05.30.07
New Photos
Today I looked at two apartments up in Davis Square with Erin. Unfortunately, neither of them was really great, so I think we have to keep looking. On the way back to the dorm, however, I did get some stuff done. I had my camera with me, so I decided to just walk around campus a little and take some pictures. You can see the results on Flickr.
A Post Free-Web-Hosting World
I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my online presence after graduation for a while now. I had a few choices about what I could do once my MIT hosting disappeared:
- I could give it up and suddenly not be online.
- I could use generic services like GMail and Blogger to maintain a basic web profile.
- I could host my own server either with a dynamic DNS entry or with a static IP address and dedicated hostname.
05.28.07
New Theme
As some of your may have noticed, I have a new theme for my blog. This one is basically Vertigo Blue by Brian Gardner. Thankfully for me, he released the theme for free for people to use. All I had to do was make new versions of the header graphics and slightly modify the sidebar (I didn’t like how the links displayed), and I was off.
Unfortunately, soon after changing the theme, I noticed a sharp drop in visitors on my Google Analytics reports. Since my readership is so low anyway, I first attributed this just to people being busy and/or not noticing anything. However, after three days of zero visitors showing up (even when I tried to make visitors show up by visiting myself), i realized something was wrong. Turns out, I forgot that the display of WordPress blogs is entirely decided by the theme, and the way I had gotten Analytics working before was to put the javascript code into the theme footer. So, when I changed the theme, I also eliminated all the tracking code from my website. It’s back in there again (you can check), so everything should be back to normal.
So, in conclusion, let me know if you like the new theme. I’m a little worried that I won’t be able to keep it over the summer when I will probably host my blog on wordpress.com for free, but I guess I’ll figure that out when it’s absolutely necessary.
05.27.07
Gone With The Wind – Too Good
This post on Marginal Revolution was too funny not to mention to all my readers who are fans of Gone With the Wind. Is it really too good to read?
I’m done!
Last night, a number of my senior friends and I had a huge party. Everyone’s finals were finally over, and we are going to graduate! The party was fun and all, but personally, I didn’t feel 100% done yet because I hadn’t actually seen confirmation that my finals went well enough for me to graduate. This morning, I received that confirmation.
After I woke up (late, of course), I decided to check my degree audit online again to see if anything new had been posted, and there it was… I had enough credits! The only piece still missing is the credit for my UAP, but since I personally turned in the UAP grade report and saw the “A” written on it, I feel ok. In 13 days, I will be an MIT Grad. I can finally turn my ring around and move on with my life. I can’t wait.
05.25.07
It Won’t Be Soon Before Long – Maroon 5
I just finished listening to Maroon 5’s new album, It Won’t Be Soon Before Long. I have to say, on the first listen, it’s not as good as their first effort, Songs About Jane, but perhaps it needs to grow on me.
Chen said it best when she described many of the new songs as “more poppy” than before. For example, the first single, Makes Me Wonder, is definitely a dance song – so much so, that it almost sounds like disco. However, after a few listens, I have begun to appreciate it a bit more; it can certainly get stuck in your head.
05.21.07
Useful Guitar Hero
When I bought my MIDI cable a while ago, I had assumed that mostly I’d be recording myself play piano, and I have done that a bit. However, it turns out that there is more to having a MIDI keyboard than recording. You can also play games with it.
One of my favorites is Synthesia – a Guitar Hero clone, but for piano. I love the concept of this; Guitar Hero is such a fun and addictive game that some people will play for long hours to become good at it. Why not use the same format to teach people a useful skill?
05.20.07
MIT Undergraduate Advanced Project
As of Friday, I am done with every requirement for an undergraduate degree in computer science from MIT, except for one not-too-troublesome final! I had quite a time trying to get my UAP (senior project and write-up) finished on time… Which didn’t quite happen. However, I talked to Anne Hunter (course administrator) and received permission to turn it in one day late, which gave me just enough time to go through another revision with my great adviser, Barbara Barry.
My project ended up being some work in story-analysis using common sense (provided by ConceptNet, another Media Lab project) as well as trying a new approach to anaphora resolution (basically determining antecedents for pronouns), which didn’t rely so much on common sense.
If you’re really interested, you can download the paper I wrote. I also am planning on releasing the source code to my project by the end of the month, though I want to get through my linear-algebra final first before I clean it up and put it on a webpage somewhere.
05.19.07
Apartments and KML
I’ve been looking for apartments lately, so I’m constantly looking at Craigslist postings, finding the addresses, putting them in Google Maps, and trying to estimate how far they are from the T-Stop, whether it’s a good location or not, etc.. However, this morning I realized that Google Earth is a great tool for this. You can add more than one address, check distances, etc.
So, I decided to play around with KML a little bit and make a map of where I want my apartment to be. Now, I can just put the address in Google Earth and see if it makes it into my desired area quickly. Check it out:
