from the desk of stinkpot

the boston muddy buddy race took place this weekend. this race has been a huge event on my calendar. my teammate – andrew – signed us up some time in february. chris and i even cut short our european odyssey to make it back in time for the muddy. the race sounded incredible on paper. […]

hooray, christina and i are finally back home! actually, we got home yesterday – i couldn’t post anything until now, however, since our internet has been dead the last two days. ::angrily shakes fist at verizon:: of course, when the internet did come back on, i was greeted by this on my screen: up there […]

as usual, we had an eventful weekend. stephanie, my younger and only other sibling, graduated from high school in new york city. i’m really proud of her – she’ll be chemE in the fall at upenn and she won the science medal at her graduation. what more does an older brother / engineer need to […]

gawsh, i’m starting to appreciate how difficult it is to develop algorithms. it seems that the function representing the novelty & utility of an algorithm vs. effort exerted looks like 1-exp(-x): the first couple of breakthroughs in a field come easily, but improving on them can be quite hard. in my case, i’ve been working […]

i turned 23 on wednesday. i celebrated by taking my one final of the semester, which went surprisingly well. (i was pleased for two reasons: 1) i was able to put down a reasonable answer for each question; 2) my sense of academic apathy, first nurtured in senior year of undergrad, has finally blossomed this […]

christina and i took an impromptu trip to maine 2 weekends ago. her firm was sponsering a convention for grants administrators in portland. (yes, even people who underwrite grants have symposia.) the convention was from monday-wednesday; we decided to go up on saturday and spend two nights camping and biking along the maine coast. (being […]

ah, so much has been conspiring lately against me getting some notes down into my blog. broken laptop – at least my powerbook still happened to be under warranty and apple paid for my hard drive repair. in fact, by patronizing a local computer repair-man, instead of the official apple store, i was even able […]

about 2 weeks ago, i was elated to hear that one my favorite bands – wolf parade – was coming to boston. i was subsequently crushed to find out that their one tour date here was also sold out. luckily, christina had the fantastic idea of catching their april 8th show down in providence. tickets […]

i was playing with my camera the other night and snapped this picture of pythagoras’ bust on my desk. it reminded me of a question a professor asked me once in college. it was meant to test whether i belonged in science or business. he asked, “would you rather own the empire state building or […]

inspired by the winter games in turino, christina and i ventured out into the blizzard today. i brought along my camera. here’re some photos i snapped: the lot of them, most of which didn’t turn out so well (since it was so dark), live here.