I’ve recently been involved in a relatively non-trivial undertaking known as Tech Theater. For those of you not hip to the jive, Tech Theater is a small production that is put on for the incoming freshmen during their Orientation that’s written and performed by current MIT students. Its purpose is to inform them about all the ways they can avoid drinking themselves to death, and all sorts of fun and family-friendly things of that nature. Somewhere between the free dinner at one meeting, and discussions about the implications of cricket death, we all decided that the introductory video for our little play should be shot and edited in the style of the Friends intro. We’re actually going to frolic in the moat. Frolic. In the moat. On camera. Overall, I’m pretty thoroughly amused by the whole venture, and also pretty excited about getting a chance to act completely ridiculous in front of most of the new freshman class. I need to start things off on the right foot, don’t I?

It’s both comforting and somewhat disconcerting (you resolve that contradiction, I’m lazy) that summer is almost over. It’s been a pretty unusual summer for me, as far as summers go; it’s been my first summer away from home, and also the first time that I’ve worked full-time for any real length of time. I’m going to miss having up to 40 hours a week to devote to improving Timegrid, but I think it will be refreshing to move on to spending my time on other things (like classes, and stuff). There’s also the idea of people that I know (!) and like (!!) actually living on the floor, which is exciting. Perhaps even more exciting is the idea of people I don’t know moving into Burton-Conner, i.e. the freshmen, that I can corrupt enlighten.

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.

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.