Been a long time since I had an update!

I've been VERY busy running my experiment, which is a good thing! We've been collecting data and trying to figure out what adjustments we need to make. I hope to get the first amplifier result on Friday or next week, which is very exciting, since that's been my goal for 4 years!

Still working on a compact Pulse Width Modulator board design for the p|asma tweeter - It's the most complicated circuit board I ever designed with almost 200 tiny parts packed onto a small 2.5"x3.5" board.

We're in the process of planning our trip to Japan and Korea this May for a conference and to visit family. Can't wait to get the planning done! It's hard enough planning a complicated trip in the US. We plan to take plane, train, boat and bus!

We're also seriously considering a trip to Slovakia for my wedding photographer Daniel Nagaj's wedding to Pavla on 9/1/07. That's very exciting. I hope we can go to Budapest too to visit a friend from MIT and take a tour of the Tokaji wine region! Heidi's very excited about the trip.

Heidi's looking forward to finishing her student teaching semester and hopefully graduating completely after one last summer class in July-August!

My brother Chris plans to marry Tiffany Ego in 2008 too! He's planning to graduate from Berklee in June. Tiffany's site.

Our garden continues to grow (and sometimes die): We've harvested the first long peppers when they were yellow-green. Suddenly one day, one of the remaining 7 peppers started to turn very bright red, and since then most of them have turned extremely bright red. The three dark green bell peppers are about 2" long and still growing slowly. All six garlic cloves sprouted a few weeks ago and are about 20" tall now! Our two tomato plants are growing a total of about 12 tomatos now. The hydroponic zuccinis are taking up a large amount of space with their huge leaves. The cucumber, by contrast, grows upward like a vine and it's long tendrils are grabbing whatever it can find. We killed the soil watermelon because of a problem with thrips, who were eating the leaves, killing the plant and wanting to take over our garden. We haven't seen any of them for about a month now, which is a great relief. We have a new gardening webpage here. Updates are slow, but come eventually.

The winetasting class is over now, but it was phenomenal! We tasted 56 fabulous wines. There were none that I disliked, although several I probably wouldn't buy. Beides having a huge smathering of the usual white and red wines, we had a bunch of more unusual wines, like the oldest wine we had, a 1970 Port wine from Portugal. It was very heavy and about 20% alcohol, but sweet and loaded with character - fabuolous. 1970 was a fantastic Port year, so this was really something special. We had a Sherry from Spain fermeted in open vats which was full of fruity flowery aromas, but had almost no flavor to speak of, except for a nutty, pecan aftertaste long into the finish, and was bone dry - It was a grand deception to the senses! We had a few from 1975 and 1978, the mid 80's and lot from the great 90's when there were a lot of very good vintages. My favorite wine was a Tokaji from Hungary - Sweet, full of flavors, floral aromas, complexity - it scored a 10/10 on my scale! We also had a great J. Lasalle 1989 Champagne. People never think of keeping Champagne that long, but if you do, it can be very rewarding! Overall, the class was absolutely excellent in every way. I felt we definetely got my $175 dollar's worth. I'll have a summary web page soon of this class.

Well, I have to at least start thinking about jobs soon. I'm starting to contact a few friends in industry to get their opinions of where they work -- Networking, they call it. From one of the MIT career classes I took this IAP, they said about 70% of the jobs are acquired through network contacts, so that's pretty important.

Last night, I had my first wine tasting class. This was a white wines class. They were basically all dry up to the end, which was a very sweet Muscat. I gave top ratings to Gewurztraminer Alsace Grand Cru 2001 Pfersiberg for flowery, fruity taste by itself, but it wouldn't compliment any foods we could think of ($28). The Waterbrook Columbia Valley Chardonnay 2002 was the best overall value and a great food wine to boot ($12). The Pinot Grigio would have been great with pasta, veal, or veggies. The Sauvignon Blanc from Loire would have been great with fish!

Basically, we got a 25p packet about wine itself, including all the technical stuff, maps, and careful vocab descriptions of taste and smell. We also got a pack of notes for the 11 wines we had, about a page description of each.

The professor, Dr. Linn Hobbs, was the wine steward at Oxford University for 5 years and tasted about 200 wines per week! He used to be a professional wine taster and had a monthly wine column (I guess it was in the early 1980's).

In all, the course looks very interesting, being grouped by grape, vintage, style, etc. There are even a few from the 1970's!

We've been enjoying IAP too. Heidi and I took a didgeridoo class saturday and made them out of PVC, which we heated and formed into more organic shapes. We're both good at playing them now and look forward to learning circular breathing in a few weeks. The magic card class is really fun and I'm practicing some techniques when I have time. He showed us a few tricks we'll be learning.

Unfortunately, the GRT position (living in undergrad dorms for free) is tough for us to get since I only have 1 year left. They usually look for 2-4 years, so we will not likely get a position (~100 applicants, ~25 spots). Oh well, I was dreading the thought of moving anyway, since we just picked up two shelves, a carpet and a queen bed from our friends who moved out!

Wow, it's been a long time since the last update... We had a great time at my parent's house in Pennsylvania - pictures are here!

Heidi started back to student teaching and is busy working with that again, but this time she only has to go to one school instead of six, which is nice!

I've been busy taking MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) classes, which really started this week. I've attended a few extra seminars that I thought were good, like speaking skills, which was phenomenal. I'm looking forward to card magic tricks tomorrow, and the wine tasting next week!

Heidi's concert went very well and she's relieved to be finished with that! Now she's busy preparing a log book of everything she did this semester -- the binder will be about 4" thick full of papers! Student teaching is tough because their professor wants them to have lesson plans ready when they start teaching so they don't go so crazy the first year of teaching.

My recital went really well yesterday too. About 100 people came, which was great. I got a lot of great comments and a bunch of kids and other folks got to play the organ at the end. I'm already looking forward to the next one, hopefully in the Spring! We collected donations to help keep the organ running, so I'll be looking for parts soon too.

Today, I'm eating some of our lettuce crops! Very good. The hydroponic lettuce easily beat out the soil lettuce in size by a factor of 2!! We're trying to eat our lettuce up before thursday when we fly to PA for Christmas!

We're both looking forward to traveling to PA this week. We plan to visit Longwood Gardens, the new Kimmel Center (home of the Philharmonic Orchestra), Wanamaker Organ (hopefully), and shop for clothes and shoes at discount stores!!

After our trip, MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) begins, through January. It's the best time of the year! Heidi and I will be taking a didgeridoo (native Austrailian drone wind instrument) class. I'm taking the coveted MIT wine tasting class which is very difficult to get into (I've been trying for 3 years and finally made it!), and another very difficult class to get into: Magic tricks with playing cards! Can't wait. I'll also be attending a few other talks.

Praise the Lord! Heidi passed her Permission for the recital, which is sort of like a qualifying exam! She was so nervous and worried, but she made it! Now she just has to do the recital on Saturday, 12/9/06, but that won't affect her passing this requirement for her degree in Cello Performance!

I'm also getting ready for my concert, which is on 12/17.

My last part was finished today, so now I have to clean the remaining parts, cold test what I can, assemble the tube and hopefully start pumping down the vacuum by this weekend.

Hydroponic lettuce is still growing bigger every day by about 0.5"/day! It's outgrown the soil lettuce by a lot now. After less than 1 week, the large Korean radish ('moo') has grow leaves about the size of a Quarter, and even has a few roots sticking out of it's Oasis Horticube.

December already??

Suddenly a few days ago, our hydroponic lettuce started growing very quickly!! It was stuck for a long time with only one "big" leaf about 2" long and 0.5" wide -- Maybe almost 2 weeks. Then suddenly about 4 days ago, it started gowing very rapidly! The biggest leaf is now ~5" long and there are several that are 4" long. It grew over 0.5" in length overnight just last night! The soil-grown lettuce is doing well too, but I'm afraid they're too crowded to grow to full size. Now we're trying to grow: Lettuce, pepper, sesame leaf (Korean plant: "gget-ip"), parsely, basil, green onion, carrot, large Korean radish ("moo"), watermelon (!), tomato, chive, and some other Korean lettuce-like plant!! Did I forget any?

We'd like to grow more fruit, but most good fruits require trees, like apple, orange, pineapple, pear, peach, plum, etc. Since trees take a long time to grow fruit (15 years?), we decided to try growing a few soon so they'll be ready to plant in the ground by the time we get a house! We'll start grape too -- They take about 2 years to grow fruit.

I'm planning to try to grow the watermelon hydroponically, since they love water. Korean radish might work well hydroponically too since they are so large (I've seen them almost a foot long and several inches in diameter!).

