Category: School

So I promised this a while ago, and I’ve been living here going on three weeks, I sure as hell should have something insightful to say about Boston! Right? Yeah, I guess.

There’s Boston, then there’s Boston College, and then there’s Boston College Physics. The three are somewhat distinct entities, and I feel like I should address them individually:

Boston (the City) is fantastic! I love it to death. There’s a million different things to do, and so many people! I mean, I live in a major metropolitan area, I will not strip Kansas City of that well-earned title, but it’s nothing like this. There’s just people everywhere. That was the biggest surprise was that it could even be possible for so many to live in so small a space. I’ve visited New York City, which I suppose is the quintessential example of such a place, but I never lived in New York.

Having lived in Boston, the sheer scope of the number of people living hear freaks me out just a bit. Those people, however, are all different races, and speak a host of different languages, which also surprised me. The most common non-English we get in KC is a modest bit of Spanish… Today we visited the Boston Aquarium, and I heard languages I couldn’t even identify! So that’s pretty neat, diversity and whatnot. To see what it really looks like, for once, has been nice. Missouri: You’ve got a long way to go.

Speaking of journeys, how about the T?! That is what the Massachusetts Transit Authority calls its bus/train/commuter-rail system. It is the best thing ever. Public Transportation is like… a hobby of mine, I suppose? Maybe that’s too kind of a word, and ‘infatuation’ better describes it. Riding the T is just fantastic. I went to the trouble of getting (for free!) a little card that has an RFID chip in it (remember those, debate folks?) that I don’t even have to take out of my wallet; you just slap the wallet against the console at the front of the bus, and it takes the money off!

Of course, eventually you need to put more money on… which I’ve done a copious amount. It’s too much fun though to just hop on and have it take you straight into town for 1.70$, and then not have to worry about parking, something happening to your car, the weather, drunk drivers, any of that! You just do your business in town, and provided said business is over before 12 AM, hop on the T and head home. BC is even the last stop for the train that I take, and so I can even nap on the way back without worrying. On top of all that, every time I ride the T is a time I’m not sitting my ass down in a car to burn fossil fuels, which also adds to the enjoyment of it all. (Caveat: Grocery shopping via public transport is sortof a hassle…)

Boston College: I have fewer good things to say about BC. Like, for me, right now, it’s great. I have a big old room, my suitemates are good dudes, the REU people are fun to hang out with, campus is fairly easy to navigate, and so on. But never have I been more proud of Truman. I don’t mean this as a slight to BC… but- well I’ll stop. The examples I present aren’t that lengthy so we’ll just hit it:

1) Papers
So it’s a silly complaint, but I’m gonna make it nonetheless. BC has no papers for me to read. Even during the summer (I can speak from experience) Truman has the USA Today / NYT / STL Post out there in full force for the summer students to read. I can see no sign of a news paper program here at BC, which I think is abysmal for any self-respecting academic institution. Even if the defense is that they subscribe to a lot of online sources or something, I’m gonna say that’s not good enough.

I’ve got a tech article in the wings where I compare the different feed-readers I’m trying, and how well they syndicate my news, which is something I’ve had a lot of trouble with recently. I’m go out on a limb, though, and say that I’m in the minority. Unless this news is readily available to students, I think it just encourages a lot of the apathy that’s already implicity in my age bracket. So yeah, the lack of a newspaper program is reprehensible.

2) Rec Center
So I can’t really comment on the nature or quality of BC’s recreational center because I haven’t been inside. “But Tom! How then could you possibly level an accusation of a shortcoming!?” Watch me. The reason I haven’t been inside the Rec here? It costs money per-visit! Madness, you say? Indeed. Their response? A 65-dollar all-summer pass. Really? REALLY?! That’s got to be a joke. It isn’t.

I had some of my fellow REU students assure me that this was well below what a full-time, equivalent gym membership would cost, but that really dodges the point. It should be free. You should be able to go exercise whenever you think you need or want to, and not have to worry about how much it costs… not have to factor it into your budget. Like with the newspapers, the dedicated kids are always going to find a way… but if Truman charged per visit? I don’t think I’d even be able to tell you what the inside of my OWN Rec Center looked like, because that’s not really my beat.

Point here is that if lowly Truman State can swing this, surely the illustrious Boston College should be able to as well, and I’m in awe of their failure to do so thus far.

