maggied’s blag

At the Museum of Science, for a limited time only! The group I am working with is conducting a study over in Cahners Computer Place involving our latest robot. The Computer Place is pretty fun to hang out in; when the little kids aren’t around, occasionally the UROPs will sit at the computers and play old games like (my personal favorite) Star Wars Pit Droids. I don’t want to spoil the study for anyone, but it takes about 15 minutes, and is a lot of fun.

I’ll be at the Museum Saturday and Sunday, probably from about 10 or 11am until 5pm. The Computer Place is to right next to the Theater of Electricity; starting from the entrance, you turn right, enter the theater and turn left and head up the stairs.  Pretty straightforward. Unfortunately the robot is out of commision pretty often; she is kind of tempermental and gets a little stressed out with all the people around. But we swear, she is a star. Anyway, if you are curious about coming to the Musuem, admission is free to MIT students, and the Musuem itself is also a lot of fun to explore. Be sure to give me a heads up if you want to swing by and I’ll let you know if everything is up and running.

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Rachel and I decided to head over to Harvard’s Arboretum today. Neither of us had been before, and both had free time in the early afternoon. We took the scenic route to the Arboretum and back, to say the least. The directions we got off the internet were meant for cars and not bikes, and we got lost on the first turn. After stopping for directions, we eventually found our way over to Jamaica Pond. We didn’t know which way the Arboretum was, but we rode around the whole pond, and took a few pictures.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous out.

We ran into a gigantic family of ducklings, and took a few pictures. More ducklings can be found here.

After hanging out on the Pond for a while, we decided to give it one more shot. Fortunately for us, the turn we needed just involved taking a different fork in the bike path. We arrived at the Arnold Arboretum about 5 minutes later. On bike, we decided to stick to the main trails. We went up Bussey Hill to the Overlook, hung around for a while, and took a nice nap. Coming down the hill was really fun. Some pictures:

I had a SLOPE meeting at 5:30pm, so we didn’t stay very long. Definitely would love to come back another time and take more pictures. On the way home, we got lost again, and wound up over by the Church of Scientology. With Mass. Ave as our reference, we managed to make it home alright.

As a side note, I decided to start playing around with collections on Flickr, so all the photos from today are in one here.

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Rachel, Dale, Drew and I went to see Iron Maiden on Friday. The concert was at the Tweeter Comcast Center in Mansfield, so we drove down in Rachel’s car. While seeing concerts at gigantic venues like the Comcast Center doesn’t feel quite as personal as smaller concert halls, in this case it allowed Maiden to do some absolutely crazy stuff. The crowd was really excited for the whole show, and the display Iron Maiden put on was absolutely ridiculous. Lots of backdrops, effects, and special guests (the beast, Eddie, etc.). Overall, this concert was probably one of my favorites. Pictures of the concert can be found here.

Not only was yesterday my birthday, it was also really great weather outside. I slept in a little late and wound up heading over to Porter Square with a bunch of people for cheap (but delicious) sushi. I’ve only had sushi a handful of times or so, but I’m starting to really like it, particularly if it’s affordable. The sushi place was in the Porter Exchange.  After sushi we visited a Chinese super market and I got some chocolate koala bears. Mmm. We arrived back in EC in time to go to a Rush meeting. Besides the usual wankery, we picked a name for the East Side party this year: Xanadu. The blurb includes excessive references to Kubla Khan and is pretty awesome.

We also made important decisions over at the Cambridge Galleria, where Vinayak spent quite some time deciding on an iPod to purchase. (He went with the 80gb.) For dinner, 12 of us headed over to Helmand, which was absolutely amazing. In the mid to upper price range ($15-23 for an entree), Helmand had a variety of dishes with Lamb, Beef, Chicken and vegetables. There was also copious amounts of bread and rice, which I was very excited about. Stuffed from dinner, we headed back to Porter Square again for Sarah, Vlad and Marty’s housewarming. The turn out was great, and it was a nice close to the evening. Pictures for the day can be found here.

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Finally have  a bit more time, so I’ll give a run down of all the bands I went to see.

Thursday:

We first arrived on Thursday around 12pm. Shows started later in the evening, around 8pm or so. There were not many shows this day, but we hit up MGMT, Battles, and Vampire Weekend. MGMT and Battles were both pretty out of control; I really loved the lighting for both of the shows. Vampire Weekend was also really great; the singer was a lot of fun, and made the crowd really pumped about the rest of the weekend.

Friday:

Umphrey’s McGee was this awesome band that combined Jazz and Prog-Rock; they were a lot of fun to just chill on the grass and bob your head to. Definitely a band I’m buying more music of. Stephen Marley (as you can probably guess from the name) gave a performance that was just like Bob Marley; he both looked and sounded like him. Next up was The Swell Season. For those of you who have seen the movie Once, it’s the band from that. They were really great live, although towards the end I got a little bored because all their songs seemed to have a very similar sound. We saw State Radio on a smaller and somewhat intimate stage, and they were really great.

Now for the show I was super excited about today: M.I.A. “I fly like paper, get high like planes” (M.I.A. in Paper Planes). I have never heard anything like her before. She had a great stage presence, and the crowd went nuts when she played songs from her second album. She finished the set with Paper Planes, and some people even threw planes at the stage! After M.I.A. we listed to some of Chris Rock, who was making a joke about how fat girls can diss skinny girls, but skinny girls can’t diss fat girls. It was alright. Up next was Metallica. Yes, Metallica was at Bonnaroo. This seemed to confuse everyone, and it showed as the crowd just wasn’t really into their concert until they played Sandman at the very end. Ending the night we saw My Morning Jacket, who were a lot of fun, even though we left early due to rain. Every time they hit an awesome guitar riff, someone would throw fifty or so glow sticks up in the air, and it looked really neat.