We also got a pH tester and have been trying to keep an eye on the hydroponic pH. The pH of our tap water is about 9!! I've been adding a little lemon juice to the tap water for the plants to bring it down to about pH 6. Lettuce grows best at pH 5.8-6.0, and once we add the nutrient solution, it goes down to about that value. We keep two 4-foot fluorescent lamps a few inches above the plants, and have a fan blowing on them all day to increase transpiration, the way plants carry nutrients through the leaves.

I got my final part for my experiment finally! Just waiting now to get a waveguide soldered in and then it will be time to start testing, assembling and pumping down the vacuum! I'm hoping to get some data within the next 1 month.

I'l try to squeeze one more update in before the end of November!

We're thinking about making Christmas cards, we just haven't been motivated enough to start yet!

I'm still waiting my final part from the machine shop -- literally "part" with no "s" ; just one piece! Once I get it I can finally start assembling my vacuum tube for the first experiment!

MIT has their Independent Activities Period (IAP, January 2007) list up, so I'm signing up for things. I'm going to a class about how to work a career fair, how to research possible companies for employment, how to negotiate offers, and how to do playing card magic tricks! After 3 years of trying, I finally got into the coveted MIT wine tasting class!! My cousin Peter also signed up, so I'm hoping it will turn into an opportunity to talk about God more. I wanted to sign up for Basic Machine Shop and Pilates, but they conflicted with the wine tasting. I'm also toying with the idea of posting my own class on the "Guitar Dyna-Matrix project", which has been a long time dream of mine to build.

Speaking of building, I'm still working on the plasma tweeter, but without many breakthroughs recently, and a plasma stove of all things! When Heidi and I go to PA, we plan to build a percussive PVC pipe instrument, which will be fun, along with a few thumb pianos!

We're still trying more gardening. Heidi has planted watermelons now. We'll be lucky if they grow -- they take a huge amount of root space apparently! I'm hoping to grow a hydroponic watermelon in a PVC pipe to save space! Maybe we'll make a square watermelon while we're at it! I'm working on a computer controlled timer for the hydroponic stuff using a very old laptop that I was about to throw out! The last challenge will be figuring out how to use the serial port on the computer. The program side already works, and I have a clever electrical interface planned.

Heidi and I are also sponsoring a child in India now through Gospel For Asia. His name is Sheron (10). We haven't written to him yet, so we need to do that soon too!

I'm gearing up for an organ concert in December! Right now, it looks like it will be a Sunday afternoon. I've been busy putting together a program, learning about the composers and their pieces, making a presentation and getting ready to tune the organ. I have a big plan for this concert: Primarily, I want to use it as an evangelistic opporutnity, but I don't know how yet. Perhaps the event itself will be a testament to God's power. I also want it to reach out to the children in the church so they can get interested in the organ, and celebrate the 120-th "birthday" of the organ, which was built in 1886! In addition, I plan to have a donation box for anyone who wants to donate to keep the organ alive for another 100 years! There are a lot of 120-year old leather "nuts" that hold the tracker action together and need replacing, along with some other special parts that the Organ Historical Society would like to have fixed.

I'm still working on my side projects, which are coming along slowly, but surely! This week, I'm supposed to get my copper mirrors, which are basically the last piece I need to start my experiment!

Last night and today at lunch, I had the opportunity to hear Tony Campolo talk about what he thinks of Christians these days. It was a very thought provoking time, illuminating how the modern evangelical churches seem dead - Not because of lack of spirituality or bad theology, but because they lack passion. Instead of going to help the poor and needy (there are over 2000 verses on the poor/needy/humble in the Bible), we cluster together just making sure we each have the right theology and block others out, not even daring to get involved in the needs of the lowly people: "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to Me." ; "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth"-- NOT 'blessed are the arrogant who give from their spare change/time, but are too clean to actually go serve the needy and cloth them.' Using the example of St. Francis of Assisi, he said we need to realize Jesus is alive in us, and when we value and love humans as God's creation, and for who they ought to be instead of for who they are, we can see through their states and help them meet Jesus. We will be driven and empowered by the spirit of Christ. This is an experiential living out of the "Red-Letter" Christian, that is, striving first to follow the teachings of Jesus and see the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus.

Weather is getting cold out! There was frost outside this morning and it's not even November yet! It looks like I was right -- the unusually cold Summer will lead to an unusually even colder Winter! I hope not! I'm already complaining and it's still 40 deg F!

Recently, I've been wanting to take up zymurgy (beer brewing), probably because I haven't had any beer in about a month, and it's october (October Fest). There must be 100's of home brewing websites selling kits and ingredients! I wonder if I can brew beer in a studio apartment...

I'm planning to have an organ concert in early-mid December sometime, and trying to practice every chance I get for it. It should be a lot of fun! I plan to record at least the audio part of it. I'm praying that it can be an outreach event more than anything else. I want to have an introduction explaining how the organ works, an intro to each piece, and an "organ walkthrough" during the finale piece where people can see the organ in action! It would be so great!

Next week, my copper parts should be finished for my experiment, which means I can finally assemble the whole vacuum tube! I'm hoping to get some results by January so I can submit a paper for the International Vacuum Electronics Conference (IVEC) in Japan, which is in May, 2007. After that Heidi and I would go visit Korea for a few weeks!!

For the last three days, I went to Harvard with the MIT GCF to hear N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham talk about Christianity and in the modern culture. It was very thought provoking and included topics like Gnosticism, Postmodernism, and the characteristics of Empire. I took extensive notes.

Heidi and I will be leading a new Bible study between Tang hall and Westgate next week. It's finally coming together, although it's pretty small now at only 5 members.

Wow, more than a month since the last update - that's a new record!

Heidi's been busy with student teaching, lessons/practice for her upcoming recital (Dec. 5, 2006) and working a day per week at the front desk of two dorms near us. She enjoys teaching, but gets worn out waking up between 6:30 and 7:30am 4 times a week, and then coming home and working on lesson plans and reports for school until 10-11pm every night.

I'm still working on research. My first experimental vacuum tube is almost ready now; just waiting for a few more parts, then it will take a month to get a good vacuum before testing it out!

I've got a reserach committee meeting planned for 11/17/06, so I'm starting to get ready for that too.

My thesis has about 70 pages in it already, although there are still a lot of changes to be made, especially in the first few chapters that I copied from my Master's thesis. And I haven't even done the interaction theory yet!

I'm also working on my p|asma tweeter and it's coming along slowly, but steadily. I finally managed to shrink the tesla coil and shielding cage from 600in^3 down to only 30in^3, a factor of 20 smaller than the original! And it works better too! Since moving to surface mount parts, the size of the oscillator board went down by half!

I've been practicing organ at least once a week because I want to have a fall concert in early December for about an hour! I plan to play a few pieces by Bach, Messaien, Widor, possibly deBussy and some arrangement on a Christmas tune. It should be fun!

Some friends at MIT started a Greek New Testament study here, so I've learned how to read a Greek bible and am trying to learn some vocabulary and grammar now. It's fun and interesting, although Greek grammar sounds extremely complicated. My friend John Lee, who has been studying it on the side for 3 years at Harvard School of Divinity often uses phrases like "I think in this case...." because even he's not 100% sure sometimes!

It's the last day of August already! My research is about 2 months behind due to the machine shops being backed up, so I'm working on the theory chapter in my thesis and designing parts for the second version of my experiment so I don't have to wait so long next time, if possible. I also have to schedule a committee meeting for october probably.

We're getting ready to go to my friends wedding (Jon Bratt and Libby) in a few weeks, which will be held at a church I attended for about 5 years that is literally 5 minutes from my parent's house in PA! Probably a few people from the Graduate Christian Fellowship (GCF) here will sleep at the house, since several friends plan to come. It should be a good time!

I got some new parts for the p|asma tweeter and tested them -- they are phenomenal compared to what I have been using! I can't wait to get a design together using them! Heidi and I plan to drill holes in a metal chassis tonight for the next prototype!

My p|asma tweeter "boss" Russ came to visit, see the tweeter and take us out to dinner! We went to No. 9 Park for dinner, headed by award winning chef, Barbara Lynch. This restaurant is something like the 4th ranked best in Boston by Zagat, achieving a 27/30 score for food. Heidi had cod and stuffed calamari, and I had loin of lamb en croute, which was incredible! Russ and his wife were very funny people (she is from Scotland and had a nice accent too) and we had a great time. Thanks! They like to collect historic artifacts, which have the double benefit of suddenly becoming extremely valuable in the last few years. A classic Gibson guitar that sold for $1500 in 1980 sold for $10,000 in 1990 and $75,000 in 2002. One just sold for $150,000 this year. The baby boomers are now rich and interested in collecting artifacts from their teenage years (cars, guitars, Beetles/Elvis stuff, etc), and hence the supply is getting very small, while the demand continues to grow, so there is exponential growth in the value of these items. In their collection, besides many rare guitars, they have a signed document by Abraham Licoln and put a bid in on Thomas Edison's foreign patent for the light bulb that was patented in India, but the final price kept going up.

