"A word about my personal philosophy. It is anchored in optimism. It must be, for optimism brings with it hope, a future with a purpose, and therefore, a will to fight for a better world. Without this optimism, there is no reason to carry on. If we think of the struggle as a climb up a mountain, then we must visualize a mountain with no top. We see a top, but when we finally reach it, the overcast rises and we find ourselves merely on a bluff. The mountain continues on up. Now we see the 'real' top ahead of us, and strive for it, only to find we've reached another bluff, the top still above us. And so it goes on, interminably.

"Knowing that the mountain has no top, that it is a perpetual quest from plateau to plateau, the question arises, 'Why the struggle, the conflict, the heartbreak, the danger, the sacrifice. Why the constant climb?' Our answer is the same as that which a real mountain climber gives when he is asked why he does what he does. 'Because it's there.' Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys in a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of an illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the unknown. Paradoxically, they give up the dream of what may lie ahead on the heights of tomorrow for a perpetual nightmare -- an endless succession of days fearing the loss of a tenuous security. ...

"At times we do fall back and become discouraged, but it is not that we are making no progress. Simply, this is the very nature of life -- that it is a climb -- and that the resolution of each issue in turn creates other issues, born of plights which are unimaginable today. The pursuit of happiness is never-ending; happiness lies in the pursuit."

Hello again from Berkeley! There was a fire drill today! The annunciator horns in Stanley Hall are very polite.

"May I have your attention please!," they called. "May I have your attention please! A fire emergency has been reported in the building. While this is being verified, please leave the building by the nearest available exit or exit stairway. Do not use the elevators."

Happily I had just finished in the tissue culture hood, so I pulled my stuff out, took off my lab coat, dithered about whether to bring my laptop (I didn't), and otherwise did as the nice man said while the lab manager pulled on a reflective vest and a plastic helmet. Maybe there was actually a small hood fire? Something was venting white smoke at the roof level. In any case, the Berkeley FD showed up but we were back in the building in about fifteen minutes. It was a nice day.

For several good reasons, Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed has been on my headphones several times tonight. Though good reasons would be less relevant if it weren't so damn catchy. Seriously, I fucking love the production on it. Triumphant layers of guitars with screaming violins crashing in over cymbals FTMFW.

( lyric spam is good for you )

So I have like three weeks left in the lab. CRAP! Just starting to make friends with the not-mine grad students, too.

Anyway ttylz bai

hey guess what, ljfriends! i'm in berkeley!

i've been here for about a week... i've hung out with maia in the mission and glennis around golden gate park and ellen downtown and all of the kids in the amgen program here around berkeley! and i JUST ran into elana on the street! anyway i'm doing vascular graft engineering oriented kinds of things in the li lab at ucb... i think the focus of the project will be comparing in vitro assays of vascular biocompatibility (doesn't encourage blood clots, degrades, supports endothelial cell attachment) between electrospun nanofiber films of a couple of different polymers.

i also tried (and failed, i'm pretty sure, though we'll find out soon) to isolate endothelial and smooth muscle cells from a rat artery sample. it's hard to lose to a diced rat, but i don't think i won, either.

soooooooo give a holler if you're in the bay area and we'll see what's up i guess! so far i think i like berkeley, THOUGH (this is a critical flaw) there's no really decent coffee to be had south of campus as far as i can tell. please let me know if i'm wrong!

Went on a total weaksauce run today. It felt TERRIBLE. I thought I would let you know.

HAY GUYS what should I do in Manhattan? I get in to New York midday Wed and I'm leaving Thu evening; I'm spending the intervening night with Matt Ritter after checking out the Amazon Web Services meetup.

Ideas I have so far are:
- the Guggenheim.

While cool, this is a very short list for a potentially very full day of New Yorkin' it up! LET ME KNOW.

I've been chilling in Charlottesville this week, doing a very little bit of helping my parents move in. Major projects so far have included doing reading for Tissue Engineering, finding REU's for this summer, and starting work on my bizarre Frankenstein synchronization web service.

Observations so far:
- Google's documentation consists of a set of examples. This is very useful if you are trying to duplicate their examples. It is less useful if you are not. Would it kill them to provide an annotated list of objects and methods? pydoc is nice but insufficient; the SNR is poor.
- Trust me on this one: suds is the Python SOAP client library that you want to use. It's actively maintained and uses modern Python XML libraries, unlike say all of the other ones.
- NTLM authentication is a pain in the ass, but python-ntlm (a new project!) makes it easy, with urllib2. I'm glad I didn't try to write this app a month ago.
- Microsoft ships an incomplete WSDL file with Exchange and didn't bother to document it. What? Who does that?

