It snowed mad amounts of snow while I was home over break. My plane back to Boston was delayed more than 1 and a half hours due to problems with getting someone to drive the fuel truck to the plane, but I managed to still get on my connection. IAP has been great so far; I'm taking welding, glassblowing and speaker building classes. We built a halfpipe for bad ideas, but had some problems with the joint between the two quarter pipes holding, so we mainly rode it as a quarter pipe. Here are some pictures Some other people made a pulse jet engine, an asskicking machine, and a curling rink. Danny and I won the ultimate culring championship trophy in quadruple overtime.

Here are some pictures.

The Term is now over. Finals are done and I passed my classes!! Tomorrow I will be flying home for winter break and then flying back on the 4th of January for IAP. Many things are scheduled to happen during IAP. I'm already enrolled in a crossover loudspeaker building class and a welding class, but I plan to do a lot more, like work at the East Campus' own bad ideas competition and participate in the mystery hunt.

My classes for next term are looking like this:
3.094 - "Materials in Human Experience" - archeology
7.013 - "Introductory Biology" - biology concentrating on dna and genetics stuff
8.022 - "Physics II" - the physics 2 advanced edition
13.001 - "Measuring the Ocean" - throw test buoys in the water
18.02 - "Calculus" - multivar calc

I'll give the links to the class webpages as classes start and the webpages are available. I may switch out of the archeology class to another archeology class - we'll see...

Here are some pictures from the hall camping trip this weekend: HERE
It was nice weather (execpt for this morning, when it rained pretty hard) and we went on a rather long day hike and spent the nights at Camelot, the MIT cabin in New Hampshire without running water.
Here is a real cool page danny down the hall made

I've been working pretty hard on my classes recently:
3.091 Intro to Solid State Chemistry
8.01 Physics I
18.01 Calculus
21W.732 Intro to Technical Communication

But I've still been fooling around with odds and ends around my room. Here are some new pictures

The chain thing is pretty cool - what happens is as the chain begins to spin around at a good clip it starts making really cool patterns near the bottom. The 1,000 watt light goes on when someone steps on the pad at the entrance to my room - stays on for 2 seconds then goes off for two minutes before it can be actuated again thanks to a nifty timer.

Hey, it looks like I made it into the Sierra Sun. Cool. All of the accesories (like a monitor adapter cable) to the PowerBook that I ordered have shipped now, except for the computer itself. I found another cool e-mail list here called "free-food" which is made so that anyone who spots free food is supposed to submit where they've found it and announce it to the rest of the list. Apparently the Dali-Lama was here over the weekend. I missed it, but I saw a presentation by the human genome guy, Craig Venter - cool stuff

Oh yeah, Here are some pictures.

Newer New News: I'm taking a sailing PE class which is turning out to be a lot of fun. I just ordered the new 15" Powerbook introduced today - other than that, not much new - lots of work is beginning to pile up, but it's manageable. Chem is going to be real tough though..... Next Monday is a suicide prevention day, which means no classes. I need to do laundry - I need to buy food - time to get off the computer and get things done? Maybe later.....

Classes have started - I am now taking:

8.01 - Physics
18.01 - Calculus
3.091 - Chemistry
21W.372 - Technical Writing
PE - Sailing

Pretty basic classes. The Lecturers seem to be good as well as the classroom instructors. I am now an official resident of THiRD EAst in EC. I've got a single room with a loft and yellow walls. Food has been more of an issue than I had planned - basicly, it costs money. You can check my Soda Consumption at my dorm - started as of today. I'm going to get a permanent webcam out my dorm window soon. I got a Mini-Fridge from the community hall pile, had it subsequently taken away, then took another one, which was broken, but once fixed proves to be bigger and better than the original. It's a long story, but the short of it is I was hit in the face by a flying projectile and my right eye got quite a blow. I went to the doctor and was given drops to put in every few hours and will be seeing him every day for a few days. No permanent damage, and, in fact, I have had a similar problem before when smacked by a soccer ball in middle school, never went to the doctor, and was fine. Textbooks are expensive. My mom shipped some of the boxes from home that I wanted, and they should be arriving within a couple of weeks. Coolness!!

New news: Cool stuff. We've been keeping extremely busy in this "Discover Mechanical Engineering" program doing all sorts of stuff. On Monday we were introduced to our projects and spent quite a few hours working on them, spaced between breakfast, lunch and dinner - all free, every day this week in this program. We had to construct there soccer robots, which were simply remote controled cars that we'd eventualy use in a 4x4 soccer match. We spent the first part of Tuesday working on our 'robot' car thingies then toured the various MIT labs - awesome stuff - we got to see the $500,000 goo machine that can make anything you put into the computer, at least 30 lathes and the same number of drill presses and computer controlled milling machines, a wind tunnel, jet engine, liquid nitrogen junk (the teacher stuck his hand in a vat of it and splashed it out - apparently it doesn't hurt you if you touch it for only a short time), plastic 'muscle' thingies, a robot that runs around the ceiling, a robot snail, a plastic injector molder thing, a heated plastic suction shaper molder thing, then we got on a boat and toured around the waterways seeing Eric Clapton's boat and the Boston Tea Party boat and a whole bunch of other stuff. The next day we saw the Blue Man Group in Boston and got a tour of the Boston GE plant where they MAKE the jet engines and got to see everything in the factory - cool stuff. They also make gear boxes and we saw the gearbox of the USS Cole which got partialy blown-up a few years ago. Yesterday we toured a design firm, which has worked on everything from the Swiffer Sweeper to kid gas masks and Coleman BBQs. Today we had the tournament - my team, team #1 - was the first to be eliminated - bummer. We're gettin the final meal with them today, then rush 'starts' and we're supposed to be able to get free junk all of next week from dorms which want you to put them in the adjustment lottery. I've seen my roommate all of about 5 minutes and the next day he dissapeared leaving all of his stuff in the room - that was Monday, I'm not quite sure where he went, but probably he went on one of the 'Outdoor' programs, or he fell into the Charles.....who knows.