After waiting several months, we finally got a notice that Heidi will receive her Permanent Resident's Green card! Can't wait until we have it in hand.

Today is the first day of Vacation Bible School (3 days total). Once I volunteered for it, many unusual opportunities presented themselves to lure me away: A big summer festival with lots of incredible food at my apartment, a BBQ with the Graduate Christian Fellowship, and my old roommate coming to town! I will miss all of those because of VBS! What's the moral of this story? Don't volunteer for VBS? Volunteering to serve means sacrificing more than you imagined? Learn to let go of free food? I don't know, but I'm still going to VBS!

I still haven't had to do jury duty yet. I'll find out tonight about next week.

Research is still going slow. Waiting for parts and trying to get my mirrors figured out still. I'm sure I'm about 1 month behind schedule.

Thought I'd have federal jury duty today, but apparently it's been cancelled or something, because I didn't have to go in. I am "on call" for the next 3 weeks, so I may be used yet, but I guess I won't be. Unfortunately, that means I could still be selected again next year (or even next month!) and still be obligated to serve.

It's getting very hot out there! It's about 94 deg today and a little humid, but not too bad. It's pretty warm at night for sleeping, but not unbearable.

I've basically finished the first pllasma tweeter prototype finally and it seems to be working okay, but not perfect (which is what everyone wants). I'm working on the second prototype design now and trying to figure out how to make it work with about half the parts cost and size while improving the sound quality.

I've been reading "Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel and leading discussions with the youth group. It's really great for the beginning/early Christian and I also gave a copy to my seeker friend.

I've been speding a lot of time reading up on cults and other religions at the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry CARM.org. I'm fascinated by the solidity of the Bible and its ability to disarm these false religions. Islam looks like the most dangerous of them all, especially since they have over 1 billion followers (multiplying rapidly) and Christianity has about 2 billion. They look forward to a time when they might rule the earth. The average number of children for the American family is probably around 2, but for the Muslim, it is more like 6.

Heidi's been at String Camp all week learning about how to teach string instruments. The first few days were rough because of the dirt and bugs (we had a wet June, so there were lots of mosquitos), but she's used to it now. She's staying until saturday. I hope she comes home soon. I miss her! And I need food!

Our first wedding anniversary is coming up on Sunday! And we don't really have time to enjoy it because that afternoon is the final worldcup soccer game (and we have to watch that), and that evening is a going away party for someone in our church! We'll go out saturday night, hopefully, if she's not too tired from the trip.

I had a good July 4th with a small GCF group on Memorial drive watching fireworks.

An update is overdue....

We went to PA (also TangSooDo, Softball, Outside), from May 14 to May 26 and then to South Korea until June 16! See all about those trips in the links. We had a great time in Korea and ate a lot of great food! The jet lag coming home was unbelievable, but we survived!

Mostly we've just been catching up since the trip and trying to take it easy a little. Heidi's enjoying vaction, but has a teacher's 'summer school' camp to go to for all of next week, then her summer session starts. We took her cello in for some repairs (small cracks) before we left and she should get it back tomorrow.

Today is our 10-month anniversary! Already?

This sunday, we're leaving for PA with my parents after Chris's graduation from Berklee College of Music. Heidi and I will be in PA for about 10 days, then we're leaving for Korea! I can't wait, except I really don't want to sit in an airplane for 12-14 hours straight!! I just got back from CA and that 5-6 hours was not fun. I think we're about ready to go, except we have to finish arranging things for subletting out apartment for a time while we're gone.

Time's going to start flying after next week. Over the next week, I have to finish working on my codes and start working on my presentation for the conference. I'll be in CA from 4/24-4/28 for that. Then after that, another week of busy work trying to get the design finished off for my first experiment so the shop people and technician can get it fabricated and assembled while I'm out in PA and Korea. First turn on of the experiment is planned for August 1, 2006. Before we leave for PA, Heidi and I plan to attend a church conference in NY (1 night), and my brother's graduation is that saturday! Then there's packing and preparing the room for a possible sublet while we're gone!

I'm debating what to do while I'm in PA. I have a project idea that I've been wanting to build for about 5 years but never had the time to do. I think I can pull it off in 1 week of solid time in PA, although it's going to be much simpler and smaller than I hoped.

Heidi got a bad cold at the beginning of the week and has been fighting it for the last few days. Hopefully she'll start getting better soon. I don't think I caught it somehow.

I've been quite busy lately with research. I got a tight schedule for another month before things loosen up. Right now I'm trying to finish writing a code to solve the backward wave oscillation threshholds in confocal waveguide. A mathematically challenging task. Also, I'm waiting for a model to be fabricated so I can test it before the International Vacuum Electronics Conference (IVEC) in Monterey, CA at the end of this month (4/24-28). We've got a schedule now to have the first experiment turn on in August. It will be a sort of 'test' run where only the bare minimal parts are used. We'll try to learn as much as we can from it, then design the final circuit and get it running.

Still working on the plasma tweeter -- things are getting better, but I've got some more things to figure out before I can start building the first real prototype. Hopefully I'll have that done before going to PA/Korea.

Heidi has seminars today and tomorrow from a famous music education professor, Edwin Gordon.

We had our Greencard interview back at the end of March and it would have been approved, but the FBI hasn't finished the background check yet (actually, they probably haven't started it). If we don't hear anything in another week, we'll have to call someone and find out what to do because we need a stamp or something for her visa so we can travel.

We're looking forward to visiting Korea and trying to get the plans together.

I've been trying to make some headway in research lately. I'm putting in some purchase orders for parts now and submitting some drawings for a structure that will be built soon. We got to use my camera for something useful for a change recently -- taking pictures of high power microwave breakdown on various plastic surfaces. We got some really interesting pictures of sparks.

Heidi's been busy the last two days at a music educator's conference. It's really good, but she's getting up early to get there on time!

I'm still working on the plasma tweeter. I've been trying to add sound finally, but it's not quite loud enough yet. I bet the distortion is too high still.

Yesterday was the 10-month anniversary of Heidi and I being married! Can't believe it's been 10 great months already!

We had our MIT small group Bible study over at our house on wednesday and served dinner. We had lots of really great food prepared by my personal chef, Heidi. We had a seafood salad (shrimp, squid and broccoli with sauce), Korean marinated beef and spicy chicken, rice, seaweed soup, cheese, and Heidi made some really neat fruit decorations for desert, with ice cream. We were all stuffed by the end!

Research has been stressful recently with the push to get the experiment started. There is a tremendous amount of work to do!

Heidi is finishing up her spring break this week and will have regular classes next week again. She's been doing okay, but is looking for a place to do student teaching next semester.

We're both looking forward to her Green Card interview in about 2 weeks, which came earlier than we expected, luckily. If all goes well, we might even have it in time for our traveling in May!

I got my tax refunds already and we'll use it to buy an electronic piano. I haven't really played piano since last summer, so it would be good for me. Heidi will use it for various music related things.

I'm behind on photography. I still haven't updated the February 2006 photos of the month....

Just been cranking away at research mostly. We had a huge snow storm on sunday and ended up watching a sermon on the internet and studying the Bible on our own. Funny thing is most of the 18" disappeared already because it's been so warm! Not today, though, it started out at 50 deg F and is supposed to drop to about 20 F tonight! We had a quick soaking rain mid afternoon and very heavy winds bringing in the cold weather.

I'm still working on the plasma tweeter and it's slowly starting to do something. Not as quickly as I hoped, but it's moving. I still can't get the simulation to agree with the experiment at all and I'm not sure why. I'd really like to get it off the ground, but it's not cooperating with me!

We've been enjoying the winter Olympics in Turino, Italy this last week. Anything that has to do with snowboarding is dominated by the US, including the new sport of snowboard-cross.

Okay, it's been over a month now! I'm back!

Heidi and I, along with her father, were in Florida visiting her cousin's house for a few days. We had a great (and tiring!) time there and you can read all about it and see pictures Here.

MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) came and went. I attend the cheese tasting for the 3rd year in a row. One of these years I'll get into the wine tasting class, but that's extremely popular (and in it's 25th year!). There were a bunch of things I wanted to do but didn't: the Pilates excercise class was full, Wine tasting was full, and I decided I was too lazy for the 8-hour Hebrew class (I wanted to learn some language behind the Old Testament), I missed several photography classes because of the trip to Florida, and I missed the deadline for shop classes. Maybe next year.

