Extraordinary Chickens Will Rule The World

Boston Red Line T Car drives around Great Dome

2009-04-29T01:17:45Z

:D Awesome

ARghgelelhgh

2009-04-17T03:34:24Z

Sad little MIT student no get sleep.
Has lab. Will write lab. Will do uncertainty analysis for laser interferometer. Will try to remember what we actually did in that lab other than that once we were done taking measurements we rickrolled the whole lab via laser interferometer. May not get extra credit for 'Never Gonna Give You Up'.
Harhfdsjksduhsdfkjsdf.

I also really hope that downloading a 60 day trial for Microsoft Word because one's laptop is in for repair and one is now borrowing one's Microsoft Word-less roommate's laptop will work. Because otherwise I will be far away from home in a computer cluster all night because my stupid professor is addicted to the Word equation formatting.

:(

Greetings from 5am in Back Bay/12:10am in Orlando

2009-03-24T04:38:10Z

Hello everyone. How are you all?
Today is the last day before spring break. Hence why it is feck-o'clock in the morning and I am sitting on my beautiful view-of-Fenway-Park Boston-townhouse bedroom floor with a giant can of Monster energy drink and the remains of my thermodynamics homework.

It has reached the point in the morning where, while I am perfectly able to solve the governing equation of temperature distribution for a finite fin using appropriate adiabatic boundary conditions, I cannot finish my problem set because I am unable to do simple algebra.

Fail.

So, y'know, it goes. In four hours I'm scheduled to sleepily give an in-class presentation. After that...

end of message

So, that was the half-lj post I wrote early friday morning before accidentally passing out on my homework, frantically finishing it, then only handing in half of it because I left three sheets of paper at home.

But who cares? Right now, I am in Florida(!!!). As an explanation to people that I may have forgotten to tell how/why I'm in sunny FL for spring break; my roommate's parents decided that for his 21st they'd take him and a friend on vacation for a week. And since I am pretty much Kel's plus-one for everything (rooming, studying, events at which he has to pretend to be straight etc), I get a handy mostly-free trip to Orlando.

I am so glad to leave Boston for a week. Here it is overcast but deliciously warm, unlike the blindingly bright, cold Northeast. I also get to wander around all day doing touristy things that mostly involve sea creatures, which is perfectly grand with me. SeaWorld, however, have gone a bit too Disney for my taste. Do I want to see whales with acrobats + theme songs + cheesy slogans about peace, love and understanding? No, I would just like to see whales, thank you very much. I mean, Seaworld spend a lot of money on conservation and research, so fair play to them. But as a kid weaned on bloodthirsty Attenborough nature programs (y'know, where the penguins eat the fish and the seals eat the penguins and the orcas eat the seals and Sir David tells us all how extraordinary it is), I find it a little sad that people feel they have to make the natural world seem fluffy and wholesome to get people to care about it.

But meh, that's just my personal gripe. Can the MIT girl enjoy a theme park without overthinking it? Hell no! But tomorrow we're going to the everglades. On a boat! Seeing turtles and manatees! :) I think I may be fairly happy right now.

Happy Spring Break (or essay time...whichever...) to you all.

( <3 )

One of the More Bizarre Things To Have Happened This Week

2009-02-06T22:44:15Z

*Lab starts*

Grace: Professor, why does the oscilloscope start flatlining when I change the pulse frequency to 200?
Professor: Well...*explanation*

*more lab*

Professor: Can you tell me why the voltage iterations are so large here?
Grace: Because it's a digitally converted signal? Um...? *further babbling*

*more lab. lab ends. Grace begins to pack up her oscilloscopes and leave*

Professor: Before you go - you're from Glasgow, aren't you?
Grace: Yeeess. How so, Professor?
Professor: Well, I lived there for seven years when I was growing up. What part of Glasgow?
Grace: Bzuh? Well, Partick originally...
Professor: Me too! I lived beside the West of Scotland Cricket pitch! I am a rabid fan of Partick Thistle!

*Cue ten minute discussion of Scottish football*

That was moderately surreal. The one thing I am left wondering is how he survived seven years in a Glasweigan primary school with the last name "Peacock".