Anyway, about those REUs. TTYLz baiii

So this one time Maia took us snowboarding at Mt. Baker.

( Here are some things I wrote about the experience! )

Anyway Roland was reunited with his stuff in time and nobody died! Day 3 was probably the most fun; I will update with stories about it... later.

Hello, Blogterwebnets! It's the first day of the year and I'm trapped inside a pressurized aluminum tube hurtling over the Midwest, so why not engage in some critical thought and reflection about the past year, eh what?

( Also can I just say that CHRIS MORSE YOU HAD BETTER BE WRITING MY CALTECH REC RIGHT NOW PLZ. <3 )

It'll take me a while to come up with a proper set of resolutions. Stay tuned!?

does anyone remember how jon ballard on dc101 did a pm drivetime thing called "make it stop"? because it was awesome.

( answers to previous memesheepery )

anyway, as dopplr'd, i'm flying bos -> iad mid-morning tomorrow for thanksgiving break and i'll be kicking around fairfax for most of the week, with maybe a trip down to charlottesville. as it happens, my family is slowly moving south -- i think we'll officially relocate somewhere around winter break, but my mom's already living in c'ville several days a week.

so that's the news you can use. hope to see some of you!

and their first lines. you know what to do

i haven't meemed in like forever guys! i mad cheated on these s.t. i think i would get most of them, though even some of these are total blasts from the past.

1. is this a fling? seven days and you're already vanishing kimble
2. ________, i do believe i failed you; ________, i know i've let you down. don't you know i've tried so hard, to love you in my way... srin
3. this is the proper place, i'm growing older without grace, all of the people sing, contented with the urban routine
4. his goal in life was to be an echo, riding alone town after town toll after toll
5. yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah spiraloflife
6. in the name of and by the power of the holy spirit, may we invoke your intercession for the children of england tallandquiet
7. (uh. this is a song to our friends.) where do we go from here? the words are coming out all weird, where are you now when i need you? drew harry
8. my my you busted me, like a robocop strike me, with your riding crop, i'm forever going celibate
9. baby, hey ey, heyyyyy, babyy. (x3) and i thank my lucky stars every day for indoor plumbing, 'cause i know nobody knows where i'd have ended up without it
10. you looked so good in the clothes of a poseur, and when you smiled all the kids fell apart here ahmerora
11. even though i'll never need her, even though she's only given me pain / i'd be on my knees to feed her, spend the day to make her smile again topaz
12. i stand firm for a soil, lick em rock em force
13. used to be one of the rotten ones and i liked you for that
14. you say you stand by your man / tell me something, i don't understand / you said you loved me, that's a fact / then you left me, said you felt trapped
15. dark in the city, night as a wire, steam in the subway, earth is on fire
16. it's the quiet night that breaks me. i cannot stand the sight of this familiar place oceanschild
17. your friends hold a lullaby, they washed away the night lies, soft send to tackle radio oceanschild (unclaimed bonus: honey from the tombs)
18. it's crazy but often clear, often clear / we shimmer and disappear / in color, in black and white (black and white) / we slowly fade out of sight oceanschild
19. leo, they'll forgive you / leo, they'll forgive you / for the taking everything away kimble
20. it's not far to go, it's not far at all (x2) / pull out that water-soaked coat there's not much to say that i don't know

"It's all going to change, Yamazaki. We're coming up on the mother of all nodal points. I can see it, now. It's all going to change."
"I don't understand."
... "I've been looking at history, Yamazaki. I can see the nodal points in history. Last time we had one like this was 1911."
"What happened in 1911?"
"Everything changed."
"How?"
"It just did. That's how it works. I can see it now."

[hundreds of pages later]

"These people are about to change human history in some entirely new way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911 --"
"What happened in 1911?" the Rooster demands.
Laney sighs. "I'm still not sure. It's complicated and I haven't had the time to really look at it. Madame Curie's husband was run over by a horse-drawn wagon, in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start there."

William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

So I use Mycrocosm to graph the number of unread emails in my inbox each morning, because I think it's funny/tragic. But I got tired of doing it myself, so I wrote a script to do it for me.

I call it mycromail, and you can find it here: http://tim-smith.us/projects/mycromail/mycromail.zip

If you call it from cron every morning, its output will look like this: http://mycro.media.mit.edu/dataset/show/2675

It logs in to your IMAP mailboxes, grabs the total number of unread emails in a list of folders that you specify, and then uses your Twitter account to send (a) direct message update(s) to Mycrocosm. This requires that Mycrocosm knows your Twitter username (on your "My Profile" page).