3) Dorms and Residential Life
As mentioned above, this isn’t a huge bitch-fest about how much I dislike BC. Allow me to reiterate that I’ve been treated very well, and have tremendously enjoyed my time here. Stark differences remain though, and this category is the most telling one. BC has a beautiful campus: some manner of Gothic architecture graces many of the older structures, while the others are tastefully modern with overt and cohesive structural ‘tips of the hat’ to the Gothic style. It looks really good. Inside many of the main buildings you’ll find cutting edge equipment, new, clean and modern work spaces, and some of the most qualified instructors in the Boston area (which is saying something, given the looming presence of Harvard, MIT, and some 35+ other higher education facilities).

None of this, however, changes the fact that if I leaned hard enough, I could destroy the wall that separates me from the small hallway in my suite. At night, light seeps through the top of the wall and the ceiling because the two don’t actually connect in many places. As a result: you guessed it! These things are about as acoustically insulating as a facial tissue. The suite is designed for two people per room, with three rooms total (meaning 6 occupants) supported by 2 bathrooms and 1 kitchen, equipped with a GE oven circa 1950, and an average-sized fridge. In addition, there are two small, adjacent common rooms to stave off what must be the inevitable cabin fever.

I guess the punchline to all of this is that Ignacio Hall, where I live, is undisputed as the best dorm on campus. I had to hide my surprise when I heard that. Again, not that it’s uninhabitable, but only that… relative to all the other stuff on campus, it does not “wow” in an appreciably comparative way. Say what you will about ol’ C-Hall, but you could throw bricks at the interior walls of that room all day and into the night, and the worse you’d do was chip the paint. The outer-walls of the rooms here could stand such a test; they’re made from brick. You know how I know? THEY WERE NEVER PAINTED. You literally walk down a hallway composed exclusively of brick, with only the periodic door to break the pattern.

Ack. It also doesn’t help that laundry is expensive as the dickens (1.50 for a wash, 1.50 for 60 min. drying time). That’s one thing, I understand stuff costs what it costs… but the machines only take quarters. Annoying as that is, it would be ok if there was a change machine nearby. There isn’t. Perhaps someone like myself felt this was an injustice, and got them to allow you to place money on your ID, and then you could then in turn use that to pay for laundry. You can. JUST NOT IN THE SUMMER TIME BECAUSE THEY SUMMARILY SHUT DOWN THE ENTIRE SYSTEM FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON. I swear, at every turn, I feel increasingly more thwarted.

So these aren’t huge issues. But they are issues. I’ll openly call out BC’s student government (http://ugbc.bc.edu/), and ask them “Where the hell have you guys been?!” I know I don’t understand the situation fully, but I gotta ask myself what these people have been up to, given their failure to address any of the issues mentioned above. To their credit, they have a professor evaluation system in place… which is open to the public so near as I can tell (it’s called PEPS), which seems like an awful idea. But again, I’m willing to acknowledge my ignorance of the entire field of issues.

Somehow, our Student Government, for all its flaws (and there are many!) and trouble getting students engaged, has managed to bite, claw, kick, and bitch its way to a point where students are in a good place; and in areas where it isn’t a good place, it’s one that’s getting better. All those times I felt like maybe we took ourselves a little too seriously, I suddenly feel less bad about.

Anyways.

BC Physics is a slightly less soap-boxy story (albeit more technical): You can ready my impressions of it over at the SPS REU Amalgamate Blog which I haven’t posted nearly as much as I should, having founded the damn thing. So it goes.

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Heeeey people!
Bet you thought I’d fallen back into a blogging coma?! No such luck.
Still here, still blogging, and getting off to a good start in 2009!

I ended up coming back to campus a little early for a meeting that was Thursday morning. Which meant I had to leave the house at 4:30 AM, the day of. I got there on time and everything, thanks to a huge amount of help from my mom and sister, so all went well.

As soon as that was over, I set to crafting Tom’s Room: Mark II.
At the end of last semester, I’d had this idea to reorganize some of my room, moving stuff around and so on. I also thought it would be neat to rebuild the futon (banned to the closet by an executive decision of Ian and Rob) and use it as a couch. Or try at least. It’s a crappy futon, but Lizz said they’re better if you put memory foam on, so I might try that.

Anyways, I did all the moving, futon-building, and cleaning, I finally got it close to something I liked. Below are pictures!

So we’ll see how that works out. As I told Rob, you can never know how you feel about a given configuration until you field-test it, and right now, I’m noticing a sloping in the floor that I hadn’t before… but what’re you gonna do.

In addition to a new room, I also got a new phone! Our contracts were up, so they were not as expensive as they would normally be, which is always a plus. It was a weird moment, the phone-swap. You look down at a little lump of plastic and metal that’s been by your side more-or-less for the past two years, and you have to look into its little screen and explain why you can’t be together anymore. That’s hard to do.

