A quick note:

As many of you know, MIT has a not-so-secret love affair with acronyms, abbreviations, and numbers. As much fun as the code is, I understand that many of you may not speak MITese. To remedy this, those of you reading my blog on ebroder.net will notice that certain words and phrases have a dashed underline. Holding your mouse over these phrases should display a small tool tip that expands the abbreviation or translates the number.

For those of you who read this elsewhere, fear not. The tool tips are probably still there; they just don’t have the dashed underline marking them. So if there’s something you don’t understand, try mousing over it, and the meaning just might make itself clear.

So, classes start today. My first class (7.012) is in an hour and 20 minutes, followed immediately by 3.091 and then 8.02. It’s a fairly easy schedule; my goal is basically to knock out the GIRs this semester so I can focus on more interesting stuff next semester.

The past week has actually been relatively uneventful. I’ve mostly been too lazy to do a lot of frat events because I didn’t want to go across the river, especially since I was only rushing, and not particularly concerned with pledging. That being said, my friends and I have still eaten relatively well for the past week, although we were never able to get in to one of the steak and lobster dinners.

Outside of rushing, there has been a pretty high amount of Super Smash Brothers over the last couple of days, and I’ve just spent a good amount of time wandering campus to get a feel for the place.

So, the last few days was Dorm Rush. The point of dorm rush is to make sure that freshmen find a dorm where they are happy. The truth of dorm rush is that freshmen spend the week exploring a little, but mostly enjoying the free food offered by almost every dorm.

Some of the other interesting events of the week:
Underground Capture the Flag, or at least an unofficial version run by people from Discover Ocean Engineering—the real thing is this Saturday.

Exploring the many corridors of campus and trying to learn my way around, preferably not entirely above ground, either, so I don’t have to spend too much time outside during the winter. Yesterday I managed to get from Lobby 7 to the Stata Center without ever going outside. This isn’t actually very hard, but the last time I tried to do this was when I visited campus last October, and I had no idea where I was, and the area looked a little sketchy.

18.02 (multivariable) Advanced Standing Exam, which I apparently passed. Difficulty really varied by problem. I know that I finished 12 or 13 of 20 problems, all of which I think I did the right way (although might not have gotten the right answer). I was far along in 4 or 5, and only clueless on 1 or 2. They obviously gave partial credit, and were also willing to set the bar below impossible, fortunately.

Today I have Core Blitz, where they talk about the classes everyone has to take, and the Academic Expo, where the different majors give out free stuff to convince you to join their department. I also have a meeting with my advisor, which I’m really looking forward to, because he’s supposed to be a very cool guy.

Dorm rush is now officially over (the housing adjustment lottery closed last night), which means that the dorms aren’t going to give us food anymore. However, frat rush starts on Saturday, and the frats are notorious for spending lots of money on food for freshmen. Generally steak and lobster are available.

So until then, I need to go actually buy some food.

So, this is a short and relatively uninteresting story, but it made me pretty happy. My server got in today (we had it shipped in hopes that it would make it in one piece—it did, fortunately), but I had to reconfigure it for the MIT network, and I didn’t have a monitor. So one of the guys on my floor takes me down to the lobby and into what was once a photography lab, and there are 3 or 4 different monitors sitting in there that nobody wants. So I grabbed one and carried it back up to my room. I didn’t even have to leave the dorm.

So I have a monitor now, network configuration was easy, and I have a server too. Which means that my spam filtering works again. Trust me—this is good.

And now, for a brief summary of today:

Since yesterday was fission day, today was fusion day. Fusion is apparently believed by many to be possible, and MIT has an entire center that studies it. However, there are still several problems, and most of our mentors are fission people, so the kind of laugh at the fusion people.

After that we went to Salem, where we saw this terrible presentation on the witch trials. It was kind of funny because it was just so bad. Then we were given a few hours to wonder around Salem. However, none of us knew what we could do, and none of us wanted to spend money, so we spent a long time sitting by a cemetery talking about different stuff like classes and dorms.

Tomorrow (well, today now) is officially the start of REX, or Residence Exploration, or dorm rush. For the uninitiated, rush is the period where dorms try to convince you to leave your temp housing and move to their dorm. This means free food for the next 5 days.