The Mycrocosm dataset you point it at must already exist. I recommend a line graph grouped by date.

You could make this into a web service and make millions have no users and -- bonus! -- have creepy access to your friends' email, but I've spent enough time on this.

Let me know what you think!

Hey NoVa-types! Barack Obama will be joining you in communist country Fake Virginia Manassas Park on Monday with Virginia's next junior Senator, Mark Warner!

Sign up for details here: http://www.markwarner2008.com/nova

So jealous! <3

Hello world! I have not posted in basically forever. In case you were wondering about me, here is what you need to know. I guess.

Things I am doing:
- Classes. Being: SCOPE (mandatory year-long project for a corporate client), Computational Modeling (in which I have yet to model anything), Modernism and the Making of New (lit class at Babson), and Advanced Topics in Cell Regulation (at Wellesley). I'm not doing as much work as I really need to be, yet. I'm pretty sure I'm going to take CompMod pass/fail -- it is vastly less relevant than I had expected/hoped, and seems to be mostly a data structures and algorithms class. So far, we haven't covered anything hard that I didn't touch in APCS freshman year at TJ. Modernism is psychically terrible for me: apparently I have the same amplified, self-conscious neuroses as Joyce and Eliot and it sucks having in thrown back in my face, always, but it's still a fun class. Cell Regulation is fantastic and I'm spending a lot of time on readings for it. And it's taught by a TJ grad! SCOPE is design, which is exhausting. My team is working for Pearson Education, which has probably published at least one textbook you own.

- CORe. Being: Olin's student government, of which I am Vice President of Student Initiatives, which means I do committee assignments. Mostly. It's been a pretty big timesink and I need to really start paying attention to care and feeding of committee representatives.

- Campaigning for Obama in New Hampshire! I was in Milford, NH today canvassing undecided voters. It's a good time. And important. And lots of walking, which is good for you. All in all: win.

- Working a few hours a week for Arsenal Medical, the same stealthy biotech I was working for this summer (they changed their name). Lately, this has meant a lot of filing/fixing bugs in CellProfiler, which is an excellent software package despite its barely functional user interface / workflow tools and heavy MATLAB dependency (which is damn expensive outside the academic market, by the way).

- Never leaving campus except for one of the above reasons. :( Needham: it's pretty boring.

- Living in "Gay Hall." Three suites were like, "hey! We're friends. We should live together in a north wing of East Hall." And then we noticed that nearly all of the out LGBTQSA kids (and a fair chunk of the student government, actually) at Olin were in one of those suites. The name stuck.

- Not very much work. Especially right now. I will get back to that. Bye!

not to go buy an Aspire One right now.

Ahhhh. This afternoon was wonderful in all its pre-autumnal glory. On the way home, I looked out on the Charles River Basin and decided I wanted to go jogging, so I did. I came back (it was wonderful), showered, grabbed my copy of Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and a falafel from Falafel Palace, and retired to a park just up the way from my apartment and ate my falafel while reading about Haruki Murakami looking out on the same Charles River Basin and renewing his laid-away habit of running. Huh! Msr. Murakami also noted Cambridge's summer inevitability of Sam Adams Summer Ale, of which I've quaffed my share these last months. Fun to have some degree of empathy with possibly (for reasons I don't necessarily understand) my favorite author ever.

The director of biology sat me and the other intern down and told us that we should know where we want to be and run for it. She said she stumbled from one position to another almost by accident, and wishes she'd had a little more direction. I was chatting with one of the senior scientists (who's not all that senior, either) today and she said something similar! And neither of them are US natives; the director is Iranian by way of England and Australia and the scientist was born and raised in China, so it's not like they didn't take big steps for their careers. I guess I should give a little thought now and then to the idea that inshallah I'll be thirty, forty, fifty someday...

Also, thought this was funny: Someone did a quick survey and the Hillary Clinton alumni email list is putting its money on Joe Biden as Obama's VP pick. Though who knows how informed they really are -- Hillary got 23% of the votes. (Wishful thinking?)

I woke up this morning and intended to clean out my inbox and start packing and cleaning (I move out of my summer sublet on Saturday; I'm camping out with the Somerville kids for three nights before moving in to Olin on Tuesday evening). Instead, I realized it was a beautiful day.

