Today marks a momentous occasion in the history of this little blog: the first post ever with embedded Flickr photos! You’ll have to try your best to contain your excitement; we wouldn’t want any ecstatic screaming at this hour of the night now, would we?

Browsing Facebook one lazy evening, I came across a Marketplace listing for a used Fender American Stratocaster for $450. I wasn’t actively looking for a new guitar, but this was potentially a tremendous deal, and if I were to buy another guitar, it would have been a Stratocaster anyways. My interest piqued, I e-mailed the poster and opened the appropriate lines of communication. After meeting him and playing the guitar in person, I wrote a check, and came away the proud owner of a beautiful guitar. Curiously enough, I can’t seem to quite pinpoint the exact model of the guitar, since the serial number is missing. I suspect that it has either worn away, or the neck was replaced at some point. Anyways, here are the specifications:

• White Fender Stratocaster
• 3 Rio Grande pickups
• Vintage tremolo, temporarily stopped for more sustain
• 21 frets
• One-piece maple soft-V contour neck

And the promised pictures:

If anyone needs me, I’ll be channeling Stevie Ray Vaughan and wailing away in my room (which, incidentally, I moved into about a week and a half ago).  I’d post pictures of it, but that would oversaturate this post with pixels, and they’d start dripping all over the place and everything would just get messy.

I haven’t posted here lately, which doesn’t bode well for the future continuity of this blog, but hopefully my post velocity with respect to time isn’t a simple linear function.

I actually had the distinct pleasure of having my four wisdom teeth removed this morning, an experience that turned out far less unpleasant that I’d anticipated. The procedure itself was completely painless, since I was asleep during the painful bits. My only real complaint is that I’m unable to eat any real food for a few days, but it’s not nearly as bad as when I first got my braces on (two weeks). Until I get the stitches out, I’ll be resting and relaxing at home, consuming as much ice cream and mashed potatoes as I can stomach.

Other than that, I’ve spent the past week or so alternating between working at my UROP, sleeping (including napping), and frantically trying to paint my summer room so that I can finally move all of my worldly possessions at MIT into it, which doesn’t leave too much time for blogging. At least, that’s how I rationalize it in my head.

My UROP has been going well; I actually physically go to work at CSAIL now, instead of sitting in front of my desktop in my room in my pajamas. It helps keep me disciplined and focused, and it’s nice to be able to interact with the other UROPs working under my professor. I’ve got a bit of a head start on them, since I’ve been working at Simile for an entire semester already, but I suspect that they’ll catch up quickly. Timegrid is coming along nicely. I recently tore out the rendering algorithm and completely rewrote it, due to a realization that my old design made a few features impossible or difficult to implement. The new algorithm essentially renders events and gridlines as absolutely positioned <div> elements in a container div, instead of relying on a <table> element to render lines and cells for me. The DOM actually turns out much cleaner, at the expense of a bit more code complexity.

Painting my room was a whole different venture entirely. I had actually agonized about the design and color scheme of the room for at least two weeks before actually painting, and my poor friends had to put up with some of the most ridiculously hideous combinations of color that my imagination dared bring into existence (”How about lime green, pink, and dark blue?”). I eventually settled on a comparatively tame design, with walls alternating between green and blue themes. Each wall has a larger top portion painted a light shade of the theme color, a stripe of white, and a smaller bottom portion painted a dark shade of the theme color. I still picked lime green as my light green shade, but overall the room gives off an interesting vibe laying somewhere between “responsible adult” and “oh my god, my retinas are on fire.”

I’ll take pictures once the room settles into a happy equilibrium.

This summer, I’m working as a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity) at MIT’s CSAIL. I don’t think I’ve ever made a post about my actual project, Timegrid, so I think I’ll do that now.

My task is to design and develop a client-side Javascript framework that takes event data in some format (iCal, XML, etc.) and renders it out to a number of different, configurable, dynamic views. What kind of views will Timegrid support? For starters, it will support all of the views that Google Calendar is currently capable of: weekly, monthly, etc. Timegrid is more flexible than Google Calendar though. Imagine that you want to render a table of events happening in various locations, and you want each column to represent a different room, and each row to represent a starting time. Timegrid will be able to handle that as well.

Timegrid is designed to be easily configurable, incredibly flexible and customizable, clean, and beautiful. Good thing I have all summer to work on it.

Timegrid Project Page