Brain Lint

For a little while at least, I’m a full time grad student. I finished up my fifth class (wireless sensor networks) this summer to reach the halfway point in my master’s program and was starting to think about going full time.. in fact I’ve thought about it the last two summers because the Tuft’s CS program really isn’t conducive to part time study. All the “interesting” classes are offered at 10:30 unfortunately. I’d also been interviewing for new full time positions. In the midst of that deliberation this time around, I had the good fortune to get laid off from my full time job…

So now I’m taking Intro to Machine Learning, Intro to computational biology and a seminar on Brain-Computer interaction. I’m also tagging along with one of my advisor’s research groups which will hopefully afford me the opportunity to carve off some work to get started on my Master’s degree project.

In my (ever declining) free time, I’ve also been doing some Ruby on Rails work for a small company in Cambridge as a contractor.

I became an American citizen today, just ten days short of nineteen years after moving here and about a year since applying. There were 98 other people from 30-something countries being naturalized as well. First we all stood in line to check in and give up our green cards (which went into an official looking Target bag), Then we waited more after being seated, during which we were told some rather hokey stories by a manager in the Immigration Services office and read and re-read our letters from the president (Dear fellow American…)

Once the judge arrived, things moved quickly- first we all said the oath together, then the judge made a nice speech. Due to the hokey stories and the fact that I wasn’t running away from religous persecution or civil strife, I expected to view things through my usual detached, ironic perspective, but once things got going, I found it quite moving.

After the judge was done speaking, a grade school daughter of one of the fresh citizens led us in the pledge of allegiance and that was it. We filed out a row at a time to collect our certificates of naturalization and that was that.

Here’s me before the ceremony, permanent resident card in hand:

And afterwards, government-issue mini flag in hand:

Big difference eh?

The MBTA today unveiled their new web site, and all I can say is wow. Its way more than I would have expected out of them (this is a site where the outages page was updated by hand editing before). Theres a clean and modern new look, plus an array of new, useful tools.

Theres a revamped trip planner integrated with google maps, with “suggest” for landmarks when you type (which doesn’t work quite right yet..)

My favorite, and the most impressive is the new My MBTA feature which allows one to save planned routes and sign up for customized alerts. (but I’m not sure if they email them). There’s a hidden, unlinked tool (with the old look) called VIP Alerts that seems to let one do email and sms alerts.

UPDATE: It looks like the MBTA didn’t like people using the t-alert system before it was public so they took it down.

There’s another tool that isn’t linked up yet (it’s commented out in the source, I wonder why?) is system schedules for your ipod.

The dream is over – my team lost tonight in the second round of the playoffs – too many errors, not enough runs. We started a comback in the top of the 5th with three runs in, but alas, it was not enough. At least we have the one win to look back at in the long offseason .

I did have fun reffing the game after ours though – I called a tight strike zone because I’d rather see lots of kicking than a pitchers-duel any day of the week. The teams certainly came through for me. One of the teams scored 11 runs one inning. Fun to watch.

My kickball team, the Somerville Land Pirates (yarr!) won our first game of the season at long last! We entered the playoffs last in the league with a perfect 0-8 record, having never led in a game. Our opponent had the good kind of perfect record, and had beat us twice already in the season.

Last night none of that mattered though (nor did missing half our team); we cruised to a convincing 6-1 victory over the number one seeded Stewie’s sexy party. Things looked good right away with a four runs in the first inning, and we never surrendered that lead thanks to some great defensive plays by Tom and Ander.