ownership and motivation: a blurb

I think I hate problem sets.

I don’t typically exhibit such strong emotions towards my schoolwork, but problem sets and me are not getting along. I look forward to the point in my life when I am free to never do a problem set again.

On the flip side, I really enjoy working on research projects when I feel like I have some emotional stake in the outcome. I think I do better work all around when I know that I’m working toward more than just a grade.
Case in point: I’m having incredible difficulty getting very far on this astronomy problem set, but feel really stimulated putting any work into my project proposal.

I’ll observe this trend going forward.
/blurb

salt

Hey guys -

a mostly unplanned, spontaneous post here. I stumbled across one LM’s blog and felt inspired and introspective for a moment, and remembered: my best thoughts come from channeling procrastination into self-reflection.

So: Life is, on the whole, pretty good. Being a junior is awesome; I’ve got this romantic relationship which I’m pretty much a fan of; I feel like I’m heading in a direction, and I am very, very happy that it’s a cool direction. And I feel like I’m making my own future regardless of what my past consisted of — my trajectory can forget its initial conditions.

(more…)

the lens.

I’m finding something.

Something: it’s not until you introduce something really new into your life that you get even a small glance at yourself — what you are, what you’ve become, and whether you think this is even a good thing.

Things are happening in my life and I am (as always, always, always) re-evaluating everything around me, but it’s only close encounters like these that let me evaluate myself.

Have I changed? Have my desires changed? My bad habits? My sense of self-control? My fears, hesitations, inadequacies?

I’ve not a damn clue of what’s to come, but I shall treat it as an adventure, and attempt to be wise, kind, and thoughtful at every step.

Computer surgery

Dear readers,

Let me tell you a story, full of tragedy and despair. In December 2009, through an accident involving a high-speed pen and poor aim, I cracked my laptop’s LCD screen. The damage wasn’t so bad at first – a couple of dead lines on my screen – but as the months went by, the amount of dead screen space got bigger and bigger. I finally caved and bought a brand-new replacement screen for my computer…

and decided to install it myself!

I’ve always wanted to get better at knowing about the insides of computers, and this was a great opportunity to do this.

Here’s an image gallery of my wonderful exploits.

Long story short, it turns out that in a ThinkPad, if you want to replace the screen you have to literally take the entire computer apart. What a pain.

It was fun, though.

THE SUN NEVER SETS ON THE BLANDFILL EMPIRE

This summer, we the Blandfill Four were awesomely distributed across the globe of the Earth.

View Empire in a larger map

Tom was working in Hilo, Hawaii; Danny was working in New York City; Duncan was visiting family in Cornwall, England; Charles was working in Shanghai, China.
This awesome chance alignment happens only once every million billion juptas.