After going shopping and purchasing my last summer week's worth of food (mostly bagels and things that go with rice), I took a freezing cold shower (the hot water has since returned) and mucked around with the Boston Harborwalk Fort Point Channel mp3 tour. It took me half a damn hour to get the mp3s onto my Zune, by which point I had lost interest -- I'd at least seen the neighborhood before, on the way to taking my GREs (which were successfully reported! despite my never showing ID -- oops?), and I kind of think they're astroturfing some of the neighborhood's cool factor. So I got off the Red Line at Park Street instead of South Station and walked around the Commons and Garden for a bit before starting in on the Freedom Trail, which I followed all the way up to the Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown. I got to walk on the USS Constitution about five minutes before it closed for the evening, which was kind of cool! I have some generally unremarkable photos which I'll probably post eventually. I think it's pretty badass that the Boston Massacre victims are buried right next to Sam Adams. We knew how to agitate, back in our day. Also, brick townhouses on Monument Ave in Charlestown: gorgeous! (Zillow says they're in the $800-1000k range, which might be attainable someday, and WalkScore gives them a respectable 81 for walkability. Though now I'm spoiled - Central Square has a score of 94! Olin? Like, 50. D:) I say things like "yeah, I don't really worry about my future salary" but then things like real-estate break that down.

I really like watching snare drum hits and low bass thumps on oscilloscope visualizations.

What's the difference between a Fast Fourier Transformation and a Fourier transformation done quickly?

Anyway, to-do:
- Show some progress towards any of the mid-term goals mentioned previously (oops)
- Clean out inboxes
- Begin packing
- Clean out room
- Buy some non-ugly clothes for crying out loud

Funny how it looks like the list of things I was going to do this weekend. ;P

Mid-term goals:
- Develop a coherent style and/or philosophy of management and/or government. Apply it through CORe and/or SCOPE.
- Understand the wars/genocide(s) in former Yugoslavia/Serbia/what the hell ever happened in that region anyway. AHS Capstone?
- Scope out labs; figure out where I want to go to grad school.

This weekend was good for me psychically. Nantucket with Jobim, Angela, Andrea, and her family on Saturday -- we daytripped out and stayed at (count the links) Andrea's mother's boyfriend's sister's house. It was a beautiful day at the beach, and I got to try my hand on their inflatable windsurfing board, which was an impressive amount of fun. The thing about Nantucket is that even mentioning Nantucket (and most of the Cape, really) makes you sound like a pretentious bag or an aspirant to the landed gentry. Fun to experience, though, and I'd go back in a heartbeat! Today I spent several hours at Simon's cleaning out my inbox, biking straight past 1369 in Inman in the process (and good riddance). The yerba mate latte at Simon's is interesting but at medium size, the flavor of the mate is almost completely lost in the milk (with or without its charming trademark latte-art heart).

Thao Nguyen with the Get Down Stay Down are playing TT's on Tuesday! It's an 18+ show, even. I'm picking up tickets tomorrow; give a holler if you want one.

My damn laptop keeps locking up on the docking station. I reimaged at the end of the year but whatever causes the hanging has persisted / was reinstalled. Boo. Makes it a lot harder to, you know, use.

I expressed a number of interesting sentiments tonight. I intend to follow up on essentially none of them. Is the unimplemented, examined life as fatal as the merely unexamined? Perhaps it's worse: overexamination leads to paralysis, thus compounding indirection with hesitation.

I wonder what this semester will be like. I have a lit class at Babson that meets for 2.5 hours on Tuesday nights. The Stars and Dandy Warhols concert in early September is on a Tuesday night. Crap guys what do I do! I guess I have already seen Stars this year and don't really need to see the Dandy Warhols, but augh. Torquil Campbell! Amy Millan! I hope you will forgive me. Then again, I know that professor, and she will definitely forgive me. Hmmm.

In secret, we believe we're nothing nothing nothing that we need.
I almost really really like Mates of State. I would probably LOVE them remixed or covered. By the Postal Service. Yes.

Two weeks of work left!

If you've talked to me lately I've probably babbled at you about David Foster Wallace's 1996 opus Infinite Jest and how shockingly amazing it is. I'm re-reading it and I'm up to page 128 of its 981-excluding-footnotes pages. Because I'm actually this obnoxious and the book is actually that amazing, I'm going to proceed to quote a couple of completely non-representative passages at you, one because I love the dialogue and one because it made me giggle in quite an undignified fashion. Enjoy! Or not! See if I care!

( excerpt 1 )

==

( excerpt 2 )

that is all goodnight!

( a list )

Saw AYLI on the Commons last night. Way, way not my favorite Shakespeare comedy.

On the line "newfangled as an ape":

newfangled: c.1470, "addicted to novelty," lit. "ready to grasp at all new things," from adj. newefangel "inclined to take" (c.1386), from new + -fangel, from root of O.E. fon "to capture" (see fang). Sense of "lately come into fashion" first recorded 1533. (dictionary.com.)

