did it and really enjoyed it every bit as much as I suspected I would.

But, rocketry aside, my thoughts are lingering on the rescue personell in New York. They are selfless. And heros, every one of them.

So you're probably wondering how my qualifying exams went. Well, so am I. I will know my fate Wednesday night at about 9pm. Here's how it went:

The first session was the Math, Chemistry, Physics, and Biology questions, of which we only had to answer three. Chris, Karen, and I had done a thourough review of chemistry so I felt confident there. I hadn't studied physics much, but an email mysteriously appeared that contained a description of the question. We weren't sure if we could trust it, but it was better than nothing. And besides, it suggested that the question would be a circuits question, in which case I was golden anyway. Math I hadn't studied for at all because the math questions are always either impossible or easy, so I just let the cards fall where they may. In the event that the math question was difficult, I had studied some biology. The last 2 years questions in bio dealt with DNA and we figured that they wouldn't hit that one again, so we focused on cell cycle and cell structure.

Well, the math question was hard. Solving some sort of second-order differential equation in spherical coordinates. And to boot the question was totally sequential, meaning that if you couldn't solve the equation then you couldn't do any of the later portions of the question. So after half an hour of kicking it around, I resigned to doing the bio question instead.

But first, chemistry. There were three parts. The first two were easy and I aced them. The third one was about the color of compounds in solution, and they forgot to give us a periodic table which made the question really hard. As a result I sort of half-assed the answer and left it. Talking to Ken afterwards re: the missing table, he indicated that perhaps the grading on that part would be somewhat lax. So that's good news...

Physics. The email was right on. It was a circuits problem. And it was so much easier than we were expecting. We were banking on them not asking an AC circuit problem, because that's harder than the sorts of things they generally ask. But we figured they would at least have a time-varying problem... But no, they asked a DC statics problem. Basically Ohm's Law was all you had to know.

Really simple. Comically simple. The funny thing about this question, aside from the fact that it was earmarked for an hour and it took me four minutes, was that it was written as a word problem (something involving jumpstarting a car whose battery had gone bad). This was enough to throw off a whole host of the PRC students, who didn't know what "jump start" meant or what placing a battery "across a motor" involved. I felt sort of bad because it was clearly just a language problem, but the question was SO simple that to explain it to them at all would be to give the answer away to at least one part (drawing the schematic).

And this brings us to Bio. Perhaps it was karmic retribution for us knowing the physics question in advance... It was a DNA question again - the one topic we hadn't studied at all, and after my demonstrated inability to solve the math question, I had to answer this. It wasn't pretty and can basically be described as me bombing it. I don't know jack about recombinant DNA or gene cloning, and I had to write about the processes in detail. So anyone who knows anything about bio and reads my answers to this question is probably at least chuckling if not weeping.

The second session was for 101 and 102 (Nuclear Physics / Quantum Mechanics, and Fundamentals of Engineering). I got lucky here in that Molvig wrote the 101 question and I had him for the class so the questions were ones I was used to seeing. Also, Todreas wrote the 102 question and I took that class with him twice.

Unfortunately, 102 is impossible to study for and I just don't know that stuff. And when I got the question in front of me, it was clear that I didn't know anything about engineering. So I bombed that one too.

101, on the other hand, was basically an easy question. It came in several parts most of which I did admirably on. There were a couple places were the question seemed so simple that I convinced myself that there must be a trick and changed my answer away from the correct one in order to incorporate some ficticious bullshit that I invented right there on site. So that made me mad, but I still think I did reasonably well on this question.

The third and final session was for 51 and 55 (Interactions of Radiation with Matter and Radiation Detection and Shielding). Here we had another ace up our sleeve because Professor Chen had basically given away the topic of the 51 question to Chris. Chen had gotten in trouble for writing the same question two years in a row in 1998 and 1999, so he wrote a new question last year (which kicked my ass) and this year he pulled an older one from the stack. When Chris was asking him questions about some of the older exams that we were working through, Chen saw one of them and asked "what year did I ask that?" This, of course, was a dead giveaway.

So we studied NMR and magnetics problems like mad. And we were right. The question was very similar to one we had gone over every night for a week before the exam, and the only new part was something Evan had derived for us on the board. So I flew through the 51 problem and probably aced it. This is good because it's supposedly the hardest question and the one most relevant to what I do.

The 55 question came in 3 parts. The first part was simple and I aced it, but it was only worth 10% of the question. The last part was about Monte Carlo, which I have an unfair advantage with having recently taken Professor Yip's MD/MC course. So I did quite well on it as well. The second part, however, which was worth the bulk of the points, covered Bragg-Gray theory which is easy and I should have known it but I blanked on it and probably got that part mostly wrong.

So, if I had to grade my answers they would look something like this:

Chemistry: A-
Physics: A+
Bio: D-
101: B
102: F
51: A+
55: B-

Add to this the fact that they grade leniently for people taking the test for the second time around, and that Molvig has to be at the meeting and seems to want me to pass, and I feel cautiously optomistic. But with two total bombs in there it could easily go either way. We'll see day after tomorrow.

I'm back in action. Lots to tell, but right now I'm busy building a rocket so I only have until this fillet dries to type. Dan's studying for German class with those hillarious language tapes, as featured in the movie Top Secret. He writes:

Position of nicht
Hey baby, I'll put my nicht by your nicht and we'll nocht nicht's all nacht long, eh?

I guess I don't speak enough German.