I've been reading a book called "Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life" by Donald Whitney. It's really an eye-opener and I discover something new each time I read it. The first section was about the importance of memorizing scripture and meditating on it. On my own, I decided to memorize Psalm 1, and during the week (before I had completed the memorizing), the EXACT verses I had memorized were quoted exactly in the book! Wow, how's that for confirmation! Then, I read the section about prayer, and on sunday morning, I shared our prayer request about getting travel permission to go to Korea with the other teachers, who prayed for us. When we came home, we picked up the mail and there was a letter stating that our travel permission had been GRANTED! Wow, another amazing response! Praise God from whom all blessing flow!

Heidi and I have been dreaming and praying about opening a free music studio for inner city children some day. We dream about having a little living space on the 2nd floor with the other rooms being practice rooms, the 1st floor being filled with orchestra things (chairs, music stands, etc) and a workshop in the basement where we can teach music theory, build instruments with the kids and restore donated instruments. We would also like to have a Bible lesson time during the course of normal events. What a thought it is to imagine taking one young kid off the streets and giving him direction and goals for his entire life.

Happy new year!

Heidi and I had a great time at my parent's house in PA from 12/21/05-12/31/05. We ate a bunch of great food all the time, and even had a wine and cheese tasting on 12/30 with my cousin, Peter, and some of my parent's friends -- it was really fun. We also went clay-bird shooting, shoe shopping, and more eating. We bought my dad a DSLR from Christmas, a used Canon 10D. It's really a fun little camera, and we hope he enjoys it and uses it a lot. I got a great little tiny 512MB thumb memory stick and money for a cordless drill and dremel tool (both of which I have yet to buy).

Heidi's enjoying her break now until classes start in about 2 weeks. Her dad will be coming to visit around that time and then we will all go to Florida to visit her cousins briefly.

Still working on the plasma tweeter. After carefully designing a circuit board and having it built, I'm now tuning it and testing it out. I've heard that the days of the 2-channel stereo may be numbered. It seems multi-channel systems are ubiquitous now and the market push is for quantity of channels at a low price instead of quality of sound.

MIT's Independent Acitivities Period (IAP) is about to begin. It lasts all of january and is the best time of the year when we get to select from a bunch of fun classes, like chocolate, cheese and wine tastings, and cooking classes in the Food category; swimming, fencing, marathon running, Pilates or pistol in Althetics; making chainmail armor, photo organizing, DIY loudspeakers, glass blowing, machine shop, or robotics in DIY; a ton of talks, classes, puzzles, discussions and lectures.... it's amazing. There are hundreds of interesting classes - thing you never thought you'd be interested in. All at http://web.mit.edu/iap. Of course, I'm not doing all of that. I just sent my check in for the "Theory and Practice of Godo Cheese", which will be my third year of attendance. I'm hoping there might be a spot left in the over-popular "In Vino Veritas" wine tasting class, but that's unlikely this late. If I don't get that, I'll try Pilates. I may take a Hebrew class to get some knowledge of old testament Hebrew. I'm also planning to watch a bit of the Integration Bee (normal schools have only the Spelling Bee).

It's mighty cold out there today at only 14 deg F! The 7" of rain and snow we got last week is a little icy now.

Heidi's almost done with the semester!! She has one more big assignment to finish and hopefully we can celebrate after that! Then we're off to my parent's house in PA for Christmas, which will be a fun time.

The immigration people cashed our checks and sent receipts, so we've officially submitted our petition for the green card and for travel permission in May, 2006. We'll probably file the permission to work form too soon.

I sent in a PC board design for a plasma tweeter prototype and ordered a bunch of parts. I built a lot of flexibility into this board so I can make necessary adjustments when needed. I'm excited to get that built when it comes and start testing!

Wow, I've been swamped in the last two weeks. The reviews of my paper came back, so I've been busy trying to update the paper to properly address the referee's comments (that is, being obsequious enough to get it accepted without making waves in the water). That was stressful because if I don't address their comments correctly or completely, the editor may send it back to the referees again and they'll find make comments for me to fix! I finally got it resubmitted yesterday, so hopefully I won't have to think about it for a while. It is to be published in the June 2006 issue of IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Special Edition on High Power Microwave Generation.

Also, I was really busy putting together the greencard application and travel permission forms (I-130, I-485, G-325, I-865, and I-131), plus all the supporting evidence. I finally got it all together yesterday after tracking down a notary service for one of the forms. I sent them both off by Express mail today to Chicago and they should arrive tomorrow morning! The speed is not so important, but I want to make sure they got there. They have until about May 2006 to grant the travel permission, so that should be enough time.

Now I'm working on evaluating an old electron gun for use in my project. If it will work, it'll save a few months of work and about $50,000 (but I don't get to keep the savings!). At the same time, I need to come up with a specifications document for the RF pulse driver for my experiment.

Last night, I finished making Heidi's birthday present -- Actually, we bought an unfinished shelf for the kitchen and I sanded and painted it last night. She loves it! I'll post a pic.

It's been another few weeks since an update.... I've been quite busy recently. I took pictures of people in costume around MIT on haloween and still haven't processed those!

Heidi and I just came back from two separate retreats this weekend. She went to a retreat for the elementary school teachers in Cape Cod and I went to Kennebunkport Maine (near George Bush sr.'s summer home) for a retreat with the youth group. It was incredibly peaceful, refreshing (cool and sunny), and quiet (when the girls weren't screaming). I put together a "Treasure Hunt" game where three separate teams had to follow clues and solve puzzles to find the treasure. That was really fun. I'm still processing the pictures from there too.

Last week I had around 6 meetings, and that was with none on monday or friday! I got comments back from reviewers of my paper and now have to implement the changes before resubmitting it. I've jumped into a lot of new work in my research lately and have to learn some new codes and consider new things. I also had my first committee meeting last week, which went pretty smoothly.

Wow, it's been 20 days since I've updated. That's a record, I think.

Heidi and I have been trying to get everything together for her greencard application. The medical exam has been holding us up. It has to be done at a registered civil surgeon's office, so we made an appointment and paid the cash, but they didn't have the required vaccines there, so we had to make an appointment at another place to get the vaccines. THen we have to bring it back to the first place and have them compile it before we can send it in. We're also waiting for a translation from a friend, but found out he'll have to get it notarized too! I hope we have enough time before we plan to travel in May 2006!

Over the last week, Heidi's computer has been acting up and won't let her access the internet, so I've been trying to fix that the last few days too.

The big news is that I finally made a little progress in the plasma tweeter, achieving the largest flame size to date from some low-cost solid state components. Now I'm talking with a high efficiency RF power amplifier specialist about how to increase the efficiency and safety factors in the system. It would be nice to have it done about one month ago so it would be ready in time for the Consumer Electronics Show in Nevada in January, but I don't think it will make it.

Research was up about two weeks ago, but this last week was pretty fruitless. I'm trying to figure out which method to use to construct my traveling wave circuit. My options are increasing, but each one seems to have a different very difficult aspect to it and it's still a bit of a gamble which one we can build with minimal risk of failure due to unforeseen circumstances (i.e. fabrication errors, misalignment, dielectric breakdown, etc).

We had a mighty storm earlier this week with heavy rain and high wind. It blew about a gallon of water into our room through the incompletely sealed AC mounting and even through the AC unit itself. It took about 2 hours to clean up. Today, it's supposed to snow!! It's mighty cold and dry, just like winter. I'm already wearing two jackets and still pretty cold. The temperature will yet drop from it's current 40F to around 20F over the next few months, so I better find some warm clothes!

We just got back from a nice retreat with the Graduate Christian Fellowship (from MIT, Harvard, BU, BC and a few other schools) up at Toah Nipi, NH. Even though it is near the peak of colorful foliage season up there, we didn't really get to enjoy it because of the rain. It poured like crazy almost the whole time, but that didn't stop a bunch of people from playing ultimate frisbee in the rain! The theme passage was Psalm 46 (The Lord of Hosts is our strength, help and refuge) with an emphasis on taking a weekly Sabbath rest. We had a great time in fellowship, sharing, and discussion. Heidi and I got our own room with a queen bed, so that was nice!

A few days ago, the elephants came thrgouh Boston for the circus! Heidi and I will see them again on thursday night because we got front row tickets!

I'm still waiting for the photos from Williamsburg, Virginia, but I saw a preview of them online and there is one lightning shot that came out great!

I got back from the IRMMW-THz conference in Williamsburg Virginia on wednesday evening. The conference was really good. They needed help manning the computers and projectors in each room for the presentations, so my advisor "volunteered" us for the job -- actually, it wasn't that bad and we got paid $25 per session for the help. In one of the talks, the group was generating sub-nanosecond pulses at 95GHz, using a simple system that would be great for my project (the non-PhD work part).