So he's calling her easily distracted. Huzzah!

This next semester is going to be generally pretty intense. I'm registered for 20 credits, but I knew that wasn't going to last and I think I'll drop HDK's phage class unless the syllabus seems unusually compelling. Also, if I keep having to talk people down from hysterical and uninformed accusations of my incompetent, elitist failure, being CORe VPSI is going to take a bigger emotional toll than I really want it to. We'll see how that goes. Alisha (Olin BioE prof) and I met at Ula Cafe in JP yesterday and talked about grad school and SCOPE and confocal microscopes and faculty drama and it was good and grounding and purpose-giving. Not that I really know what I want my life to look like, but I have a better idea of how to take the first steps. Also, noticed that I have unrealistically high expectations for myself and corresponding insecurity in essentially all aspects of my life! Should work on that, somehow?

Okay! Let's make this happen.

It has been a Long Weekend of Action! (tm).

Friday, 7/4: Project Best Idea Ever 4.0.
This is maybe the most awesome thing I've done in Boston yet. Man Hall alumni, ring-led by Anthony Roldan and Andrew Coats, organized a flotilla of more than 20 inflatable rafts on the less toxic than previously! Charles River for the fireworks (which, for the uninitiated, are launched from a barge on the river between the Harvard/Mass Ave and Longfellow bridges, thus making the river itself an excellent viewing point). We assembled at Beef & Beer house in Somerville to receive our life vests and flags, MBTA'd it to the BU Bridge to pick up our rafts and head down to the BU boathouse (perhaps illegally crossing Storrow Drive in the process -- shh), where we inflated our watercraft, entered the river, and headed east. We paused at the Mass Ave bridge to wait for the stragglers to catch up and enjoy hot dogs, grilled on the water by Anthony and Coats with camping stoves jury-rigged to a canoe (!), before continuing to our anchor point at the edge of the restricted zone.

It was a beautiful evening on the water. Experiencing a sunset on the Charles is [HIGHLY RECOMMENDED] -- it set up this awesome orange glow on the water and over the MIT dome. The goings-on were sufficiently amplified that we could clearly hear the Boston Pops and the utterly inane radio announcers (who we mocked without pity). On the other hand, we could also hear Rascal Flats, so I guess it was sort of a mixed bag. The fireworks themselves were almost overwhelming in their sheer volume, both audibly and visibly. 22,000 pounds of explosives (per the Globe) puts on a hell of a show. I think the jellyfish/Pac-Man ghosts were my favorite, though the upside-down smiley faces were pretty awesome.

Afterwards, our exit was facilitated by a convenient dinghy dock at the Esplanade, where we deflated our rafts and dripped our way back to the Red Line. Somewhere on Beacon Street, a woman in the mold of a Boston Brahmin, observing our life jackets and oars and our direction of travel (away from the water), jovially asked us where the boat was -- I pointed to the folded raft my boat buddy Alorah was carrying and said "right here!" She laughed bemusedly. I grinned.

All in all, a brilliant success. I've never been prouder of our national pyromania. Beef and Beer folks deserve "mad props" for flawless execution.

Saturday was a bit less eventful, in that I woke up at 11, sat in my room all day, and posted journal articles to my tumblelog (kumokasumi_tmbl). Oops. George S. dragged me out of my apartment for dinner at Nine Tastes in Harvard Square, which was tasty.

Sunday, I headed up to Diesel in Somerville to check it out and chat with Chris Morse before he leaves town for a puzzle conference. It's probably my favorite coffeehouse yet -- large and well-lit, with ample seating (apparently it wasn't very crowded this morning) and well-executed decor. And good coffee! -- they serve Intelligentsia. How can you lose? Then I met up with spiraloflife, who also had a quiet Saturday and was in the mood for Action. We went to an Indian restaurant in JP for the lunch buffet and then hit up the Museum of Fine Arts (for free!) for the afternoon. (Colonial portraiture is kind of boring. American impressionists are more fun. Japanese art is pretty. The end!) Then, I came home, scribbled down some notes about CORe, and biked over to Harvard Square to meet up with cat_bird and her beau Simon for a showing of "Blade Runner: Final Cut" at the Brattle (awesome) followed by ice cream at Herrell's (not bad either).

Anyway, it's past my bedtime. Supposed to be warm this week -- ew. Tomorrow I get to sit at a microscope for most of the day, which at least means I can commune with my Zune without appearing antisocial. Hurrah!