Once again, in a fit of end-of-semester productivity last May, I volunteered to blog over the summer. And once again, I utterly failed to produce more than a single page of handwritten scratchy blog beginnings. So I’m vaguely ashamed (due to my failed contract to blog readers) but marginally pleased (by the contents of the following list) to present my second annual set of excuses as to why I didn’t blog all summer.
Cooked dinner: Having a full-fledged, properly stocked kitchen is an amazing thing, especially when you’ve got free time on evenings and weekends and your friends live nearby. Food was my main method of socializing--I live with 8 other people, and generally speaking, we had dinner guests 3 or 4 times every week.
Walked to the Fells: Took me long enough.
Went to the MFA: This is one of my favorite museums. I go and pretend to be an art student.
Went to the UK: I took a solo trip to the UK for a couple of weeks at the beginning of the summer. I don’t have a camera so I documented the whole thing with my sketchbook and watercolors. It was a super fun, liberating, vaguely-smelly wandering hostelling adventure.
Organized my room: This may not seem like that big of a deal, but moving from a fully furnished dorm to a house for the first time was probably the only time in my life I’ll ever get to start completely from scratch in furnishing my room. I spent a fair amount of time (read: multiple 4-hour trips to Ikea*) devising an organization system that I’ll actually stick to, and so far the results have been extremely satisfying (everything is in boxes).
*Actually, I was disappointed by Ikea, they went out of stock of almost every item I was planning on buying.
Thought about the future: Oof dah. I did this a lot. It wasn’t (isn’t) always fun. I talked to a lot of peers, professors, and coworkers about their post-grad decisions and my potential future, and have come to absolutely no conclusions. The basic predicament is that I’m excited about a huge array of companies, classes, and potential life paths, and choosing a job or a Ph.D topic means picking one, which I don’t feel qualified or satisfied doing.
Thought about the near future: There are a lot of exciting things that are going to happen between now and the time I graduate, although it took a while for me to remembered that. I’ve been sending emails to plan the Computer Science Exchange’s upcoming semester, Airbnb’d like a fiend for a weekend getaway, checked out the syllabi for the classes I’m taking (and some that I’m not yet signed up for), and generally gotten pumped for the school year.
Worked for the government: Technically, worked for MIT Lincoln Laboratory, an FFRDC (Federally Funded Research and Development Center) in the Cyber Systems Assessments group. I’m working on a research project called Single Device Authentication, trying to create a cryptographically secure protocol to store all your authentication details on your smartphone. It was awesome for a wide variety of reasons.
Wrote a Chrome Extension: Rather than sign up for Pinterest and give them access to the contents of my entire FB page, I wrote a line of jquery that hides the annoying overlay encouraging me to make an account. Stickin’ it to the man.
Read some books: I started a Goodreads account to keep track of the books I’ve been reading, and it’s been a satisfying way to quantify some of my literary preferences. I take the bus to work some days, and get a good hour and a half of reading in.
Knitted a sock: Actually, I’ve knitted slightly less than half a sock (the easier half). It might be done by winter.