I had the opportunity to see the Transformers movie today with a few friends, and while I’m not going to review the movie here (it was awesome, ’nuff said), it inspired a few thoughts that I thought I’d post about. Basically, if this post bores, offends, or otherwise intrudes on your quality of living, you can blame Michael Bay and his ridiculously cool movie.

Do you ever watch a movie where the characters, who are otherwise just regular shmucks trying to make it through another day, get tangled up into a conflict larger than most people see in a lifetime? Frodo never asked to leave the Shire. He seemed pretty happy right where he was, but he ventures out; he risks his life for something bigger than himself. People in movies like that go through trials and torments that are only tolerable to witness because we have a the protection of reality, a thin screen dividing Frodo and his ring from our safe, air-conditioned seats and overpriced popcorn. Those giant robots that tore through buildings like so much tissue paper are placed safely in the realm of impossibility. Even movies where the element of fantasy takes a backseat to the element of realism are thus tamed.

Good movies erase that boundary, if only for an hour or two.  We can all easily sit back and point out all the reasons why giant autonomous robots from Cybertron could never crash land on our planet.  It’s more fun to lower your defenses for a while though, suspend your disbelief, and for just a little while, live vicariously through the characters on the screen trying desperately to save their world from extinction.  It’s a strange and exhausting sensation for me, to feel all of these big, noble emotions.  Maybe we all want to taste, even for a second, what it feels like to have something more to worry about than whether we’re going to finish our next project on time.

When I walk out of a movie like The Lord of the Rings or Transformers, I always feel exhausted.  More than that though, I always have trouble going back to my life, unenhanced by special effects and unplagued by absolute evils, and not feeling a little insignificant.  How can I possibly have any real problems compared to those characters?  I don’t have any worlds to save, evil rings to destroy, or Persians to defeat in glorious, slow-motion combat.  All I have are my comparatively inane worries that I’m not getting enough sleep, that I need to make myself dinner tonight.  Ironically enough, my life is the one that winds up feeling contrived and artificial.

The feeling never lasts too long though.  I guess I just go back to my regular life and get used to it.

Delicious, warm, flaky biscuits, but without any gravy, unfortunately.

I got my first B ever today, an event whose supposed significance is surpassed only by its actual complete and utter meaninglessness. I guess that means that my tiny inner Asian is dead after all, or just that the forces of apathy have captured him and placed him in an uncomfortably small, toroidal cage. In all honestly, I tried my best in the class, and I don’t really think anyone is going to be too miffed about a B+ in “The Art of the Probable,” a class so ill-defined and cross-curriculum that I had difficulty explaining what it was to others not because they wouldn’t understand, but because I myself didn’t understand.

So now I’m sitting in my room at home, listening to some downtempo lounge electronica in my pajamas, and wondering how much of a blog post I can honestly write about absolutely nothing without feeling genuinely guilty. It’s been nice to be at home after an admittedly difficult semester; I think I’ve put on at least a few pounds in the past few days, something I’ll have to remedy once I head back to campus. Man, this electronica just got really blippity and bloopity all of a sudden. I’d skip the song, but it’s Pandora, and they tell me that every time I skip a song they brutally slaughter an infant of some adorable animal species. Oh, it just changed on its own. Guilty yet? So far so good.

So after about nine months of trial and tribulation, my first year at MIT has been vanquished. I’d be lying if I said it was easy, but I’ll skip the cliché and spare you all the reasons why it was hard.

I’ll probably have more to write later; I’d like to resuscitate this blog over the coming summer, and probably consolidate it with my LiveJournal as well.

I had hot dogs for lunch today, which I heated up on the stove and consumed on some toasted hot dog buns with ketchup. As I was reheating my meaty treat, I realized something: you can cook a hot dog in just about every way you can imagine, and it will still taste just fine. In fact, more often than not, they wind up tasting delicious. Just off the top of my head, you can: microwave, boil, steam, broil, bake, stir-fry, grill, and roast them. Beyond the method of cooking, hot dogs also have an extraordinary tolerance for how much they are actually cooked. As long as the middle is warm, and the outside isn’t on fire, your hot dog will turn out just fine. How many other foods can claim such versatility? Not many, I assure you.

So when designing a piece of software, robot, building, or anything else that demands reliability, remember: be as the hot dog. Be versatile. Be durable. Be strong. Most of all, be delicious.

I was thinking yesterday of things I could write about in my blog, and a lot of them seemed really interesting and amusing, the sorts of things that people tend to want to read about. Of course, they were almost all anecdotes from my personal life, or just random oddities that I had stumbled over. So how could I possibly write about them in a blog that’s supposed to be strictly informational?

It’s simple really: change the premise of the blog and pretend that nothing happened.

So welcome back to exactly the same thing. It’s always been this way. Really. I promise.

Hey everyone, this is the first post in my experimental foray into WordPress blogging. Exciting.

I have plans for this blog, big plans.  Let me explain.  I’ve been trying to quit Slashdot/digg recently, seeing as the level of commentary on those sites has been reduced to screaming 14 year old boys trying to out-1337 each other.  Of course, I still need somewhere to find neat news about everything a geek might be interested in, including but not limited too: hardware, software, programming, web development, gaming, science/technology developments, music, and monkeys.

So, being the enterprising and naive soul that I am, I have this dream of turning this blog into a source of all of the above.  Wish me luck.