On tuesday night, I signed up for a walking tour of Williamsburg, but as soon as we arrived, there was a terrible lightning and rain storm -- it poured rain for the whole 1.5 hours with wild nonstop lightning striking as close as two football fields away, and we were all outside!! While the rest of the people actually went on the terrible walking tour, I just stayed under the overhang of one building out of the rain the whole time, since I only had one pair of pants and shoes and didn't want to get them wet. That was a bomb of an evening...

Heidi's classes are really stressing her out, so she'll probably drop one and take it next year.

Today was the start of Heidi's fall classes... she went, but they didn't have her classes today, except for the night class! The others will start thursday. I guess that's the difference between engineering and other majors - In engineering classes, not only do they start the first day, but they have a full lecture that day and often have make-up classes for ones missed during the semester due to professor taveling, snow emergencies, etc!

Heidi's been cooking some awesome food since we've been married. Really great food! We go to Trader Joes together about every week to get some food (especially Mochi Ice Cream!) and also to Star Market about once a week together. On friday nights, Westgate apartments has "hot grill night" where they provide a hot grill and you provide everything else. We've been buying a nice big loin-steak and grilling it to a nice medium. It's awesome on the grill!

I have a conference (IRMMW) in virginia in 2 weeks, so I have to get my poster together for that.

Heidi and I went to Colt State Park, RI with the MIT Mission Korean bible study on saturday and had a good time. Some of the pictures came out really well. We had a sermon, ate some great food, and had good fellowship.

Tomorrow is the Westgate yardsale. We're hoping to find a TV! We've been watching DVD's a lot. We just got a 5th season of The Simpsons, and the 4th season of Friends. We'd also like to get a bike for Heidi, but probably not at a yard sale!

I'm submitting my paper soon, finally. It based on the gyrotron that my project will eventually replace. In addition to that, I've been running the 460 GHz gyrotron, which is in the same room as my project. I'm moving closer to MY project, which will actually help ME graduate, but I still have a lot to do on that!

Luckily, I've had time in the lab to work on the plasma tweeters. The newest version is the most complicated yet and "should" deliver about 200 watts to plasma (previous versions were around 50W, maybe), but it's very difficult to get it to work because the frequency is quite high (14 MHz). So far, no plasma from it.

Canon came out with their new 5D digital camera (which I won't be buying at $3300!). It's a 12 megapixel full frame with 3 frames/second rate. The full frame sensor has the advantage of lower noise than the popular cheap 1.5-2x crop factor sensors. Even at ISO-3200, the pictures looked great! Maybe they'll step up to ISO-6400 someday!

I've been reading up on car buying, which is much more complicated than I thought. In order to purchase an excellent car for minimum money, you have know how dealerships work, know how to approach a dealership, know salespeople's tricks and dealer gimmicks, legalese ("The warranty covers ball joint breakage, not ball joint wear, so you have to pay!"), insurances (there must be 10 different types and you want them all), warranties, know what could go wrong on a car and how to evaluate a used one, etc.. In addition, you need to have a trustworthy mechanic evaluate the car before buying, and decide whether or not to take your car back to the dealer for simple maintenance (oil change, etc), which the dealer really likes, but costs you more money, or take it to a franchise for service, "cheating" on your dealer - then when you go to the dealer for a big job, your car gets lower priority, and you have to buy your own rental car. If you stay on the dealer's good side, you're car will be out faster, you'll get better service, and you'll probably get a free rental car in the mean time. And a good test drive takes about 30 minutes: test high speed, braking (50-0mph), curves, etc... See http://www.smartcarguide.com/gui/pro/idx.htm for the many many details!

Wow, Heidi and I have been married for over a month now! Time flies!

Heidi and I also helped out at Vacation Bible School at the Korean Church last week, which was fun.

I'm finally getting back into research a little and feel like I'm making a little bit of progress finally.

Yes, it has been over a month since the last writing! Heidi and I were extremely stressed and busy with the wedding planning -- I even stayed up until 2am the night before the wedding to finish preparations (and I got up at 7am for hair!). The wedding went very smoothly and everyone enjoyed it. Here are Wedding photos (opens in new window), done by my friend Daniel Nagaj. It was his first wedding shoot, but he worked really hard and it paid off -- the photos are great! And we got our photo albums in less than 2 weeks!! It took over a year for everyone else I've talked to.

A few days before our wedding, we watched the awesome July 4th Fireworks in Boston with her parents. That was fun!

Heidi, her parents and I went to New York city from 7/15-7/16 and saw the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The Empire State Building was a real disappointment because we waited over 2 hours in line just to get to the top of the building. We couldn't go inside the Statue of Liberty, but it was nice to walk around it and see it. We got an awesome river-side Hyatt hotel in New Jersey facing NYC for only $70 per room. Heidi and I got a king bed that night.

We all went to PA from 7/20 to 7/25. We saw Gavin's hockey game, which ended in two big fights, Amish country in Lancaster PA, had a nice reception at my parent's house with a load of food, went to church together, and played mini golf sunday night. Heidi and I stayed a few more days and bought a bunch of furniture from Ikea before driving back to Boston with my mom to take everything back up. Our apartment was boxes when we arrived and we dumped a van-load more of boxes there! Finally, we are assembling some furniture and putting some stuff away!

This week, we're also busy preparing for VBS at the Korean Church.

Getting closer to the wedding day! We went to the taylors on 6/14 with the shoes and she has to go back 6/28 for the final fitting. Hopefully it fits perfectly so we don't have to go back a fourth time. I rented my tux at Mr. Tux in the Cambridge Galleria Mall (pick up 7/8, return 7/10). We bought favors for the guests and even toys for the kids. Still need to find an MC for the short game we have planned, but everything else is coming along!

I moved all my electronics stuff to my lab space now, so I'll have less to move on July 2 when we get the rental truck to move most of the big stuff (bed, futon, shelves, clothes, etc.). We've come up with a plan for moving, which involves steps: Moving electronics (done), moving small things on my own from 6/27-7/1, moving the rest 7/2 along with Heidi's stuff, and then moving the remaining necessities of Heidi's (food, pots, some clothes, etc) between 7/10-7/20.

About 2 weeks ago, someone was throwing out a 17" Dell LCD screen. People don't throw those out if they work. Sure enough it didn't work - it just sat there and blinked its button lights like crazy. Last night, I took it apart hopelessly trying to figure out what was wrong. I discovered that when I temporarily loosened a connector, it would reset itself and start up properly, so I wired a switch into the connector to cause that reset condition! Although it seems to turn on just fine now, I'm leaving the reset switch in place in case it gets stuck again! Well, that's a fine flat LCD monitor for free, although I did have to buy a power supply online for $25. I'll give it to my parents to replace their dying 15" CRT, which has no brightness left and is at full contrast so you can see the screen, plus the image is rotated with no compensation adjustments!

Trying to sell my Canon 35mm f/2 lens again. After fixing it, it seems to work fine. That'll probably bring in about $130, which I already spent on a Russian Zenitar 16mm f/2.8 manual fisheye lens. It's a great little lens and very sharp when stopped down to about f/8. It's very difficult to focus a lens properly at 16mm because you can barely see the details your trying to focus on!

I still have to go switch my PA driver's license to MA soon. I'll need an MA license to buy a car here. Getting a car will definetely make a lot of things easier (and safer) for us, although we will have to put up with the traffic and parking problems just like everyone else.

We bought a wedding dress yesterday!! It was the first dress she tried on! It's really beautiful and I think it really matches her character. She tried on 4 or 5 dresses, but came back to this one. We got it at Vow's Bridal (www.bridepower.com and got it for half price! We took it to the taylor's to have adjustments made and she has to go back there next week with the shoes to final sizing. It took us all day to get around by T and bus, but we got it all done somehow! Apparently "normal" brides shop for their dresses about 6 months before the wedding!! We have only 1 month! You should normally allow about 3 months for tayloring!

Next, I have to get a suit -- we'll probably go to Mr. Tux in the Cambridge Galleria Mall to rent that. I'd like to buy a nice taylored suit, but I don't want all the hassel of shopping around to get a low price to match the suit, shirt, pants and shoes.

We didn't go to the travel agency yet, so we'll have to go straighten out that mess too.

Well, Heidi and I won't be able to go to Korea because of her F1 visa, which assumes only temporary residency in the US. Since she's marrying a US citizen, she's obviously interested in being a permanent resident, which violates her F1 if she tries to come back to the US from Korea. Even if we did slip by the interrogation on returning to the US, they wouldn't let us apply for a green card when they find out we were married. So, once we get married, we have to apply for a green card first before we can travel. We heard we can't get permission to travel until at least 3 months after we apply.