Obamaman, Murals, Illness

2009-01-30T22:42:03Z

I know this is old news by now, but the inauguration was awesome. Watched it in the MIT main lecture hall with the rest of the college - students, professors, janitors, the deans, all mushed in together watch History Being Made (TM). Everyone went around grinning for the rest of the day. Also, unsurprisingly, the biggest cheer in the lecture hall was for the part of the speech about "putting science back in its rightful place".

Also, been painting a mural on my old hall - sort of a Banksy-esque paradise-through-brick-wall kinda thing. Almost finished...though my plans to get it done before classes start have pretty much failed.

I have been a little ill with the Cold of D00m that has been plaguing MIT campus in general and both Fenway House and the cast of Julius Caesar in particular. Thankfully, I'm recovering pretty well thanks to a mix of Tylenol, echinacea tea, ginger, lemon and honey. I swear, it is like a miracle drink. My friend Noel was not so lucky - he has various problems with his immune system, so when he caught said Cold of D00m he collapsed and we had to call an ambulance on him. Six hours of swabs, blood tests and spinal taps proved that he only had a cold and not the flu/meningitis/HIV/the black plague etc, which was good news for the rest of us, I suppose, but not much fun for poor Noel.

I'm finally moved into my new room! Pictures will follow soonish, once I unpack my camera cable.

Hello everyone, I am alive!

2009-01-20T05:21:50Z

Hello hello hello.

MIT seems to have continued to be MIT since I left. Classes have not started yet (my two-week machining class starts tomorrow at 9am, but proper subjects lie far, far away at the beginning of February), but the rest of the mad, peculiar status quo seems to have been retained.

1. This weekend was...Mystery Hunt weekend! Mystery Hunt is basically a big, complicated puzzle hunt that pretty much the entire MIT campus participates in. It involves solving various puzzles that involve the typical word games/cryptic symbols/lists of names or dates or photos or 1970s Broadway Musicals that are linked in obscure ways, and also ones that involve cooking/dressing up as various things/giant scavenger hunts around Boston etc. There are about 50 MIT teams, some living-group affiliated, some not. I was hunting (unofficially) with the team from Random Hall, basically on a whim after my friend Josh asked me jokingly if I was on their time and I decided to answer 'YES'.

One of the challenges involved dressing 15 people up as cartoon network characters/people in the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Here, the Powerpuff Girls and others check the latest cryptic puzzle on the interwebs.

Random sombrero-man, Random blue-dress-girl, Wilma, Cyndi Bear, Yogi Bear, George Harrison.

This year's Mystery Hunt was sci-fi themed (surprise, surprise) and one set of puzzle answers was various types of alien food which we then had to make and present to the judges. Below were our wonderful "Burgers from Radioactive Cows" (beef, green food colouring, falafel, ketchup, peanut butter, shprinkles).

2. Also - it is snowing! In a wonderfully pretty way. Being from a place where precipitation is rather crystally challenges, I was obviously very .

Early in the hours of the morning on Mass Ave, me pottering along men shovelling shovelling away...

Early in the hours of the evening, passing the MIT chapel after rehearsal...

Pretty!

3. Gig season has started, yay! Yay for using my reduced rent and food money to, er, pay for $8 tickets to reasonably unknown bands at the Middle East. This week me and the gig crew went to see The Rosebuds, a sort of folkier version of the Subways. They were pretty good, and from them I must post one ubiquitous

4. I continue to have friends that put up with me, bless 'em, and until classes start we are actually able to *gasp* see each other. Here, before the Rosebuds, , the best ice-cream joint in the Massachusetts area, nay, the world. This week the 'weird-ass flavour' specials were beer wort, earl gray tea and ginger-raspberry.

5. I continue to be alive! Isn't that great.

On New Year's Resolutions

2009-01-04T14:22:41Z

The result of me trying to make some resolutions for this year.