See you little buddy! And then, you turn around to a new lump of little plastic and metal, and realize that it’s going to be by your side for the next two years. Some of the most important moments of my life that haven’t even happened yet, I can almost guarantee that that phone will bear witness to… and that’s a weird thought to think.

Anyways, enough phone philosophy. I mostly wanted to drop a little blip about redoing my room, and how boring Kirksville is. It will be good once there are people to see, but right now it’s just me and Lizz and a bunch of 30 Rocks we’ve both already seen.

Could be worse though.
And it beats frickin’ working.

[Oh! I almost forgot! My and Ian's Top Albums of 2008 are both up. You can access them from the new music omnibus page! It's not quote done yet, but it's functional.]

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So we had our first night of observing up at Lowell: It was pretty badass. The control system they have is pretty slick: One computer, aptly named “MOVE” controls the direction of the dome/telescope contraption, while the other, named “PEGASUS”, operates a software package called LOIS (Lowell Observatory Instrument System) that takes the pictures and can run some useful mid-observing tests.

We arrived at around 6:30, PM. Ed, the super-nice technician dude helped us get started, showing us how LOIS worked, what to be careful of when moving the dome and telescope, and how to restart the whole shebang when (yes, when, not if) it should crash. Soon, we were off.

Cody and I ended up going first, so we pulled two targets off our giant heap and started going for it. This process ended up entailing an exceedingly simple and repetitive series of actions that Cody and I needed to perform every 15 seconds. An exposure takes 10 seconds, and then about 5 more seconds for the system to reset itself, then we point it to the second target, repeat. Point it back at the first, repeat, and so on. We did this until 11:30. I’m still a little scared to do the math, but we ended up taking something like 300 images on that first go. *cringe*

Then Cody and I had a break while Nick and Kerry did their thing. Eventually though, around 3 AM, myself and Cody were back in the hot seat. We picked two more targets, which thankfully were dimmer, and so needed longer exposure times, but basically entailed the same methodology. Sadly, we both began to fall apart around 6 AM (having been awake then for 16 hours, 8 of which were in what would be considered ‘normal sleeping time’): He’d move the dome while I was taking an image, or I’d take an image while he was moving the dome. We were a mess!

By 6:30, the decision was made to call it quits, and we happily did so. Quickly we returned to the Chalet for some sleep. I awoke at around 1 PM with something like six hours of sleep under my belt… Alarmingly, that’s pretty typical for me.

Only problem now is that we have no water, which is… unfortunate.
I’m dirty, and perhaps a tad over-hydrated.

We’ll see how this goes.

In Other News:
Mom and Dad got a new computer over Thanksgiving, and after much begging, I convinced my mother to not throw the old one away (she HATES having old computer stuff around the house, as much as I love it, it seems). I’ve got big plans for this little machine though! I’m going to wipe the hard drive, and install the Ubuntu distro of Linux on it. Then, I’m going to try and run it as a web server out of my house!

“But Tom, you already have a web server! You pay a hefty chunk of money every year to keep it in operation! Why do you need two?!”

If this one works well enough, I can host Schrodinger’s Blog locally, and NOT have to pay a gazillion dollars a year to keep my crappy, little-used blog in operation. Also it would just be mega-hardcore to do it myself.

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Well hey there, everybody.

Suppose it’s kindof been a while.

Getting back on that old blogging horse though, and I’ve decided there’s no better time in which to do that than during a trip! I’m currently sitting in “The Chalet,” a small living-quarters area located on the campus of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ. Myself, Cody, Nick, Kerry Anne, and Dr. Beaky just arrived here about… six hours ago.

We were supposed to leave Kirksville at around 5:30 PM, on Tuesday, but to do weather conditions (see: Hellofsnow) we were delayed until around 7 AM Wednesday. We then proceeded to spend the next 24 hours driving across the Midwest into the Southwest to the grand state of Arizona. The best part? When we arrived here, they had forgotten to leave our keys out.

So here we are, 6 AM in the morning (local time), dead-dog-tired, covered in Car Grime (you know? that dirt that accumulates on your person only, and I mean ONLY in an automobile?), and we’re forced to sleep in our cold, cold minivan yet another two hours. That part was pretty miserable. Also sleeping around 12 hours in something that’s moving at about 70 MPH: no picnic either.