But in the mean time, I should get to sleep, since I still have to wake up in 5 and a half hours.

Good night.

So, being bored a few nights ago,…

Well, not bored, but more avoiding certain things I didn’t want to do, I took photos for a brief photo tour of my suite/room. Of course, the prospect of photo editing tends to scare me away from doing any of it (I have tons of photos that need editing), so it took me an extra day to actually do anything with it. But, I finally got around to it, and fixed my iPhoto plugin to publish photos to Flickr, so you get a very brief tour of my suite in Burton-Conner.

Our suite is at the far end of one of the hallways on Conner 4. I say that hoping that it’s only enough information for MIT students to find me, and not anyone else, because they could find me anyway.

Anyway, right inside all Burton-Conner suites is a little lounge area. One of my suitemates actually managed to get a piano in here, although by what magic I know not.

Also in the common area is the kitchen, one of the coolest features of B-C. Generally the upperclassmen keep it stocked well, although I’m sure the freshmen will be pulled into the stocking process eventually.

(N.B.: The last photo and the next photo were both taken facing roughly the same direction. This one was taken facing the opposite direction. That may help to orient you within the photos, or it may serve to just confuse you more.)

The rooms are just past the lounge area. Mine is the first room on the right, the only double in my suite.

My room is also one of the “smallest” on the floor. It’s not that the actual square footage is less, but there’s this little foyer area that’s kind of off from the rest of the room and makes it all seem a little smaller. The foyer contains one of our two dressers.

The two desks and the other dresser. I will claim mine, here. It’s the one that’s covered in stuff. It’s not really too much stuff, but it’s the only area where I’ve unpacked at all. Since we might move again, I have a towel hanging up to dry on a hook in the dresser, and everything else is either in the suitcase or on my desk.

Our beds. I’m not going to say which one mine is. Maybe you can figure it out. Also note the shelving on the right wall, which is currently very inconvenient, so not sure what will happen there.

And finally, the view from our window. This was mostly taken to prove to my dad’s friend that we can, in fact, see Fenway Park from our dorm. You can see the lights in the top center of the photo.

So, that’s the tour. Brief summary of events…

The Discover Nuclear Science and Engineering program has been feeding us, starting with dinner on Tuesday night. It’s basically run by a bunch of grad students and a few upperclassmen. After a pretty dry lecture yesterday morning, we took a tour of MIT’s nuclear reactor. We did actually get to go into the containment building and everything, although we had to leave bags, cameras, and phones outside for security. It was pretty cool, although it’s not a big operation or anything - it only takes two people to run the reactor.

After that and lunch, we went to the Boston Museum of Science, where we saw the Body Worlds exhibit, which is the one with the plastinated bodies. It was kind of disturbing, actually, mostly because some of the bodies were as much art pieces as they were medical cadavers.

After that we wandered around the museum and saw a few of the other exhibits, and the lightning show. I have photos, but I need to touch almost all of them up first. It was a very good show, though.

There was an employee in the computer exhibit who was basically taking care of two Aibos that they had on display who turned out to be an MIT grad. She was Course VI, decided she didn’t like the cubicle work, and so now she works at the museum instead. I think I’m the only Course VIer at DNSE, so they laughed at me for that one. The lesson, I think, is to avoid cubicles at all cost.

Anyway, I have to go, because I’m hungry and B-C is starting orientation events with breakfast downstairs.

So, does anyone else find the combined message of Accepted and the Get a Mac ads to be rather amusing?

I mean, I guess they’re saying that Macs will help you do stuff better, but you’ll be so busy creating cool videos in iMovie that you won’t get into Yale?

Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t make the switch sooner…

In the list of other weird computer related things, Stephen Colbert showed his three favorite websites today on his show. I’m normally not a huge Colbert Report fan, but today was funny because, although he pulled out an HP laptop, the screenshots were taken in Safari

We had Chinese food tonight, and this was Aaron’s fortune. As Cain pointed out, turn the second number backwards for bonus points.