Saturday:

We started Saturday off with Soul Rebels Brass Band. It was early in the day and the crowd was small, so we were right up near the front of the stage. These guys rocked. It was a nice, intimate setting, so all of the crowd was really into it. They really got everyone dancing by the end of the show, and it was a lot of fun. We chilled in the shade for part of Gogol Bordello; I liked the “gypsy-punk” thing they had going on. Up next was B.B. King, who made a lot of jokes about how old he was (82) and got a little over-sentimental on stage. Still, his performance was solid.

In the evening, Jack Johnson was the first one up. I am not really a big fan of Jack Johnson, honestly, but he brought out Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam which was kinda cool. Then came Pearl Jam who played for an extra hour over their allotted one and a half. They were really great, although Eddie Vedder was so bombed out of his mind he could hardly form sentences when he spoke to us.

Finally, ending the night was Kanye West. You may have heard about this controversy. Because Pearl Jam ran late, Kanye’s crew didn’t get the stage set up until 3:30am, but despite this fact the show didn’t start until 4:25am. By this time, Kanye’s Glow in the Dark tour didn’t seem like it was working out so hot. The show itself was great, even despite the lighting; there were craters on stage, and a hot female robot narrated you through the show. The show ended at 5:25, 2/3rds of how long it should have been, which was lame. Even though it was late and short, I still really liked the show. It was probably the best put together performance I’ve seen, so I still give him credit.

Sunday:

The last day at Bonnaroo (sad ) began with Rogue Wave. They seemed pretty fun, but I was tired and wound up taking a nap under a tree for most of their set. Up next was the Yonder Mountain String Band, who are absolutely awesome! The crowd was going nuts, and they even covered Crazy Train. Come on! After Yonder Mountain we caught the end of Solomon Burke, who at that point had 50 women on stage. He gave them all roses and sang “What a Wonderful World.” Despite being too old to stand through the whole show, this guy sure sounded great.

After Solomon Burke, we caught a bit of O.A.R. I’ve always sort of liked them but don’t know them that well, and they seemed pretty good live. On the way out of Bonnaroo, we heard a bit of Robert Plant, who was in a duet with Alison Krauss. He sounded great, but most of us weren’t a fan of his slower covers of Led Zeppelin songs.

And that’s about it! Overall, Bonnaroo was a total blast. If you want to hear more about anything in particular, feel free to talk to me

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Just got back from Bonnaroo around 2pm today. Am too tired to post a formal review of the bands, but have some photos for now.

Headed back up to Boston tomorrow morning, and then working the rest of the week. Good times.

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I’m sitting in my lovely air conditioned room, watching typ0 run a distribution upgrade from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn to Hardy Heron (by instinct, I almost typed our “other” name for this distro, but I managed to restrain myself).

Watching and praying that libc6 won’t break gets a little boring after a while, though, so I decided to take some pictures of my room, even though it is still in disarray.

Here is my new desk corner. Yay for two desks and AC! You can see Ubuntu whining at me on the CRT, too.

Up next is the full length mirror (I actually only had a very cruddy mirror in my old room). It has a crack at the bottom, but I’ll survive.

No lofted bed this time, folks. This is the first time I’ve slept on a non-lofted bed (for an extended period of time) since February freshman year, but it seems alright so far. Hidden to the right of the bed in that shot is the black hole. Hopefully I don’t get sleepy and roll right into it

Up last is a shot that has the lamp in it but is intended to display the full range of colors of the room. The top green is a sort of mint green that I think it pretty nice and was here when I moved in. The white trim was also there. I painted the middle blue and the blue trim (to replace a gross kind of yellow), and the light blue was also there when I moved. Although I originally considered painting the green part, it turned out to match the blues reasonably well.

I’ll post more photos when I’m done my room for reals, so you can see the layout better.

As a neat aside, I am way behind on this one but found that I really like Flickr. My photostream (which I’ll populate some more when I get my desktop running) can be found here.

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I moved all my stuff from B203 to B210 today. B210 is a complete mess, but at least I’m checked out. The next few days will be lots of sorting and organizing; I’ll post pictures when it is complete.

A web browser called Flock seems to be becoming more popular around on the internet; it’s basically an enabler for people who are super addicted to social websites of all varieties. I downloaded and tried it out and it seems interesting. Pretty well done and is intuitive particularly if you’ve used Firefox before. Am I likely to use it as a primary browser? Probably not, because I don’t really like the clutter and don’t feel the need to know that one of my facebook friends who I don’t even seem to recognize updated their profile.  Worth checking out, though.

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It’s finally here. And right when it needed to be. The end of term wound up being my most hosing time at MIT, through a combination of classes and extra-curricular activities. In retrospect, I’m starting to appreciate the idea that yes, even us MIT students can’t do everything they want, and we should try to keep ourselves sane first and foremost. Summer should help with that.

I’ll be working in the Media Lab with the Personal Robots Group. We will be working with the MDS (mobile dexterous social) robot and conducting a study at the Museum of Science. I’ll post back with more details of the study; you know you want to participate.

This past week after classes has been very relaxing; I spent a lot of time hanging out with friends that I hadn’t seen in a while, and getting psyched for Bonnaroo. It’s June 12th-15th, and should be totally awesome. I might have watched 4 Seasons of the Office in under a week. Maybe.

Other things to look forward to: There are other concerts over the summer, including Journey and Iron Maiden. I am also looking into getting a new, lighter bike, and getting my endurance back. My computer is in need of an upgrade; I’ve had it for almost 4 years now (16th b-day present). I turn 20 June 21st. An underwhelming birthday at best. I guess the next big birthday is my 21st, then my 25th, and if my mother is right, once I turn 29 I’ll stay that age forever. Now that’s weird to think about.

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