1. ...
2. Um. Go to the gym?
3. Wait, I already do that. As much as I have time to, anyway. Any more and I'd start cutting into sleep hours.
4. Surely there must be something gapingly wrong with my life?
5. No?
6. Hold on, am I, like, content??
7. Shit.
8. Learn Python! At last, something!
9. Anything else deadly practical I can add to this?
10. Get better at firepoi, get better at machining, read more, learn another (human) language...
11. Actually, that's silly. I'll get better at the first two anyway, since I already do them twice a week, and the last two I won't have time for.
12. That leaves me with one.
13. Fine by me. Python it is. Happy 2009!

Four Day Weekend!

2008-11-09T23:42:30Z

:)

Turns out that this may not go the way of most four-day weekends, where I intend to catch up on a lot of work/have a break but fail at both and end up neither productive nor rested. This time I am ignoring all the distractions from the creepily boundless energy of some other MIT students (brought to you by Red Bull GmbH), and am finishing my psets in an unpanicked manner. Also reading Neil Gaiman's new book.

In my room with a cozy bed, tea, The Graveyard Book and Morrison's equation. Sounds good to me...

Notes and Observations

2008-10-17T15:01:24Z

1. Naval architecture is awesome. Keel haul modelling with imaginary numbers, w00t. I may consider taking the full elective subject later, rather than the super-theoretical science-ey stuff I was thinking of taking before.

2. Being the TD of a show is made much less horrible when the set designer and producer are your best friends. Brianna and Kel, actually, are collectively getting me through this year in general. If I come back alive for Christmas, thank them. :)

3. Good scenic painting is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

4. SQA Higher History - I owe you so much. This week I was the only one in the class to get 100% in my PoliSci test due entirely to, I think, my practised and skillful use of the word 'ramifications' and the mantra that when in doubt, compare everything to Bismark.

5. My hair is blue and green like a pixie. Which is the idea, really. It looks AMAZING. I will send pictures. Sadly, I have 'blonde Grace' and 'pixie Grace' photos, but none of the intermediate white-and-blue stage where I looked like the offspring of an anime character and a saltire. It was hot.

6. Who Killed Amanda Palmer is so good. So, so good. I have still not tired of it, even though I've been playing 'Blake Says' as I wake up every morning for the last week and a half.

7. Yeah. Still alive.

So you don't wanna hear about my good day...?

2008-10-06T20:47:44Z

It's getting cold. The Dresden Dolls have broken up. The dollar:pound exchange rate is now 1:1.73. I barely slept 4 hours last night. By a curious turn of events, I am now not failing hydro, but did almost fail my last dynamics problem set. I put this down to the fact that whoever graded it sucks, and is probably junior who is just as busy as me.
On the other hand, I am now (almost) platinum blonde, my stage set is looking beautiful and as stated before - dude! I'm doing well in hydro!

For anyone who has never done a potential/streamline problem with water waves, this is a big deal.

What this indicates, it seems, is that I will fail as a mechanical engineer and spent my life doing computational oceanography in a basement somewhere in Australia.

Yay.

More tea. More tea.

On Being The Stingiest Set Designer/TD Ever

2008-10-05T06:54:25Z

Components of Midsummer set so far that have been obtained free of charge:

- 19 2''x4''x8' planks of wood, East Campus courtyard, left over from building rollercoaster
- 1 4' tall, 10'' diameter cardboard-form tube, found lying on Newbury St.
- lots of foam, left over from remains of last show
- stone-texture paint - made of leftover basecoat, pvc glue, sand from the EC volleyball court and wood shavings from the hobby shop floor
- one jungle - made of old scrim being thrown out by the theatre department, old chintzy tablecloths, paint, and a spare hangman's rope from the props warehouse
- realistic roman statues - two plaster cast faces me and the LD made in costume class our first term

Half-built already, ladies and gentlemen, and we still haven't broken $100. Also I think we may be the first set team in the history of MIT theatre universe to actually start EARLY. *is proud*

Still Alive

2008-10-01T23:58:25Z

Things that amused me this week:

1. Food shopping today I managed to cram several dozen pounds of vegetables, gnocci pasta and seafood and stay under my weekly budget so much so that I had enough to buy my expensive luxury items...Heinz baked beans and digestive biscuits from the imported food aisle.

2. Both me and my hydrodynamics professor were confused as to why my email to her had gone to her spam box along with all the Russian viagra ads until I read it over again and found the sentence: "In Problem 5 part a), when the cylindrical member moves through the z-axis, how much thrust is contributed by the added mass?". Hmmm.

Big Business and free Coffee Mugs

2008-09-18T22:41:32Z

MIT careers fair today. I toddled along mildly smartly dressed and without a resume thinking "hmm, maybe I shall wander around and possibly get a free Firefox coffee mug", but ended up actually getting deep in conversation about job prospects with a bunch of companies. The recruitment woman at Shell jumped to attention when I said I was an ocean engineer, started making jokes about "course 13 pride" (although OE is no longer a course number in it's own right, the <25 students who take still insist on not calling themselves mechanical engineers. It's kind of like...well, Scotland, really) and started plying me with recruitment leaflets.
Also, I have decided that I want to work for Schlumberger SO BAD. I realize that this makes me a corporate mulit-national whore of the largest proportions, but I DO NOT CARE. I WANT THIS JOB. Their field-engineer training thing is basically like 3 years of getting a master's degree, except you spend your time in the field all over the world. Then after you're trained you get put automatically in charge of your own field team, working on million dollar projects...it sounds awesome.
It is slightly telling that I've been at MIT too long that when the recruitment guy said "So it says on the brochure x hours a week, but to warn you, in reality you may be working on something for 36 hours straight. In a tent. Somewhere in Africa. With $100k of cement piping and a notebook," rather than being horrified I went "That sounds amazing! Do we get Mountain Dew somewhere in Africa?".

I'm currently comforting myself by flicking through the Schlumberger booklet to remind myself that this is the reason I am sitting in the Student Centre bashing my head off that problem with a 7-pin truss where my compressions and tensions never match up.

It's all worth it...or something...

And I did get a free coffee mug, too.

New MIT Resolutions

2008-09-13T22:28:30Z

This term....

1. I will sleep in my own bed for continuous, nocturnal periods of time. Not on the sofa in the theatre office at whatever time I collapse onto my homework.

2. I will not subsist off LaVerde's cookies, no matter how deceptively healthy the raisin-bran ones are.

3. The above resolutions are null and void only during prod week.

4. Tb = d(Hb)/dt + mV x Vb. Also e^i(pi) = 1. Don't question it.

5. When a group of people run past my door shouting "Come with us! We're off to gatecrash the Harvard freshman photo/pick up a giant metal fish that just came up on reuse/have a fire-spinning party in the courtyard!", I will remember that my 2.003 problem set could possibly maybe be more important. Especially if those people are freshmen.

6. Matlab is my friend. No really.

7. I will not kidnap the East Campus community drills for the three months I spend thinking about building my shelves.

8. My bowler hat is really awesome. Have you seen it?

9. Eigenfish!

10. I will come out alive at the other side...right? Yeah? Kay...

I am no longer trying to be witty

2008-08-30T03:49:36Z

I now realise that a few people read this to see what I'm doing/whether I'm still alive, so for the next while it will be full of common or garden "these are some things wot I done" format.

Classes have not started yet. This does not mean everything is not still hectic...

I spent my first week working for the Ocean Engineering department, running their orientation program to recruit new freshman (as I was recruited many months ago). We took them to various places like the New England aquarium and a recreation 18thC shipping port in Conneticut where we met various professional tall-ship sailors. One of them was telling me how a few research vessels still ran off New England and could need oceanographers, leaving me fantasising about my future career...

The freshman had to build robots, but being intelligent MIT types, they were very capable of doing it on their own. This left us, the mentors, free to create our own masterpiece: a floating armchair with propellers underneath, wired up to a control box so we could drive ourself around the MIT swimming pool in it :). I will have pictures.

After that week finished it was dorm rush, where we try to get all the freshmen to live in our dorms. Right now it's fraternity/ILG rush week, where strange student cults named after greek letters indocrinate young freshmen "pledges" and hit them with paddles by way of team-building exercises. At the edges of this there are the six MIT-affiliated independing living groups, who are not crazy 'brotherhoods', just places where people live. Our job is to band together to save the freshmen from the frats and let them live with us instead. It's a difficult task.