Case in point, we’re finally here! We sampled some fine cuisine along the way: Maple Something (Breakfast Diner in Macon, MO), McDonalds Adjacent to RestStop (surprisingly clean!), and finally the apex of MY trip: Chili’s in Amarillo, TX! It was stupendous. I think I’m focusing on food right now because we at at Chili’s at about… 9-something, CST, meaning I haven’t had food in like… 18 hours? Oh geez. Better get on that.

Feeling pretty good though. All-in-all, things turned out OK. Our little delay meant I got to stay on campus for a few more hours, which included a pretty good party, an adventure to the roost and the bowels of OP, and (my mouth salivates now, at the thought) Ian’s Custom Exam Treats!!! They were so good… I would kill for a cinnamon roll right now.

But enough about how hungry I am. Gonna figure out how to get music off my iPod and onto the website. Hope everyone’s finals/dead weeks are going well.

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So yeah. I took a month off. SUE ME!

No, for real. I was home for three weeks. The first week was pretty crazy becuase Erin was graduating and I’d just gotten back and stuff. The third week was equally as nuts because I was getting ready to move back to Kirksville into the house, and I decided that’d be a good week to work too. (I really have no good excuse for the middle week…)

Contrary to what seemed to be my apparent demise at the close of Humans vs. Zombies, I managed to survive the semester. Just barely. Things got pretty rough. I referred to this as my semester of “lasts”, as I would be escaping German, Math, and Chemistry after I’d completed these final courses. They weren’t going down without a fight though. At present, I’ve still yet to check my grades. Given how battered I was at the end of the semester, I don’t really want to see them just yet.

In other news, I turned twenty! I did.
Instead of taking the time to wonder aloud as to how crazy the past five years have been, and wonder how crazy the next five will be, I’m going to recount a lighter aspect of birthdays: GIFTS.

One gift, actually, stood out from the rest in its grandeur. Yamato is a Japanese toy company that makes products from the Macross anime series. Undoubtedly, most of you haven’t heard of that do to a big licensing quagmire related to its release and syndication in the United States as something called “Robotech”. None of that’s really important though.

What is important is that it’s the best toy I’ve ever had.
Imagine a transformer, but then make it perfect.
I present to you the YF-19 Variable Fighter!

The first few are pictures of the ‘fighter’ mode, which is a typical plane. The last one is the robot form, called ‘battroid’.

I even bought some add-ons for it (more armor, rocket booster), but I currently lack pictures of those, so maybe later. Case in point, my toy-addiction has evolved to a new level. I was looking into perhaps purchasing him a friend, but the First National Bank for Tom’s Childish Obsessions/Hobbies is a little strapped at the moment, so this is a while off.

In other news directly after my birthday, Erin graduated from high school! Goodness! Go her, being all competent and whatnot. She even gave the super-important speech at the ceremony and did the best job I’ve ever seen one of those done! And this is the third year in a row I’ve been there. So that was really cool. She also had a giant party at the house, the day I got home from school, which was a little surreal.

But there was Jackstack Barbeque, so I got over it pretty quick.

The whole thing was just another item in the long (and growing ever longer) list of things that make me feel old. It’s already been two entire years since I sulked across that stage to get my empty diploma holder. They mailed the actual diploma to me later… though now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it myself. Huh. Hope I didn’t lose it…

On a final note, before heading back up to Kirksville to move into the house (which will be another entry unto itself, with some forthcoming photographic tributes to its state of disrepair), Ethan, Kathryn, Lizz and I all saw Death Cab for Cutie in concert at City Market!

The concert was really good. The venue, City Market, always leaves something to be desired… Given that it’s you and a zillion other people crammed into this out-door space at the end of May when it’s just starting to get up to that characteristically mid-western “hotter than hell” range. Ick. But I got a shirt, and despite a few close calls and head-kicks, we all maintained consciousness throughout the show. [For more details and the set-list, check out the Kansas City Star's blog post about the concert.]

Here at the bottom I guess I should mention, for posterity’s sake, that the past few days have been pretty hard for me. I’m going through some radical changes in my social life. Things that stayed the same for so long are now suddenly different. I suppose, in spite of everything, that I’m handling it OK.

I am just in awe, truthfully, that I’m even capable of feeling so much pain.
That’s really the only surprise of the whole ordeal…

Lest I get even more DeviantArt than I already have, I think I’ll stop there. I’ve sortof made it a policy to not discuss my intimate personal life on the Blog, and this is no cause to change that. Suffice to say that today’s song says pretty much all you’d need to know to get the general idea of what a mess my life’s been the past few days (and will presumably be to degrading extents in the foreseeable future)…