Things went downhill from there. Her parents had been making reservations for us to do all kinds of things in Korea -- Jeju island, hotels, arranging housing while we're there, etc. All of that had to be cancelled. It's a terrible shame. I hope they didn't have to lose too much money in cancelling due to fees/fines. I'm sure they're just as upset as we are.

Then we already had tickets to travel to Korea, so Heidi spent yesterday afternoon at the Korean travel agency. At first they said no refund, no credit, no exchanges. That's bad news, because we paid a chunk for those tickets. I called North West Airlines, but they said our tickets are "consolidator tickets" which means NWA can do nothing unless we both have doctor's notes that say we can't travel. It's all up to the travel agency. Heidi spent almost 3 hours there and they kicked her out. They called later and said we could exchange the tickets within 90 days with extra fees, but that doesn't help us because we can't permission to travel until after tha 90 days and she can't go anyway because of her semester. So far, it's either lose the money or possibly take a trip within the US to Hawaii or the Virgin Islands on plane tickets that cost twice the normal rate (besides, are those places too hot during August?). For both of us, we can't get excited about a trip anywhere now after such a huge letdown. If we travel elsewhere, we'll still have to spend more money, which really won't solve our problem.

So here we are, after months of careful planning and large spending, much of it has been dashed to pieces, and now we have to work twice as hard to undo the mess we're in now and then decide what to do next. Nothing like starting a marriage with no money and a bunch of shattered plans. The temptation is to think that we'd be a lot happier if everything worked out and all our plans went well. The truth is we still have each other. We might not have anything else, but marriage is about each other and God anyway.

So this week, Daniel printed the response cards for us, we cut all the invitations and announcements (except the ones going to Korea), I printed an information sheet and bought a bunch of stamps. Hopefully we can get the first batch of invitations out on Sunday. I still have no idea how this is going to work given the traditional Korean wedding where people who come to the wedding expect to go to the reception too.

About 100 things more to do. Wedding cake, flowers, centerpieces for the luncheon, wedding dress and tux, hairdresser/make up, runner, check with organist, keep track of who's coming (if known), guess-timate how much food to order, make sure the headphone receivers for the translation are charged, photograph the chapel, decide if we're going to Hawaii/Virgin Islands or just give up the honeymoon idea, housing!! housing!! housing!!

I caught a cold starting saturday, so my throat feels weird today. I've been taking every vitamin I can find.

By the end of this week, Heidi and I should find out whether or not we have om-campus housing. Hopefully will get it in this first round. There is a waitlist, but it may take until August to get in, which would be a real pain.

Heidi and I have a big visa problem to sort out -- She has an F1 student visa now, which is okay, but when she goes through the interview coming back from Korea, they might know she's married and think her purpose for coming to the US was to marry an American and get an easy citizenship instead of just to study. It's possible that there would be no problem at all, but if there is a problem, it would be a major one. Ideally, we would apply for a Green card right after our wedding and have it all processed and finished two weeks later when we leave to Korea. The government is not that fast, so it would probably take about 6 months, during which she could apply for an emergency parole to go to Korea for a month, but that could be tricky too. We're talking to friends and lawyers now to fingure out what to do. We might have to postpone the Korea trip until Winter.

Wow, I can't believe another week has gone by already! Heidi finished her semester this morning, finally, so now we have to get moving on the invitations! The caterer need the final counts by June 9, which is really soon, so I doubt we'll get them all in. We'll just order extra in proportion to the responses we get and hope it all works out in the end.

The housing lottery closes in a week, so in two weeks we'll hear about the results of that.

I called MIT medical this morning to make an appointment for a marriage blood test, but they said it isn't required any more as of January in Massachusetts, so that's good news! There's no need for more paperwork to get in the way of getting married. THe license fee doesn't even include a copy of the license!

I've had a bunch of meetings this week and I've been busy running the 460 GHz gyrotron system, so I've got stuff going on. My magnet will arrive probably in early June, so I have to make preparations for that as well.

Only about 2 weeks of TA-ing left! TA-ing hasn't been as bad as I thought, but I'll be glad when it's over!

We got plane tickets for Heidi, her parnets and I to go from Boston to Philadelphia on 7/20/05 to visit my parents and friends for a few days before leaving for Korea on 7/25/05. We have a long list of things to do before the wedding day and hopefully we'll start checking things off next week.

The MIT housing lottery results will come out on 5/27/05 -- Heidi and I are hoping to get something in Westgate or Eastgate on campus because it includes everything (internet, phone, electricity, water, heat, repairs, MIT busing) and an efficiency apartment is a good price.

Heidi got an "A" in her guitar class!

On saturday, I went to a Home Entertainment Exhibition in NYC. It was amazing to see how much junk people are selling to rip off the rich. We encountered table after table of the newest craze, which is souped up super cables that "let more of the music flow freely through your system" by using large "hand-made" largely air-filled cables that have to cost over $1000 to sound good. I think power cables are the biggest hoax of all; oversized, ferrite-bead-like filled, with a beautiful woven fabric on the outside to cover its cheap-o ingredients, high purity copper contacts with silver blah blah blah --- Power cables don't make a bit of difference unless your whole system and whole house and all the transformers and power wires leading back to the power station use the same material. It's like using a bungee cord with a 3 foot section of special aircraft bungee rubber while the other 200ft is nothing but a shoelace! The shoelace is going to break and your $1000 3ft section of bungee cord isn't going to do anything! If you're not satisfied with their $250 power cord, you might need their $1100 top of the line power cord to get more music out of your system (note: music doesn't come in through the power wire -- noise does!). My photography hobby is cheap compared to audio and theater; the best digital camera you can buy is $8000 (Canon 1Ds Mark II) and the best zoom general lens is $1100 (Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM), add a few other accessories (professional lighting, printer, computer, etc) and you're still under $20,000. Audio, by contrast, there's no limit to what you could spend. I saw a record player tone cartridge (picks up record vibrations) for $13,000!! You could spend $50,000 easily on speakers and another $20,000 on a set of amplifiers if you wanted. The scaled-down Hollywood profesional Tenerex processor is in the $5,000 range and we haven't even added in the TV yet! I heard a $7,000 CD player (my friend owns one!).

That said, there was a lot of really amazing stuff there made by people who know how to make good quality audio equipment. I also realized how materialistic people can be.

Heidi turned in a really neat band score arrangement today. It uses three hymn tunes with transitions, intro and a key change, and some solo playing. It's really great! She's got a guitar final tomorrow, an 8-page paper due monday and a program to make up for a hypothetical concert. She's almost done, then we'll continue our wedding planning.

In about 3 weeks, we'll hear if we get MIT on-campus housing or not.

I've got a busy couple of weeks coming up. This weekend, I have to go to NYC for a Home Entertainment Electronics show where I'm supposed to meet the people I'm working on the plasma tweeter with. The show will be great, but I have to get up before 5am to catch the train and I won't get back until about midnight. Then, the following saturday, I have to go to NYC again for a sunday school teacher's conference they want all the teachers to go to.

I still have to buy the tickets from Boston to Philadelphia for Heidi, me and her parents.

Heidi is very busy now. Today she had a 30 minutes presentation on the Baroque period that was supposed to target 5&6th grades - it was really tough (I worked on it with her for about 8 hours yesterday). Wednesday she has four term papers due (not started yet), and thursday she has an orchestral arranging project due (also not started yet). The following week there's a guitar final and then a 40 page paper due (not started). I am committed to helping her through it all and I'm glad for the opportunity, because I always felt like I had the deepest relationships with the people I struggled studying with. (that's probably the third sentence I've ended with a preposition today - I should go back to English school!). We're both looking forward to the end of the semester so we can get on with wedding plans.

On thursday, there was an MIT sponsored event called "A Day In The Life at MIT" (ADITL MIT), where participants were supposed to carry their camera around all 24 hours and take photos of whatever (daily routine, interesting sights, etc). This is the aditl.mit.edu website, and here were my photos.

On Friday, Heidi and I went and her an MIT ID card, so now she can use the MIT gym and use it for other MIT things too, like opening doors!

I thought it was worth noting... About a month ago I calculated my total savings to be about $24,000. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the most savings money I ever own! Thank God I've been able to store it up for times of need!

Last night was my last Ashdown concert (officially - Saikat will probably bring me back to play drums or guitar). I had a good time playing, listening and looking at the art exhibits too!

Today, Heidi and I got plane tickets to Korea! We leave from Philadelphia on July 25 (visit PA people first) and leave from Korea on August 23. Now I need to get tickets for for people from Boston to PHL around July 20.

Next, the BU student center is supposed to call me today to start setting up reservations for the reception. Hopefully once we get that (and the tickets) out of the way, the only (and biggest) thing left is the food.