Also, I somehow ended up working light board for a production of 'Into the Woods'. It was a favour for the producer, who is a good friend of mine, but it's fun anyhow as it's a really good show. The set is gorgeous. The light cues are also really bleedin complicated.

Oh, and I got a job as a tutor! W00t! This means I'm dropping one class, Special Relativity, but I figured that getting paid to review Linear Differential Equations (which I really need to know...) is better than snowing myself under with a subject I don't actually need to do to graduate. And I'll still be taking 3 technical + 1 humanities classes, which is the recommended maximum unless one is a Genius Prodigy or Crazy.

What else? I'm joint Technical Director and joint Set Designer for a production of Midsummer Night's Dream. It should be really really fun - the director is awesome and his idea for the set is exactly the same as ours. Also, the rest of the prod staff are all my close friends (Anna is Lighting Designer, Kel is producer, Brianna is my other half in both jobs). So yay. Fun all round.

I must stop now, as the other 0.5TD is coming to discuss our pretty pretty set.

Love
Grace

Stereotypical MIT Discussion

2008-04-30T06:18:44Z

At 2:11 in the morning, after crawling in from the cold after a fire alarm evacuation, we somehow ended up modeling Marxism as a damped harmonic oscillator that goes through one period of oscillation before going to equilibrium (Communist ideology on y-axis, time on x-axis). Communism in practice, though, only goes oscillates through pi/2 before coming to equilibrium.

Think we may have to add further exponential decay for very large t, but not sure best way to do this. Perhaps something involving unit step function.

I should really go to bed.

Choices

2008-04-15T06:10:54Z

1. 2A + 12 ('Flexible' mechanical engineering with environmental science) - because I want to 'save the world' or similar.

2. 2OE (Ocean engineering) - because there is nothing I'd love more than to spend the rest of my life throwing robots off of boats.

3. 16 (Aero/Astro) - because it's what I came to MIT to do, and because jet engines are cool.

Comparatively few choices, yet still so many. Knowledgeable people keep telling me to just do what I really want to do and it'll work out okay. I'm trying to do that, but there's so many other complications - knowing what it actually is I want to do, worrying about what jobs I can get, knowing that sometimes I do things just because they're meant to be difficult and forget that any degree I get from MIT is going to be very challenging. Never mind that I can barely do my 18.03 p-set right now, I still find myself leaning away from 2OE because its curriculum is apparently 'easier' than the dreaded sophomore year course 16 class.

But it is MIT after all.
And throwing robots off boats is sounding like something I'd be perfectly happy doing...

On realizing what makes it all worthwhile...

2008-04-13T11:10:26Z

Moments like that are what it's all about. Looking up and wondering how you ever doubted that all the stress and pain and hard work would amount to something that would make you forget it. And, against your better judgment, want to do it again.

You also realize that although you miss knowing where your home is, where you are and who you're with are both pretty damn amazing.

So enjoy it.

:)

On Philosophy

2008-02-19T21:44:12Z

I'm really starting to like Spinoza.

Grace Loves Nerdgasms

2008-02-14T21:41:28Z

While sitting in my otherwise rather dull "Fundamentals of Engineering Design" lecture today, I suddenly had one of those awesome moments when an idea smacks you in the face with full force.

Me: ITARU!! OMG!!! So we have to build a semi-amphibious vehicle, right? That goes down a ramp into the water? We can build a SPHERE. That ROLLS!

Itaru:...?

Me: Okay, so it's weighted at the bottom so it buoys itself up, and we can have two inwardly directed motors at each of four corners so it can spin and thrust in a particular direction, all mounted inside the robot and and...it will be BADASS!!!

Itaru: Awesome! But remember, we can only have three motors and one servo.

Me: Hmm.....

Itaru: GRACE!! OMG!!! We can build a strip around the middle that is rotated by the servo, and a motor mounted on it that uses a propeller to suck up water and thrust it out at whatever angle we turn the servo to!! This is BADASS!!! This must be made!!!

Me&Itaru: *NERDGASM*

....

Me: So...this is going to be a bitch to machine.

Too gay, or not too gay...that is indeed the question.

2008-02-14T05:48:05Z

*post-rehearsal*
Me: So how did the last scene go? Was it too gay? I'm not sure what kind of thing we're going for. Does that work?

Brianna: I don't know. I can't quite extract what would look right from what everyone in the world wants to happen...

Marvolio: Don't ruin my fantasies about this play! You want Sebastian's babies!

Brianna: ...like that.

Home at last!

2007-12-28T00:13:18Z

Back where I belong...briefly.

The first term at MIT has been a strange, hectic, surreal experience that almost seems like it belongs in another universe. I can never decide whether things feel as if they happened last week or last year - I feel at once like an old hand and like I'm still completely out of my depth.

I wish I could put the whole experience in words, but I don't think there's enough space or time. In short, physics is damn hard but damn interesting, my dorm is awesome, life is never ever boring and to be honest I think of the underage-for-drink thing as being a benefit. Time is a precious commodity, and there are far better things to do with it than get shitfaced.

Now I'm back, I'm even more relieved to see Glasgow than I thought I'd be. I thought the common going-away-to-college attitude was generally 'Yes!! Freedom!!', but for some reason I don't feel that way. As amazing a place as MIT is, I still feel more at home here in the Old Country than I think I'll ever be anywhere else. Reality is very firmly here - this place with familiar voices, and irony, and nice-tasting bacon. And unlike many other returning students, I really like being back with my family. They're pretty awesome.

Ditto my old friends. To paraphrase one of them - I've made plenty of new friends in college, but few of them know me well enough to spring sexual lubricant anecdotes on me at a moment's notice. To be fair, I do that to them anyway, but it feels nice to recieve as well as give sometimes.

The best thing about being home, though? That at this time of night, after wasting some quality time on the intertubes, I can go curl up in my bed with a good book and a nice spot of tea in my Sex Pistols mug (ah, the irony), and not worry about that pset I have to finish for tomorrow or the class I have at 9am...

...Yes. It's good to be home.

Things at MIT that make me...

2007-11-15T11:13:51Z

Happy :-)

8.012 Physics: By some silly presumption of my own abilities, I signed up for 'hard physics' this term. It's a fickle mistress, to be fair, and sometimes is the most frustrating thing imaginable, but it's incredibly interesting. Also, when you've spent four hours labouring over this one problem about rotational momentum and then at 3am finally get it...it feels so damn good.
Costume Design: A Humanities class I switched into at the last minute because my friend said it sounded cool...and turned out to be one of the best decisions I've made here so far. There's nothing like relaxing between problem sets by painting giant robot suits and making imitation armour out of carpet fabric - and getting academic credit for it, too.
My room started out a bland kind of ecru, was painted initially with giant multicoloured bubbles, and now is the canvas for whatever me and my Sharpie want to produce in the early hours of the morning. So far some giant-eyeball plants, a literal clockwork orange, butterflies, a few Baron Samedi portraits, the Sex Pistols logo and a saltire.
friday juggling club - no, seriously, I'm in the juggling club. Doesn't mean I can juggle, does mean that I'm learning to...also poi, unicycle, stick-throwing etc. It's awesome fun, not least because of the fact that the first time I turned up I found that all of the people I'd met randomly during fresher's week and thought were awesome were in it too.
the fact that at any moment someone will make a sweeping scientific analogy for whatever the conversation is about, then run to the nearest whiteboard to make a graph/set of equations for it (example - one of my friends just came into my room and drew an integral for charge on a sphere - with respect to (_), radius ♥ - above my bubble-heart painting, then ran away saying 'I've been wanting to do that for a while...'). Also the fact that everyone is interesting in some way - and though not everyone is nice, none of them are stupid.
all the silly traditions and hacks and 'cultures' that no-one really takes seriously but at the same time really do. In any case, they're great fun.
The Artists and Craftsman - a small, multicoloured art supply store competing with the shiny chain 'Pearl Arts & Crafts' across the road, staffed by friendly Mass-Art students who already recognise me.
MITSFSthe MIT Science Fiction library. It takes up around the same proportion of the student body as the Science Fiction society does in most colleges, but this being MIT, where everyone is a nerd, the SFS contains the nerdiest nerds in nerdland. And is therefore awesome. It's also a nice, quiet, cosy place to curl up with a book of PKD short stories for half an hour between classes.
Sunny's - a tiny, cute little dinner close by whose coffee always somehow seems to hit the spot when you've just pulled an all-nighter to finish a physics p-set.
Those lucid moments during lecture when your brain is somehow working faster than usual and miraculously UNDERSTANDS SCIENCE!!
late friday night exploring with my friends, ending up back at East Campus to make smoothies and talk into the early hours of saturday morning.
The fact that everyone is too busy to drink
All the little awesome things that happen daily - like when someone in my hall comes back with a cannister of liquid nitrogen and we all make ice cream/frozen grapes/frozen anything we can get our hands on, getting out of campus and talking to random Bostonians, passing people riding on unicycles down the main corridor...etc.

Life here is just crazy, but fun.

I intended to make a "Things at MIT that make me sad..." list, but all I can think of right now is:
Everyone is smarter than I am. Subsequently I always feel very stupid...but then I ask around and find that, actually, everyone else feels that way too.
My laptop got stolen :-(
There are only 24 hours in a day.

...that's about it, I think!
Should sleep now...luckily I don't have class til 1pm tomorrow - so Wednesday nights are it's-okay-if-you-work-until-6am nights...or something.

That's another thing - sleep schedule here? Forget it...

And so it begins...

2007-08-24T02:13:54Z

Am now proper, bona-fide almost-MIT student. Though I have been on campus for five days already, scheduled classes are still that strange beast off on the horizon somewhere that I haven't really got round to thinking about yet. Already, though, I have paper-mached a giant wood-and-wire elephant, rode a human-sized hamster wheel, wandered through Boston to a 24-hour bakery at 1am, and many other awesome things that I am now too tired to remember. Funnily enough, the concept of 8 hours of sleep a night has already become a distant memory.

I got temped in my first choice dorm, East Campus - the rooms get juggled around next week in case people change their minds about where they want to live. I'm going to stick with it though, because it is, as they say, the awesome. The walls are covered in murals, there are cute cats everywhere and in the five days I've been here the central courtyard has been transformed from a bit of patchy grass to the building site for a twisted sort of kiddie funfair. So far a chariot powered by hamster-humans in the wheels and a mobile sofa have been constructed, and in various stages of completion are a revolving see-saw, a maze and an almost life-size elephant. The people are very friendly, and it feels like it's the best place I'd ever want to live in. In fact, to show you the awesome, here are some pictures.

My room - for now. Ceiling encroaching.

This is not actually my floor, but apparently it is Bat Country.

The common room-type bit on my floor, consisting of a fishtank, a bar, and a sewing machine.

"George Clinton was here"

Yes, people paint this kind of stuff on their doors. Jamie, you can breathe now.

...and the bathroom stalls, apparently.

The other night, some nice students got me and the other freshmen some marshmallows and a bunsen burner. It was very much appreciated.

The half-finshed East Campus elephant

A nice kitty. This one jumped into my room as soon as I arrived and started making itself at home on my suitcases.

After a few days of being herded around with the rest of the jet-lagged internationals to be told the many things I cannot do on my student visa (there are many. I give it three months before deportation) I am now doing my 'Pre-Orienation course'. Think fresher's week in a place where the drinking age is 21 and there is a regular supply of robot parts. Since my course is run by the Ocean Engineering department our robot goes underwater and so is the hottest thing since sliced awesome. My robot-building partner Anna and I christened it the AquaTardis - it travels through space, time and water, and thus is better than the Doctor's. There is an extraordinary number of American 'Doctor Who' fans at this college, actually. Which would be its own reason to go...

AQUATARDIS!

Anna giving last-minte repairs to the AquaTardis.

Some crazies on the Ocean Engineering course...

