Archive for the 'personal' Category

Exciting new running site

August 2, 2009

Those of you who run a lot and those of us that want to go running a lot but don’t have inspiration may be interested in my sister Erin’s new blog. She’s writing up a lot of Boston running tours with historical information about the places you will run by. She’s also doing the same thing for San Francisco, where she lives now.

Eventually, I believe the idea is to turn them into podcasts that you can listen to as you run at 7-8 minutes per mile.

Anyway, I’m excited for her and thought I’d help her spread the news. Feel free to tell any of your friends in Boston or San Francisco to check out cityruntours.com.

Global Warming Board Game

January 7, 2008

So this IAP, there’s a session about creating an educational board game about global warming.  I don’t really know what that means, and I probably won’t be able to find out, because the sessions are 2-5 during the day; right when I work.  Nevertheless, I love board games and couldn’t help but start to think about how to turn the game-theory aspects of the global warming problem into a fun board game (because if I’m not in the class, why worry about educational when it could be just fun?). Read the rest of this entry »

Dancing for Engineers

January 6, 2008

Now here’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while. I started going to salsa dancing lessons fairly regularly this fall, but am having a hard time remembering the long sequences of complex moves that I learn in the MIT lessons (which are great, by the way). Even when I can remember them, it’s hard to do them on the dance floor with a girl who doesn’t also know what is coming, while staying on the beat, etc. etc. So, at some point this fall, I thought to myself that there must be a better way to learn enough sequences of moves not to bore a good follower to tears. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, another post!

January 6, 2008

So, I’ve been thinking about this blog since New Year’s – Nicola told me that I need to write down my travel horror stories for everyone to read…  However, the story is so long that I’ve been putting it off (and I’m going to continue to put it off for a while more; right now it’s way too late).

Now that I’m here, though, I noticed that I really haven’t written in an incredibly long time; I thought I wrote more than that.  Anyway, I guess history proves that I can’t promise anything on here – so, no promises of posts, etc.  You get what you get.

I have had a few thoughts of things I could write about, though, so I think I’ll write another short post tonight before I go to sleep (I hate mixing topics, so I’m not going to put it in this one).

The Results Are In – makeyourownjeans.com

August 23, 2007

My Tailored ShirtA while ago, I wrote about makeyourownjeans.com, a website that sells custom-made clothing, that I thought might be the answer to the tall (or short) person’s dilemma. It’s been a long time, but on August 6, I finally went ahead and placed an order with them for two items – a pair of jeans, and a formal shirt.

Read the rest of this entry »

New Photos

May 30, 2007

Almost ThereToday 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

May 30, 2007

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:

  1. I could give it up and suddenly not be online.
  2. I could use generic services like GMail and Blogger to maintain a basic web profile.
  3. I could host my own server either with a dynamic DNS entry or with a static IP address and dedicated hostname.

Read the rest of this entry »

New Theme

May 28, 2007

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.

I’m done!

May 27, 2007

Morning at MITLast 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.

MIT Undergraduate Advanced Project

May 20, 2007

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.