A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

iBook is fucked again. The screen now thinks that the year is 2030 and it is a sheet of iPaper, working under reflective light only. I can just barely make out the stuff on the screen if I shine lots of light on it; otherwise it's dead black. An interesting effect

Apple's pared back their support to weekdays only, so I get to pound sand all weekend. What I'm really worried about is what they'll find when I finally manage to send it in to them. While I hvae no explicit memories of spilling drinks or anything on it this time, if they again said "Aha, we see evidence of $foo here, which your warranty doesn't cover," I can only believe them. And the repair costs would be, what, a fifth of all the money I have right now?

Feh. I need to know if I can look for a job or not. Hurry up, MIT.

Letter extraction mission from Jim met with success. However, no word back from Lenny. Also, I discovered that I spoiled Jon's letter yesterday -- I didn't know that it was supposed to be sealed until well after I had torn open the envelope. Whoopsie.

Jim went to California, following the pattern of my other letter-writers, except for the fact that so far nothing's gone wrong with his.

It definitely looks like I'm going to be asking for a semi-extension on getting all my auxilliary documentation together. I hope they grant such things in the first place. Foo. I will be sad if it happens that I can't apply because of fubared administrivia.

Well, anyway: must finish application now.

Was up until 4 am writing. I really got into a state of mind that I don't think I've visited for years, feeling mental stimulation from the awareness of things coming together just slightly faster than the gradual drop of the deadline pendulum. The last time I remember giddiness and motivation coming from that particular race condition was during the summer of 1995, when I worked as a freelance writer for The Weekly, a free Bangor newspaper (in biz lingo, a "shopper"). I covered the Hampden Town Council meetings, and twice that summer managed to spin this off into separate feature stories that focused on strange and interesting things brought up at them... one about a horrible intersection with a highly expensive and highly broken stoplight, and another about the residential outcry against curbside recycling plans (cuz that would mean closing the drop-off depot, which lots of people used as a social hangout while pawing through each others' junk).

(Hmm... I wonder if I still have those stories on my hard disk? I'll have to check. The other day I came across, in my piles of stuff, a Xerox of one of my best pieces of student journalism, a feature about the University of Maine "drunk bus", a volunteer-operated van that shuttled party kids home from their party-kid parties, written "Cops"-style, talking to the drivers while riding around with them and witnessing a night's worth of shenanegans. And somewhere, unless I threw it away in my destructive stuff-purge before my move, is my portfolio of all my proudest Maine Campus clippings. I suddently hope I still have it.)

The bad news is that I'm gonna miss Mostly Looney Game Night tonight. Too much homework to do... gotta finish chapter 8, and edit chapter 1 (the latter at Linda's specific request, which is nice... schedule is too tight for Erik and I to combine talents within each chapter, like we were originally hoping, but she specifically wants me to help punch up this introduction that Erik wrote.)

From 4 am email to Erik and Linda:

I have never felt such recurrent short-term violent mood swings about 
anything ever as I have about this project.

---

Met with the Lab prof today. Very quick meeting, just chatting on a couch in The Cube for a bit before he had to run off to his next appointment. I think it went well, because he gave me some homework to do, and told me twice at the end of it to stay in touch and follow up with my opinions about such-and-such once I get a chance to play with it. Very cool. I have to say that I find encouragement in his statement that the sorts of projects I'm interested in pursuing address things that he feels are lacking in one of his group's major projects. (He also invited me to walk with him to his next appt. so that we could finish our conversation, which I also interpret as a positive sign.)

A side-effect of the meeting was that my preparation for it (which took the form of talking to myself (over coffee) during the half-hour walk between Chez Chestnut and the Lab) forced me to finally draft up a list of the projects I'd like to pursue, were I a grad student there. It turns out that many of the projects simmering on the back burner are perfect candidates for this list, once you realize how they might apply to the Lab's goals (or more specifically the goals of the specific research groups within the Lab that catch my interest). This is, in fact, awesome, and saves me a lot of worry, because I have no trouble talking at great length about all this stuff, to say nothing of the fact that viewing these personal projects in a new light spawns off all sorts of related ideas. Yay

Mail to Jon, re: the luncheon today:

OK... I'm going to seriously break character and go to this thing with
the intent of cornering people. Wish me luck. (I haven't
forced myself to be this socially outward since my days as a
journalist. Wacky stuff...)

And to that I say this: If you find yourself applying force, consider rethinking your approach.

While I did finally learn where the Media Lab is (it look an extra-special long time since I didn't know what the building looked like, and I had chosen to complicate matters by adding a spurious '0' to its street number in my notes, causing me to walk the length of Ames Street into Cambridge Center before I concluded I made a mistake), as soon as I confirmed I had found it by peering into one of the Lego-filled labs, which I had before seen only in newspaper and magazine photos, I found that I could go no further, not alone. I felt very much like a tresspasser, intending to find my way into a non-public event to which I was not invited, and was nobody's guest, in an unfamiliar, and frankly intimidating, place.On the other hand, I thought to myself, There is something to be said for remaining in-character,, and so I left. And now I am physically crushed from 75 minutes of ceaseless walking in bad shoes.