I'm also waiting for a statement of our joint MIT bank account so we can get her an MIT ID card.

I called the BU Marsh chapel today and our reservations are complete. We have the chapel for 7/9/05S 12-3pm with a 1pm wedding time. There is a rehearsal slot at 5pm 7/7/05. Hopefully we can send out our invitations in early May.

I looked into the BU GSU student center a little today for the reception. They will call tomorrow (hopefully I'll be here). I also looked into the catering services and they look reasonable.

Heidi's pretty stressed out now - she only has 1 month of class left, so she's facing the end of semester crunch.

Good news on the plasma tweeter: After increasing the drain inductance some more, I ran it for 5 minutes saturday without going over 130 deg F! The flame was about 8mm tall and the audio wasn't very clean, so there's still a long way to go, but this is a major milestone! I had no idea of the sheer amount of energy flow through the system until I replaced a sizeable air inductor with a small ferrite core one -- I burned my finger on it 30 seconds later because it got so hot from the magnetic flux! After winding a smaller air core inductor with 20 gauge wire, I noticed the wire even heats up noticeably!

On Sunday, 4/3/05, Heidi and I will have been together for 1 year! It's amazing how fast the time goes! We both looking foward to the day when we don't have to commute to see each other. We'll have our own house and share everything - it's tough to imagine even.

Last night, I bought a used laptop on ebay for $710. It's a mini laptop with a 10" screen, but it's got a 850MHz processor with 256MB RAM, built-in wireless (802.11b), has a bunch of connectivity options and runs XP, so it's by no means behind in technology - it's maybe 2 years old. It will interface with my camera so I can adjust photos right away (and even control the camera from the computer!). I'll probably by a mini 4x6" photo printer so I can make prints myself right away (like the camera and laptop, it has a built-in battery!). I plan to use the computer a lot when Heidi and I go to Korea to make a slide show of our photos for our friends when we return. We'll also print postcards to send people and work on them in our spare time.

Now that I have some amazing equipment, I need to practice to learn how to use it well! I practiced lighting techniques on myself using one or both flashes, balancing with ambient light and trying to get the colors right. It's tough!

I made a new record on the plasma tweeters - 90 seconds before the FET driver reached 140 deg F. The previous record was only 25 seconds before the FET reached 140F. The only change is an extensive tuning circuit around the FET. The sound is still grainy and slightly distorted, but it gets over 90dB pretty easily. The flame was 8mm self-standing and 2cm with a screwdriver arcpoint!

I sold two of my prime lenses today, the Canon 35mm f/2 and the Canon 85mm f/1.8. I'll miss the 85mm one, but I couldn't justify holding another $300 lens if I don't expect to use it that often. What else can I sell? I'm always eager to make some more money somehow. I have many ideas that I want to build and test. I want to build an infrared remote trigger that would trip the camera as soon as the beam is broken for action stuff, like hitting a golf ball.

Heidi's legs are really sore from jogging! I finally made her sore! That means she got some good exercise this time. Jogging was fun, so we'll try to do it more often.

Lent is almost over (finally!), which means I won't be waking up for church at 5am; now I can take my time streching and reading the Bible in the morning!

The weather is great today. Heidi and I plan to go jogging!

I finally eclipsed the 100 transactions mark on eBay!! Wahoo!

I took a bunch of pictures of Chris last week for his website -- hopefully he'll be doing some fancy stuff there soon at JoyeBass.com.

The BU March Chapel confirmation should be on it's way soon, but basically, we've got it. Now to get to the invitations, reception reservations, etc. Part of the "etc" is housing, which is more of a pain than I thought. The MIT family housing is great, but in very high demand. Futhermore, the housing lease system is complicated and one false move nets you a fine of at least $250. Things could go smoothly or they could be a real pain. I'm sure they'll be a real pain, because that's how everything has to be. If I knew what was going to happen this summer I could plan it carefully and avoid problems, but since things will remain unknown until due time, the risks climb.

I finally got the letter from the EECS department that I passed the oral qualifying exam! Now I just have to finish my doctoral proposal this semester, which means I have to get out of the post-qual slump and try to get some work done!

With spring just around the corner (actually, we don't have spring here - it just alternates between winter and summer until full-time summer arrives), I've been taking my camera out with me wherever I go, especially trying to photograph birds. Here's my page about why it's hard to photograph birds.

Still no word on the BU chapel reservation - i think they didn't work last week because of spring break.

I sold my "old" 300D digital camera on ebay yesterday. I got $670 for it, which was less than I wanted, but still not bad for having used it for 8 months at almost 1,000 pictures a mont (it sounds like a lot, but with the 8 frames per second on this 1D camera, I'm snapping even more photos!). Now I'll be selling some of the lenses I have to simplify my collection (probably the Canon 35mm f/2 and 85mm f/1.8). It's not good to have too much stuff.

Heidi and I entered the waiting list for on-campus family housing. If nothing comes through by 5/20/05, we'll switch to the lottery. If nothing comes from that, then we'll have to search for an apartment off campus! We're also getting a joint bank account, because we need some proof of the relationship to live in family housing and also to get her an MIT ID card.

Monday morning I woke up with a slightly sore throat and it's felt a little rough since then, even though I've spent 12 hours a night in bed -- I went to bed at 7pm the last two nights to try to kill it off, but it refuses to die.

This saturday is our second wine and cheese tasting at S&P! I have to go out to Formaggio Kitchen saturday and buy some cheeses!

Heidi and I are still waiting for the reservation confirmation to come in. Then we have to arrange the catering, make guest lists, invitations, and schedule plans for the trip to Korea! Those things add up fast, but I'm trying to forget that now so I can enjoy my time and feel that it's worth it. I'm really thankful that I have no debt after college like many of my friends. Of course, my friends who did have college debt are making $75,000 a year now, so they don't really care anyway!

After much careful thought and even prayer, and after watching ebay a lot, I finally bought an old Canon 1D professional digital camera. Amazingly, this camera had under 3,000 actuations, a very high serial number (28,340), and this seller was only 10 minutes from Boston, so he even dropped it off for me! I didn't have to pay or wait for shipping! This camera is amazing - very sturdy and very high build quality. It completely put the 300D to shame! I didn't know the 300D viewfinder was dark and unclear, and there was a shutter lag between pressing the button and taking a photo, and that the 300D focusing system was really basic until I tried the 1D. Almost night and day difference. The 1D is far more complex to use, so I'm still trying to figure out the various color matrices and sharpening parameters, but it will be worth it in the end. The 1D was about $8000 when it came out 5 years ago and I got this one for $2000, with all the original stuff (even the little plastic bags!). Typically, low S/N medium-high actuation units sell for about $1700 on ebay without much of the original stuff, so I think this was a great deal. Well it has some limitations and issues that go along its being the new frontier for professional digital cameras, but I'm glad for these limitations, because I refuse to put it ahead of God or Heidi, my first two priorities, in order. The next newer pro models start at $4000 (and it's not twice the camera; but almost!) and go up from there. This model is several years old and its market price has basically leveled off. I anticipate keeping it for quite a while, but even if I sell it in a few years, I think the value won't drop much lower. The one thing I still have to get used to is the weight! It's a lot heavier than the 300D!

Wow, Heidi and I are coming up on our 1-year anniversary of being together already (since 4/5/04)! Time goes very fast indeed!

Still going to the early prayer service and feeling sleepy. God's taking care of me, though. Every week, I'm tempted to drop some of the evening Bible studies I attend, and every week at the Mark II Manuscruot Study I learn something amazing about how my faith might grow if I give up my self and devote myself to God, even though I'd rather sleep at 8:30pm so I can get enough rest by 4:30am when my alarm goes off. I always want to control my own life and do things my own way.

I've been reading up on the old Canon 1D pro digital camera. It was about $8000 when it came out 5 years ago, but now they are routinely sell for $1700 on ebay. It would give me a 1.3x crop factor so I can get nice wide angle pictures using my wide angle lenses instead of having to keep an ultrawide angle lens handy and feeling bad because my 1.6x camera sensor is throwing away 30% of the image. That means I could sell my Sigma 14mm f/2.8 lens and just live with the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L USM. It also shoots 8 frames/second. The 1D has some minor problems, but I've read a bunch of reviews and found that many people still prefer their old 1D (1.3x) to the new 20D (1.6x), even though it's got half the megapixels (4.1MP vs. 8.2MP).

Another week has gone by... Today is a holiday for MIT, but I'm here anyway. Got a lot of work to do. I'll probably be attending the Infrared and Millimeter Waves (IRMMW) conference in Virginia in september, so I have to submit an abstract at the end of March. Time to try doing some research!

