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.

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.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t updated lately. I was pretty sick over the weekend, so I haven’t had much of a chance. By the time I was finally feeling a little better on Sunday, I had to go to lab from 9-4.

This semester, I’m taking 6.163 – Strobe Lab, and Sunday was the orientation day for photography in general (i.e. lenses, image formation, chemistry, dark room procedure, etc.). I actually felt that I learned a good amount of material. I’ve always had a little bit of an interest in photography (as evidenced by some of my experiments with Flickr this summer), but never much experience. I hope this semester will give me the a chance to take some fun photographs and learn skills that I can use in the future. I could see photography being an entertaining hobby after I graduate.

Tonight, I again had to go to lab (7:30-10:30), but this time it was to perform the first experiment. The basic way that strobe photography works is as follows:

1. the room is darkened
2. the camera shutter is opened
3. some process is started
4. a trigger synchronizes a delay mechanism with the process
5. after the delay, a strobe flashes, which records an image onto the film
6. the shutter is closed
7. the lights are turned back on

In this case, the process we studied was balloon popping. Pretty standard (this is the first lab), but useful for trying different sorts of triggers. We had the most success with an audio trigger for the strobe during this experiment. We set up a microphone to record the sound of the balloon popping, which creates a spike of voltage. Once we recorded that voltage, a delay (~1ms) elapsed before the strobe fired. This timing worked well, because the balloon took about 2ms to pop completely. Hopefully the pictures we took turned out, as well… If they did come out, I’ll see if I can find somewhere to scan them into a computer and post a few online.

As usual, I’ll end this posting by promising to write more later. I have already started two more entries, but it’s getting late, and I should try to get some sleep before class tomorrow at eleven. Goodnight, World!