I'll just fall back to attempting to make contacts in a less forceful fashion. Email, email, and maybe I'll show up at the party tomorrow, if I have enough work done.

Work!

And get some good sneakers.

---

Look, a Venn spanner.

Change of plan:

Before I rewrite that essay, I've got to talk to some people. Jon suggested, as part of his critique, that I have some conversations with Lab denizens, which will not only give me a more clear picture of the Lab, but also give me some some essential people-pointers I can weave into the next draft.

I said "I'm doomed," and he replied, "No, not at all; just write $PROF1 (and maybe $PROF2 and $PROF3) and tell them that you're thinking about becoming a grad student, and would like to meet some people in their groups. They'd be happy to show you around."

I repreated this to my housemates, both of whom have experience in grad school and MIT, and they matter-of-factly "well, yeah"ed at me.

This still seems like such a strange concept, but clearly I've got to change my stance from passive formality to aggressive curiousity. It demands me to be social, to initiate dialogues, and this is very very difficult for me. But: I wrote $PROF1 an email last night (three small paragraphs that took as many hours to compose), and will write the others after taking a nice long brainsoak in their respective websites. More difficult is an event going on tomorrow at the Lab that Jon forwarded me an email about, with the implication that I quietly attend. If I do go, I'll probably have the opportunity to try cornering $PROF1 there. But, ohh, I hate doing that to people, no matter how friendly they are (and this fellow has a reputation of being among the friendliest). This is part of the reason why I dropped out of journalism (even after getting a Bachelor's degree in it); I just don't like imposing on people, even in the slightest.

OTOH, I really do want to set things in motion. And once I get over the hard part of starting a dialogue, I can really start to shine. So.

Meanwhile, best buddy Cthulhia, who is also The Devil, has taken the liberty to ping three Lab folk who intersect with Cthulhia-level social circles, letting them know of my aspirations. Hmm!

The three point five weeks between now and the application deadline. We'll see what happens.

The Diesel, I see, has embraced the strange weather by removing the wintertime battens from its roll-up front facade. I still feel the need to have some token acknowledging that these temperatures shouldn't be here: I'm wearing my corduroy sportcoat, something I wouldn't do were we having this very same weather in June.

I wasn't nervous until two people at the Sunday gaming group agreed: "That's it. We're done, we're doomed. Head for high land!" While their attitude was ha-ha-only-serious, seeing any amount of fatalism in my friends still fills me with dread. This, and the constant little reminders of the oddball atmosphere (here comes Charles in the door wearing shorts, listen to the squeak of the air conditioner at the office), has put a dint on my ability to focus on things.

Internet access at home has been squidgy for over a week now, despite Charles' efforts to make the new would-be firewall machine, the scrounged Alpha, work. Last night we went shopping at Micro Center, and I picked me up a new Netgear wireless router. Though it has its own firewall capabilities, Charles wants it sitting behind the Alpha-based one if at all paossible. If we determine that the box is simply toast, we'll fall back to using the Netgear as the house firewall instead. Tonight should hold the moment of truth.

(I played with the router's Web-based configuator a little, enough to change the admin password from the factory-default "1234" (There's a tip for all you 1337 1s) (Also: insert quote from "Spaceballs" here, if you are Carla; I'll have to tell her about this and see if this triggers her automated quote mechanisms as I predict) and make its broadcast identifier string "Chez Chestnut"... @whee)

Today, though, I'm on my way back to O'Reilly to hang out (uninvited, but I'm fairly certain I'm welcome, given my goal; see below), since Internet access is out-and-out dead at Chez Chestnut, the Alpha idling with a screenful of kernel compilation error messages until we decide what to do with this mess. Charles is sincere in his belief that we can hit a working solution tonight. I just hope we can hit one before Saturday.

The pressure to not spend this Netless afternoon reading or watching movies comes from the imperitave to Finish The Book Dammit that Erik and I received yesterday. I must spend the next week and a half in hack-and-describe mode in order for this to work according to schedule. Strange and Wondeful fact: I think I can hold up my part. I don't know how, but over the last mangle of weeks (maybe since autumn) my confidence with the project has risen a lot, and stayed there. I've managed to get a lot done, and the path ahead of me seems reasonably well-defined. I'll say no more on this, though. I know myself a little too well for that. Mmm-hmm.

I'm also making progress on the other thing I told everyone I'd put off until the move was done, and have completed the first draft of my Statement of Objects essay for my MIT application and vetted it by Jon, my principal sponsor in this crazy endeavor. He filled my head with ideas for stuff the essay still needs, so that's gotta happen today, because there's now one month left for me to finish filling this thing out. I still have to choose who to tap for writing a third recommendation letter, but after speaking with Jon yesterday I have some ideas, at last.

Finally, my first-ever contracted programming job reached feature-complete stage this week. Yay. Now comes the part where the customer tells me about all the changes they need. It's just like I read about! But in this case the customers are also my dear friends, so it's all good.