We decided that we were going to try out Netflix, since we’ve been watching more movies lately, and the Blockbuster bills were starting to add up. So, for one of our first movies, we got Walk the Line.

Now, when I watch movies, I like to turn the subtitles on. It’s not that I have hearing problems, but it’s nice to not worry about missing lines.

Now, subtitles in movies are really pretty decent for the most part; not entirely accurate, but still acceptable. The worst example I can think of was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where the translation for the subtitles was apparently done seperately from the translation for the dub. I ended up watching it with Mandarin audio and English subtitles so my head didn’t explode from the inconsistencies.

But with Walk the Line, Fox set a new standard. As the film starts and the Fox opening bit rolls, the subtitles read…

(drumroll)
then
(rousing orchestral fanfare playing)
and finally,
(fanfare ends)
before getting on with the movie.

However, in the movie itself, the songs aren’t subtitled, just the dialogue. Work that one out.

…they’re just heckling you.

Ok, so I’m delaying finishing off my quizbowl post because something more pressing has come up.

For years, Mom has refused to allow us to get a gaming console; she always said we spend too much time in front of monitors as it is. Of course, it’s not until my 18th birthday that I figure out how to get around this: have friends come over with all of the original games.

Guy brought DDR and Karaoke Revolution as well as his PS2 to my party, and we amused ourselves for long periods of time. And apparently while I was out of town, Austin and Aaron used this to convince Mom to get us a PS2.

This is big news—like I said, I’ve been trying to get some sort of console into the house for a long time.

Anyway, if you didn’t guess from the beginning of the post, we got our first game today: Guitar Hero. And it’s awesome.

We probably wasted 5 or 6 hours today playing. We only have one guitar controller right now, but you can use a standard PS2 controller as well, and I’ve gotten rather good at it. It’s a bit disorienting at first, especially if you’re coming off using the guitar, but still fun.

Yeah. So that’s basically it, but it also makes two posts in one day (within 5 minutes of each other, for that matter).

And now we come to the last part of my vacation: Vienna.

Why Vienna? Because that’s where our flight left from. Originally we were just going to take a train in and then the subway over to the airport, but I decided that I wanted to see Vienna, what with its rich musical history and all.

Turns out that they won’t let you forget about their rich musical history. In fact, they even make violin-shaped liqueur bottles.

To get there we took an overnight train from Venice. Dad and I had a 3-person compartment. The beds folded out of the wall and stacked on top of each other, and it was generally very uncomfortable. There was actually a train that left later but arrived at about the same time, but we decided that we’d go for the longer ride so we might get some sleep. The total duration of the train ride was about 9 hours, of which we might have slept for 6.

In Vienna, our hotel was very central, right near Stephansplatz, which translates to Stephen’s (as in the St.) Place, so named for the large cathedral in the square. You can also see the altar and the organ keyboard, which is apparently one of the largest in the world (the organ, not the keyboard).

We wandered around for a while trying to get to the Opera House (Staatsoperhaus in German) in hopes of getting a tour. They weren’t until the afternoon, but I went ahead and took some photos of the exterior. We also looked around in the gift shop, where they were selling what must have been every opera recording they could find. This included some old vinyls from the bargain bin, and I bought a record of the Magic Flute for amusement. I havne’t really listened to it, because our record player is only half put together and hooked up at the moment.

So, we went to the Natural History museum, which was one of a quadrangle of museums. We went into one and decided that it didn’t look interesting, although I can’t remember what it was. So then we went to the Natural History museum instead. There was an interesting stuffed lion in the main lobby, and there were stuffed versions of just about every other animal somewhere else. I didn’t take pictures of all of them, but as an MIT student, I figured I had the right to be beaver-biased. Also of interest was the stuffed dog which, as best as I can tell, was Maria Theresa’s. If anyone wants to translate the German and clear that up for us all, be my guest.

After that we still had some time to kill before the Opera House tours started, so we kept wondering. While we were wandering, we went into a bookstore, where I saw, for the first time all vacation, Moleskine notebooks. Yes, I hear you. They’re notebooks. Who cares? Well, they are notebooks that happen to be made in Milan, but try as I might, I didn’t see one in Italy. Go figure.