And okay, it's unrelated, but WE SAW KISMET!! The last day my mum was here we went out to the MIT Museum, where we saw the, er, anthropomorphic speech-recognition robotic head that I was obsessed with as a child. In't he cute?

Well yes, sleepy time calls now. I should really have gone to bed an hour ago, as we are up bright and early tomorrow morning to go see the guy who discovered the wreck of the Titanic. Ah, life is hard :-). Mahalo, stay alive in Amsterdam, kiddies.
♥

A stranger in a strange land...

2007-08-19T01:02:19Z

Mahalo from Cambridge, MA! I type here from Hotel MIT, which is awesome liek woah - there are robots in the lobby, equations on the bedspread, and the lifts look like something out of 2,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Maw and I arrived in Boston late last night, absolutely shattered, with our (well, okay, my) enormous suitcases in tow. I think, for maybe about half an hour, I may have regretted deciding to pack that carpet. The border control was surprisingly fast - instead of a full-scale interrogation and strip search, the tactic seemed to be to deter terrorists with the rudest Federal employee in New England. After shouting at me for not moving quickly enough, she asked me what year I was in at school. I promptly answered something like "Well, no, I'm not actually in school...see, but...but I'm starting college. I start next week. For the first time. I'm a freshman," which earned me the most soul-destroying glare I have ever received and a "That's all I needed to know, Ma'am." Note for future culture-immersion: apparently 'school' in America also means 'college'...

We were driven in to the city by an eccentric Moroccan bloke who got lost several times on the way to the hotel, but made up for it with gems like "You no need the seatbelt! I save you! I save all the ladies! These men can all go to hell!", and when Maw for some reason doubted this and changed to a safer seat: "Oh no! One of beautiful ladies has disappear! Where can she gone???". After many dramatic wrong turns ("Oh no! It is wrong street! I think someone has moved buildings over to other side!") we finally arrived in (OMG!!) MIT.

After wandering around Cambridge itself, I can honestly say that the place is AWESOME. I could really imagine leaving here. At first it seems very bizarre - like a direct cross between a fairly shady American city and a cute Swiss mountain village. The architecture is all Colonial red brick, with lots of little independent shops and cafes, and there's a very eclectic mix of people - lots of studenty types, crusty old men with wooden pipes, women in business suits, grubby guys sitting around in the street drinking a Bucky equivalent, young families, and one man who I was sure was some sort of Priest of Scientology.

There is too much to describe about Boston itself. We took a wander around today, me enjoying my brief status as a tourist before I officially live here and am no longer allowed to trek huge distances between landmarks with my nose in a guidebook. But a picture says a thousand words etc etc, so here are some pics from my brank spanking new (£80! ASDA retail price: £135! Dollar exchange rate, I love you) camera.

The lake next to Boston Common - filled with lovely weeping willows and ducks.

All styles and denominations of hooker accepted...

(Actually, apparently General Hooker is what the current usage of the word derives from - he supplied his troops with many Ladies of Negotiable Affection, who became known as Hooker's Ladies. Fact. Well, according to the Boston Time Out it is)

A wander around Beacon Hill, Boston Brahmins country. Slightly reminiscent of Westminster, and in many places has evidently not changed since the houses were built.

Miscellaneous urban stuff...

The Charles River, especially compared to our own dear syringe-filled mudflow, is very very nice. People can even sail without fear of catching diseases or running their boat into the losers of gang disputes.

Cambridge graffiti. You wouldn't know this was just across the road from MIT, would you...? I think a bit of "Tam loves the boab" might be needed to restore the universal balance.

I iz in ur walker memorial, receevin ur hivvenly lite..

I was puzzling over this one below when a nice professor-type came and told me that the occupants of the dorm room were Buddhists, and that they were "just trying to be consistent in their compassion for all living things. The hornets appreciate it." I'm sure they do.

Further along this street, I meet a bunch of guys dressing their friend up as a robot. To my immediate regret as I rounded the corner, I didn't stop to chat and ask what they were doing. Although I suspect the answer may just have been "being MIT students".

And finally...
Dome, me, grin grin, snap snap...