Mike's in China, doing tech stuff
Hi guys,
Just wanted to write a note that you should check my flickr site for photos. I don’t always have time to fully edit these posts and include everything, so there are a lot there that you may not have seen.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdaugherty
-Mike
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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:
A few months ago, my friend Louis Matteo performed with his band, The Modern Minstrels, at the All-Asia bar on Mass Ave. Of course, I went, because concerts are always fun, and I especially wanted to support my friend. The big surprise of the evening, though, was his opening act – Katelyn Benton. Katelyn played piano with a bass accompaniment, and even though her drummer never showed up, I really liked her piano style and voice. I decided to look for any of her future concerts in the hopes of catching the whole band together.
Well, tonight was the night. I convinced Batya to head out with me at 6:00 for the 6:30 concert. Since we were a little early, we stopped by Toscanini’s for some ice cream first. By the time we got back to the bar, the music was just starting. As expected, Katelyn’s band was really good. Her music is generally upbeat, and has a sort of bluesy feel to it. Apparently, she’s from Denver, but has a little bit of Louisiana influences via her grandmother (or aunt? She told a story about it, but I don’t remember all the details). If you want to hear a few samples of her music, you should check out her myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/katelynbenton.
After her band’s first set was done, the bass and drummer left the stage, and two guys with guitars, Will Knox and Kyle James Hauser, came up. For this section of the concert, the three of them took turns playing generally solo pieces that they had either composed or just really liked. Will and Kyle are in a band together, but tonight Will was a little better than Kyle. Apparently Kyle has only played solo twice in two years, so he hasn’t had much practice performing like this. Batya and I were both having a great time listening to the three of them, so we left slightly reluctantly when she had to go to a meeting at 8:30.
There seems to be a pretty vibrant local music scene in Boston, and I never really knew about it until this year. I’m excited, though, because maybe if I keep going to events like these, I’ll be able to continue to hear good artists and my network will just expand. I’m looking forward to hearing more.
Well, my new Midi-to-USB converter arrived in the mail today, so now I can use my Casio WK-1630 keyboard as an input to my computer. Combined with GarageBand, I think I’m going to have a lot of fun. I love the fact that I can transcribe the music I play as I play it, even when I’m just improvising. Far too often, I make up something that I kind of like, then I forget it and can never get it back. Now I can.
So far, however, I’ve only recorded one piece – it’s just me making stuff up without a plan, so there are a few shaky parts. Perhaps now that I have it transcribed, though, I’ll go back and improve upon it… Listen if you wish.
One of the great things about Burton Conner is the kitchen in every suite. Not only can we save money from not having to eat out every day, but I think it provides an opportunity for students to become more independent. Learning to cook and stock a kitchen will certainly provide rewards later in life.
Some people, however, aren’t really sure where to start or what to make. Other times, we all run out of ideas and can get a little sick of eating the same pasta night after night… To combat these problems, though, there are a number of resources that home cooks can look to for inspiration.
The Reluctant Gourmet is a site specifically devoted to home chefs. They have some great articles on general cooking techniques that you can use with whatever ingredients you happen to have (I’ve made some delicious sauces after reading their feature on pan reduction sauces).
Epicurious.com has a huge selection of professionally edited recipes that you can search through based on ingredient, and a number of other criteria. They also have a cooking dictionary that’s useful when trying to figure out what a term like “al Forno” means.
Finally, AllRecipes.com has an enormous number of user-submitted recipes. The quality of these recipes can sometimes be a little spotty (since they’re user submitted), but people also rate them, so you can at least see what others have to say.
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