new york neo's next saturday!

I'll be going here to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in nyc next saturday. Who wants to join me?

a good night...

Man, it seems like April in Chicago and not the end of January! It's 50 degrees out and sort of misty. And I spent the evening wandering around downtown which just made it the perfect day! I even got some more tea at Teavana which I'm looking forward to trying out tomorrow morning :)

I met up with the old advisor for the student ambassador program from MIT. She's in town doing her MBA at U of C. It was so fun to catch up and have some good curry downtown. They had the dragon come through the restaurant to celebrate the new year, and thinking that there might be some more early festivities going on, I headed down to Chinatown. Nothing special was going on, but I got some of my favorite bean paste cookies which made the trip totally worth it :) Some more wandering around the city and back to the train put a good end to the night. I wish all January days were this nice :)

scary...

Our government is scary!

And what you didn't know about the Challenger. Really interesting...I didn't know all of that...

another paper!!

I got some good news today as the last of my work belongings made it into the boxes. My position paper was accepted at CHI so I'll be able to attend a workshop there on Mobile Social Software as well as present our paper on music and photo similarities. I'm super excited and can't wait for this conference in April!!! So much fun!!

So all of my stuff at work is packed up and hopefully it will magically appear at my new desk on Monday. We've all got tomorrow off which is nice. Although my big plans for the day include getting new tires and an oil change. Woo hoo!

For all of you Bostonians and New Yorkers, I'll be out next week!! BOS from wed-fri, nyc fri-sun and then boston again on the 6th and 7th! And of course I want to see you all!!! Of course pour house on thursday night!! Also stopping at MoMA in new york.

MIT death ray on Mythbusters

I just finished watching the best Mythbusters ever!! They invited Wallace and his 2.009 class to come and help them build a death ray out of mirrors! And it actually set the boat on fire (at 75 feet) Yay MIT!!! :)

why I like paper...

So I was packing up my cube today as our lab is about to move across campus. And I looked at all the papers I had printed out and wondered why I really needed to keep them. And I think it's pretty simple and revolves around the ability to stumble upon papers. PC's just don't let you browse like paper can. I can have 10 stacks of papers on my desk, by topic everything from location to music to photos to ambient communication and flip through them every now and then and be reminded of all of the papers I've read and things I've learned. And that makes me more likely to make new connections. There's no way I could do that as easily with a folder full of pdf's.

Anyway, I saved all my papers...let's hope I can find room for them in my new cube!! :)

west wing and education (unrelated)

I'm so sad that they cancelled West Wing!! Man, it's totally one of my favorite shows still. I loved Stephen Colbert's quote about the show calling it "John Kerry fan fiction" :)

In other news, I was reading this CNN article yesterday and was just amazed. It talks about college students in the US and how they cannot perform even very simple tasks like reading maps, calculating tips, or understanding credit card offers. And these are our college students here!! The upside, according to the article...well at least the can read....er, most of them. You all know I get really upset talking about education in this country, but have we really sunk this low. Something major really has to get done and I really hope that whoever is in the white house next really wants to do something about it.

In the mean time, I'm really bummed that I'm not helping out with the Motorola FIRST team this year at WHS/RMHS. There's just no way I had time this year though. I'm going to be gone to so many places in the next few months that it wouldn't have even been fair to pretend to help. But things like FIRST are a part of the answer I really believe. We just have to get them to more than a tiny fraction of the students out there. And do it the right way and teach and show how these important skills in math and science can be used to do some pretty awesome things. But teaching is really the big part of it and we need to be able to really teach well and inspire students.

green zebra!!

Last night I had a wonderful dinner at Greren Zebra. Such a nice place and very very excellent food! And they even had a vegan cake for dessert!! I highly recommend it and can't wait to go back sometime!!

I wrapped up the night with a trip to TMLMTBGB which had a mere 9 audience members as they were letting us in. Some more came just before it started, but it was still a super-tiny audience. They still ordered pizza even though they didn't sell out. It was actually one of the plays to have someone run next door and get the pizza. And it goes without saying that the show was as excellent as always :)

So yes, very fun night! Plans for Boston are coming together. It looks like I'm going to stay out there for super bowl weekend which should be fun!! And then make it to the first class on Tuesday! I can't wait!!!

athena...

this makes me smile...

bentley: home-on-the-dome.mit.edu pts/1 Tue Jan 17 15:00:47 2006

I got my athena account back today...and it had all my old files in it!! znol resulted in 4 old friends being on line :) Yay for people sticking around MIT...or just holding onto old kerberos tickets!

hi!

Yes, it's been a while since I posted. It's been a busy week! But our CHI paper is finally submitted in its ready-to-be-printed form which was a big relief! And our data analysis is almost over for the study we're doing at work. I'm really looking forward to getting to relax a bit in a few weeks and hopefully take some time off of work!

In other news, I finally have a reservation at Green Zebra which I've been waiting to go to for ages! Connie and I tried to go on some random tuesday last year and it was all booked for hours. So now I planned ahead and still couldn't get the time I wanted!! It better be some good food!! :) :)

fun with friends...

Last night was so much fun! The annual pre-convention dinner at Gino's with Susan and the gang!! Such a great time to eat some good food, share lots of laughs, and even see Duke totally crush Maryland while enjoying some good midwestern beer :)

I wish I was going to the convention this weekend, but oh well, there's always next year, and lots of cubbies games between then and now hopefully!!

good day...

Today was a good day! We got out CHI paper basically revised and back into the reviewer for comments. We stopped over at Thai Garden for lunch. And I bought a new computer to replace this super slow 867 MHZ mac :) This new one is 8 times faster!! Take that Moore's law!

slam!

Last night was one of the most fun nights in a long time!! I met up with my old high school friend Laura and a coworker to head to the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill. What a good time!! An open mike, a hilarious act in between, and the slam itself at the end. Lots of good poems, lots of good laughs and lots of fun. :) I must go back soon!

In other news, it seems that 3M has stopped making printable post it notes, which makes my job considerably harder when we're doing a large affinity analysis with postits and up to 1500 pieces of data at once. Luckilly they still make the glue stick that turns anything into a post-it. A bit more work though, as I'm spending the night cutting up 351 post it sized notes from full sheets of paper. If anyone knows anywhere that's stockpiling the printable notes, let me know! We'll totally buy them out :)

poetry slam at green mill

Tomorrow I'm headed to a poetry slam at the Green Mill, the place that started it all. If anyone wants to tag along, let me know!

writing

I don't know if there's anything that makes me happier at work than writing conference papers. It's been a good week and only bound to get better tomorrow! It'll be a fun month for sure. And a really great year ahead too! I'm really looking forward to this CMS class at MIT and hopefully another publication on some of my more current work. So much fun! :)

age

So it's rather amusing as more people that I work with find out how young I am compared to what they thought. It's interesting. :) It's led me to think a lot about age in the past few weeks. A lot of you know that before Christmas I went out with this girl who was 30 and a grad student at U Chicago. It was a really wonderful time and I really felt was one of the first times I dated someone with something interesting to say. At least among non-college people, but then again MIT people always have something interesting to say. And thinking of MIT interviewing (and Motorola interviewing as the people there my age are exceptionally interesting as well) maybe it's really just that small small section of the population who really actively critically examines things and has nothing to do with age at all.

Anyway, this is a big rambling mess, but just some unstructured thoughts of late. And yes, sadly, the U Chicago girl is now seeing someone else. Oh well...

In happier news, I'm almost done with a position paper for CHI that I really really like! Let's hope it gets accepted and I can attend a workshop on Mobile Social Software as well as present our full paper on Music and Photo use similarities.