Also, for those of you that complain about Starbucks prices, we saw our first Starbucks in Vienna as well. The prices in Vienna were more expensive than the prices here, and that’s if you don’t consider the currency conversion (i.e. assume €1 = $1).

Finally it was time for the Staatsoperhaus tours. There was a line across the lobby and out into the courtyard of people waiting to buy their tickets. Seperate tours were conducted in English, German, French, Japanese, Russian, and possibly others.

The first room we saw was the Mahler room, so named for the painting of Mahler hanging in that room, shown above.

Next was Composer’s Alley. That’s not really what it’s called, but I can’t remember the real name and Composer’s Alley sounds cool. The Opera House was almost completely destroyed during the WWII bombing of Vienna, and this was one of the few rooms where the original decorations could be salvaged. The chandeliers, in particular, are original. Running along the wall were busts of composers, and above each was a painting representing their most famous work(s). The mural for Mozart contains representations of The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, and one more work that I can’t remember/identify.

We also saw the one other room with original decorations, the Emperor’s Tea Room. If you look on the wall you can see the crest of Emperor Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor during the Opera House’s construction. They now rent the room out to businesses for the duration of intermission for an unbelievably high fee.

And finally, the auditorium itself. It was huge. I don’t remember any numbers, but it was really big. Instead of the projected supertitles that companies like Nashville Opera use, they had LCD screens installed in the back of every chair, which displays translations of the opera in performance in either German or English.

Here’s something you theater types will appreciate: at any given point about 2-3 shows are generally running simultaneously on the Staatsoperhaus stage. It is a rarity that the same production runs two nights in a row. The stage isn’t big enough to hold the sets for more than one production. You do the math.

Our tour guide also recommended that we check out the Staatsoperhaus Museum, where they’ve put up on display various props and sketches and such from past Opera House productions. She failed to mention that it’s entirely in German. So we wandered around for a little while and, not understanding anything, moved on. One of the neat things in there was a small model of the auditorium. Since I couldn’t get a good wide-angle shot of the auditorium itself, I figured I could come close with this model. Unfortunately, the glare from the flash off the plexiglass was terrible, so what you see above was the best that I could do.

As we were wandering around souvenir shopping, we saw this awesome t-shirt in one of the shops. It was made even more amusing by what we saw on the street a few minutes later.

One of the things I decided I wanted to do while we were there was see some sort of concert, so our hotel gave us the brochures for the various ones they could get tickets for. They all looked really cheesy, but one less so than others, so we bought our tickets and hoped. No such luck. It wasn’t very amusing. It was a chamber orchestra with two singers and two dancers, and the dancers were really boring. The first half was all Mozart and the second half all Strauss, but after seeing the dancers in the first half, we decided that we had gotten our fair share of music. So we moved on.

Before we took the subway to the concert, we spent a good 30 minutes running up and down the streets around Stephensplatz trying to find someplace where we could get a Sachertorte, or at least a knockoff. Neither of us thought it was much special.

After the concert, we headed back to the hotel, slept, then headed for the airport. There was an express train that ran back and forth between one of the subway stops and the station.

Our flight was Vienna to Zurich to Heathrow to Chicago. There are only a couple of things worth mentioning about the flight back.

First, we took a shuttle from the gate to our plane. The shuttle was double sided - it not only opened on the side, but also at the front and the back. It also had a driver’s compartment on both sides, and both steering wheels turned while he drived. It was kind of…odd.

Next, the first two flights were Swiss Air. Swiss Air gives you chocolate as you’re landing. Mmm. Keep that in mind if you’re ever booking European flights. It’s good chocolate.

And finally, our trans-Atlantic flight was in a Boeing 777. That’s the plane with the LCD touchscreens in the back of every seat. The entertainment was bad, as usual, but at least we could waste the time by watching the little icon of a plane cross the map of the Atlantic Ocean. There was also bad sci-fi from the BBC.

And that’s Vienna. Next time I post it’ll be about the NAQT National Quizbowl Tournament.

P.S. Ben of MIT Admissions has announced the “Early Action” round for blogger applications, so I have every intention of stepping things up in the future.