Every once in a while, there’s a link highlighted in red in the upper right corner of the gmail window that reads “New Features!”. I saw it this morning and clicked to see just what was new about gmail. I was taken to a page telling me that we can now get mail from other accounts on gmail.
This is rather baffling, because I’ve been checking other accounts mail on gmail since more than a year ago. So just what exactly is new? I’m confused.
My MIA status for the past month or so can probably be attributed to my extreme levels of dedication to actually doing research for once. Did I magically find some kind of motivation? Well, sort of. We’re all required to give a department-wide seminar during the spring of our 3rd year, and mine fell on this past Wednesday, which incidentally was Valentine’s Day (did I need to remind anybody of this fact?).
The seminar isn’t really as scary as it sounds, but nevertheless, I worked up quite a sweat leading up to it (but it didn’t stop me from procrastinating … my last slides change was at 11:12am, and my presentation began at noon). In general, it was rather anti-climatic. It came, and 30 minutes later, it went, with no drums nor any fanfare. I also got lucky because the one professor famous for picking students apart was also magically absent from my seminar.
Which then brings me to Valentine’s Day. I thought about writing something about having an anti-Valentine’s day, but thought better of it because I didn’t want to come across as being bitter. I’m sure plenty of us hear great many mutterings about the stupidity of such a Hallmark-imposed holiday that you really didn’t want to read about it on my blog. Besides, I preferred sleeping to procrastination via blogging.
So in the end, all I have to offer is that this year, unlike most other years, I had no special feelings toward v-day. It really was just another day that also came and went with no fanfare. That was helped along by my boarding an overnight train to DC at 9:45pm on the evening of February 14. Even if I wanted to have make a big deal of it, I wouldn’t have been able to. So my Valentine’s day dinner consisted of some Bourbon chicken bought at the Amtrak station and shared with my handsome, and very much loved, GSC officers and one hot Latin grad student magazine editor.
I’ll be back to the real world sometime tomorrow when my plane lands in Boston and I subsequently end my email boycott. Then I will have a ball cleaning out the 250+ unread emails that have accumulated. Yummy.
Still being a proud South Carolinian, I never thought that the day would come when I would embrace Dunkin Donuts as a mirage in the desert. But indeed Dunkin has won me over, with its coffee.
Driving back from a day of snowboarding at Attitash, going down down a lonely road with its two-way traffic, fighting my eye lids, willing them to stay open, all I could think about was how I so very badly wanted a cup of coffee, and how happy I would be should I see a Dunkin Donuts.
All of a sudden, away in the distance, I spotted a rectangular lighted sign on the left side of the road, and it looked like it just might be what I had wished for. My passenger asked how I was feeling about the drive, and I said that I wanted a cup of coffee, but wait, wait, because i think I see something, but I don’t want to get my hopes up high … and lo and behold, there it was, the best Dunkin Donuts sign I have ever seen.
I have never been so happy to see the familiar white sign with red words (or is it orange?). A large styrofoam cup of coffee and a couple of U-turns to get back on the road later, I was as happy as I could be. Krispy Kreme just became a thing of the past, and I’m turning Bostonian.
As things pick up in my real life, my blog life dies. Normally, that’s a bad thing, to no longer have a life; it comes with all kinds of connotations of being anti-social, awkward, unfriendly, etc. etc. But somehow, I’m not sure a dying blog life is such a bad thing. It may mean that I am actually doing productive things rather than procrastinating via blogging.
Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve taken an actual class, so upon walking into my Linear Algebra class this morning, I felt rather lost. Nevermind that everyone else in the room was 5-6 years younger than me (and way more stylish, at least the girls). I wasn’t sure how to take notes; I couldn’t write straight on my paper, and I wondered why I ever got to love taking notes on unlined paper. At one point, I turned around and realized that one of my Freshmen was sitting behind me, in the same class. And here I am, a grad student, taking remedial Linear Algebra.
The lecturer was interesting; had this almost cute Eastern European accent. I say “almost cute” because when I first arrived in the room, I thought he was a grad student conducting lectures, and honestly, my first thought was, “Wow, he’s pretty young looking. And kinda cute, if I were into the tall, lanky, Eastern European type.” As the class progressed, I decided that he really wasn’t cute at all, and perhaps I was just initially blinded by the shock of his youth.
I’ll just leave you with something he said in class:
Usually, we think of the matrix ruling us. But in this class, we will rule the matrix.
There were some isolated chuckles in the auditorium of 50 or so.
If I could have one in my apartment, I would get a pet turtle, with a little aquarium that has water and rocks and maybe some plants so s/he can crawl all over the place and eat fish food and be happy and grow bigger.
But then I think about how irresponsible I am, and I feel bad that I may kill a turtle. I have a plant that sits on my windowsill that I forget about a lot. Most of the time, half the leaves are brown because the plant is dying because I forget it’s there so I forget to give it water. Thankfully, it’s a resilient plant, so it really ever only half dies. I give it a glass of water when I remember because a glass full of water is as much as the pot can hold. The problem is that I only remember about once a month or so.
People say that a married couple ought to get a dog or something before having kids, to get used to the responsibility and to see if they can take care of something besides themselves. I think I’m in the “can barely take care of myself” category, and seeing that I manage to half-kill a resilient plant a majority of the time, I don’t think I’m ready for turtles, dogs, or kids.
Guess what I spotted today? You know those little white-background sticker decals that people put on their cars?They usually have an abbreviation of a place on them. I first saw them when I was in Europe; cars had decals like “GB” or “CH”. I think the trend started there, but got perpetuated in the US by OBX.
Anyway, today, I saw a decal like that on a car, except … it said “C++”.
Go figure, that we’re at MIT.
It’s been quite a while since the Gang got together. In fact, I haven’t seen some of these people since August/September last year, or at least not all together. Things have mainly been individual lunches here or dinner there or coffee when we found the time. Tonight, in honor of a birthday, we gathered (all of us, almost) for a late dinner at Anthem. It’s always nice to try out a new eatery, especially one that I hadn’t even heard of before.
By the time everyone trickled in, we moved the conversations from the bar to our reserved table for 16. Along the way, like one of those handshake games where you go around and shake everyone’s hand exactly once, we all naturally fell into a ritual of chatting, clinking glasses, and going out of our ways to say hi to every person, even the one headed toward that far other end of the table. As I glanced all around me, I saw hugs, kisses, winks, happy laughing faces, and smiling faces who radiated back genuine happiness at seeing me, and each other, again.
I felt like I was in the final scene of those romantic comedies that come out around the holidays, where everyone’s gathered around a big table, laughing and happy, but you can’t make out what any of them are saying because warm and fuzzy music is playing, leading to the credits rolling. So this time, my life felt like a happy movie. The best part is that this is just the beginning, and not the conclusion of my movie.
Unfortunately, the night had to end with the restaurant playing The Scientist by Coldplay. I never really paid attention to the lyrics, nothing beyond the eerily haunting melody. Ironically, I looked up the lyrics just earlier today. They are quite sad, but somehow right for my life at just about now. I cut the night short (the others were all going out, albeit only having about an hour before last calls), wanting to come home instead and just curl up against my pillow with my book of the moment.
I’ve been very distracted for the past couple of days, finding it very difficult to focus. I just sit in front my computer in my office and pray for random interesting things that I can find to occupy my time on the internet. This included reading multiple blogs, finding new and interesting blogs to read, and refreshing the ones I’ve already read in case there are new entries.
For whatever reason, I was leaving a comment that required me to write “millenium falcon” (don’t ask). It didn’t look correctly spelled, however I looked at it, so I went to dictionary.com to confirm. Turns out that dictionary.com will now not only give you the english definition of a word, but it will also give you the same word in multiple languages. Kinda cool.
Check it out: millenium at dictionary.com
A while ago, I discovered this song called Fairytale (童话). I remember this past summer when I would walk around all day with this song playing repeatedly on my newly-acquired iPod Nano. After a bit of a hiatus, I’m still equally addicted. After discovering last night that YouTube has the music video version of this song, I have just kept playing it in the background …
I think the sad-inducing song makes me feel better about life in general because it lets me wallow in my own self pity, which for whatever reason is what I really need and want to do right now. It makes me reflect and miss people … friends, family, relationships, people I wanted to have been in better touch with …
全世界都不理我的时候， 只有你不可以不理我。
A few days ago, I was in a bathroom in building 8, and saw a sign next to the soap dispenser that said that suppliers like foamy soap better because on average, you need 30-40% less soap than liquid soap to do the same job. Plus, foamy soap needs less water to make the same amount of bubbles, thereby saving water, too.
The bathroom in building 56 (my lab floor) recently installed some new soap and paper towel dispensers, along with a sign welcoming suggestions and comments regarding the new equipment because the janitorial staff is trying things/vendors out. The new soap dispenser dispenses foamy soap, so I wrote an email to the address supplied by the sign:
“I like the foamy soap!!”