I did a little bit on the plasma tweeters this weekend. Still waiting for one more order of parts. Hopefully I won't be blowing out as many trasistors as I did on saturday! I'm trying a new idea of very low Rds(on) FETs at low voltage (~200v) instead of the 500v ones I had success with before. I found that there was a constant 50 volts DC across the FETs with about 50 volts of p-p AC swing, hence if I can lose the DC the FETs won't heat up so much and I can also lower the supply voltage. The Class-E concept is great, bu too complicated and heavy-duty for a marketable item.

Hopefully Heidi and I will book the Marsh Chapel this week for our wedding.

Happy valentine's day!

I've been pretty busy these days. Not much else to say. Wedding planning is really tough. I found out that in the Korean culture, even if we don't invite people to the reception dinner, they'll expect food -- even if we don't invite them to the wedding, they'll come and then expect dinner, so we might have to be ready to feed up to 300 people. That would rule out the mansion near Marsh chapel as a reception place b/c it holds 92. We could have the reception at the Korean church, but then how would people get from Marsh chapel to the Korean church? Then there's the homeless people coming in for dinner that night and people preparing in the kitchen. We don't want to have the ceremony at the Korean church b/c it's not that nice a place (there are two isles, not one or three and it's dim and not air conditioned!).

Besides that, research is going very slow because I've been sidetracked on two other assignments: 140GHz DNP gyrotron characterization, and figuring out how to run the 460GHz DNP gyrotron. The good news is I'll probably publish a paper on the 140GHz gyrotron; the bad news is that publishing a paper is always a lot of work and will probably take a month or two just to reach a high enough quality and get the kinks worked out. Furthermore, there's still the TA class for which I have to do the homework in prep for tomorrow's tutorial session.

I'm still trying to find a place to print our wedding invitation cards. Maybe we'll have to do it ourselves. Most of the ones I found so far do color front photo and limited text inside; but we need color photo front and Korean language support inside (both left and right sides will have writing), or image support on both sides, which surely costs extra. Some places have a 250 card minimum.

Well, I'm praying that God will help me do my best always, and if that's not good enough, then I pray I can accept whatever happens. Satan is truly trying to break me down.

Yesterday Heidi and I had an appointment with my friend Daniel Nagaj (pronounced "Nah-Gah-Ee") for a photo session. We started at 3:30pm with an indoor photo of us reading a Korean-English Bible. We thought a photo like this would great on our invitation, because the inside will be printed in Korean and English. Other pictures can be found at the Wedding page. Then we went outside to get some sunset silhouette pictures, which came out great! We're still deciding on where to have the wedding - we think maybe BU's Marsh Chapel would be better than the Korean Church. After the ceremony, we can have a catered reception dinner in a near-by reception hall.

The Lent early morning prayer started today. That means I'll (plan to) be out of bed at 4:30am every morning for the next 1.5 months. It really makes the beginning of the day feel longer, but going to bed at 9pm can be a challenge!

I also started the "Mark II" manuscript Bible study lead by the InterVaristy Christian Fellowship chaplain, Kevin Ford. I'm always amazed by how much I learn every class. Last year, "Mark I" covered up to around chapter 6. So far, I've really seen how the time Jesus spent with His disciples was to teach them how to rely on Him and how that applies to us even today. That makes my attitude toward the early morning prayer better - I have to rely on Jesus more to get through my day!

I bought two broken old flashes (Vivitar 283's) on eBay for about $10 and I fixed one last week! Now I have a working high power flash unit for the top of my camera. The difference in lighting using this type of flash over a built-in straight-ahead flash is phenomenal. My pictures look quasi-professional now! I just have to learn how to use it - it requires more setup and skill than shooting without a flash.

Today was the first day of classes - last year that didn't matter to me, but this year I'm a volunteer TA for 6.013, Electromagnetics. Doing a TA for a semester is required for PhD students in the EECS department, and being a volunteer means I don't get paid to do it! Luckily, there are two paid TA's and two volunteers, so the volunteers have a much lower work load than the paid ones. I still have to attend the lectures (4 hours/week), teach tutorial sessions (about 3 hours/week plus prep time), be present at "interactive tutorial sessions" (2 hours/week) and have office hours, so it is a significant time commitment. I think it will be fun, though (I'm trying to keep a good attitude).

This week started the second half of the Mark Manuscript study I took a year ago. It's a fabulous Bible study and I'm always shocked by how much I learn each session. The chaplain who runs it has been doing it for a long time and has some very valuable insights into the study - he doesn't tell us directly but clues us into thinking about it and finding things ourselves. Last class, I learned about truly relying on God - wow it's tough because we always tend to take things into our own hands when things are going well.

I'm running full speed for the plasma tweeter stuff too. Not only am I under pressure to do it, but there's a pot of gold at the end of this tunnel when I get something working and marketable. I've been ordering parts left and right the last two days.

The lent sunrise prayer service starts next week, so I'm getting ready for that too. It starts at 5:35am every day except Sunday for 42 days before Easter. I may also be teaching in the high school group at the Korean Church as a few of their current leaders are graduating from grad school. Over last few weeks, I've gone from preschool to 4th grade and now high school. That's rapid progress!

Wow, another snow storm! How much snow can we get? We already got something like 28" over the weekend and we're already up to about 4-5" today!

This morning, I woke up at 4:30am and took the first subway to Heidi's house because we took her dad to the airport to go back to Korea. We had a great time together ever since he arrived on 12/28/04. But we'll see him (and Heidi's mom and youngest sister Shin-Young) in July! Heidi will feel a little lonely at home, but now she has school work to keep her busy.

A few days ago, I told my friend Daniel about the new lens I was considering buying - a real professional one. He emailed me back and told me if I buy it this week, we can get all kind of rebate perks from Canon by combining it with a camera he ordered for a friend. I decided yesterday not only to buy that $1100 lens (Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM) but also another small one (Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM) because the combination of rebates would result in the 50mm lens price dropping from $320 to just $110! I plan to sell the 50mm one on ebay and get about $270 for it. The rebate on the 24-70mm lens would then make it cost $100 less minus the selling price of the 50mm lens difference, bringing the total price of the 24-70mm down to about $750 or less! Haha. I also plan to sell my Sigma 14mm f/2.8 because it is just too wide for me, so that should another $600 (I paid $550 for it). The 24-70mm lens sells consistently for $1000 used on ebay.

Yesterday, I sold my vintage Wurlitzer 214 electric piano for $671 that I bought for $420 a few years ago! I also sold my sarangi yesterday and expected to get about $250 for it, but instead got $325! Well, the sarangi still lost value, b/c I bought it for $395 originally, but on the whole, things worked out well.

The last few days have been extremely cold - it was 2 degrees F (-16 degrees C) when I woke up (accidentally) at 2am this morning.

Tonight I'm going to an MIT cheese tasting with Heidi and her dad. Last year it was really great!

I have to start serious work on the plasma tweeters again. My first custom board will be ordered tonight or tomorrow from ExpressPCB.com.

Here's a "nice" road sign we saw going into a tunnel in NYC. When I read the top half, I thought "Oh they're trying to encourage people to be nice to each other..." then I read the bottom half!! Wow, that's twice as bad as a speeding ticket!! Welcome to 'Nu Yok Citi'! When we first got off the train in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, we looked up at the I-beams and noticed a trail of sharp metal spikes -- Not just on the I-beams, but on top of everything we saw. That was our "welcome to Philadelphia" sign. I guess every city has it's own welcome signs.

Heidi, her dad and I just got back from a quick tour in northern NJ, NYC and New Haven Conn., where her dad went to meet some old friends. We had a really great time at the Cheon's house in NJ - they were so friendly and welcoming. I built the TV stand for their new 61" TV that was sitting on the floor in pieces. While we were there, we went to an Outlet Mall (not Wrenthem, but something like Wollaston maybe, I forget), which is the biggest collection of clothes stores I've ever seen in one place! About 100 or more! At that mall, I heard an announcement in English followed by, not spanish, but Korean! There is a large Korean population in northern NJ.

The next day, we went to Han Ah Reum, a big Korean mall where most of the shops were Korean and there was a huge Korean supermarket that sold every type of food you could imagine. In the elementary schools in that area, 70% of the students are Korean! Every single store we drove by in that area had a Korean title. It was amazing. New Jersey might turn into "New Korea" some day!

Sunday night, I started to get a cold/fever, so I went to bed at 9:30pm and got out of bed at noon the next day. Last night I went to sleep at 7pm and woke up at 8am. I feel much better now after sleeping like a cat the last two days.

Things are picking up again - I'll be TA-ing in an electromagnetics class this semester, which promises to be busy. I'll run a tutorial session per week, have office hours, attend all the classes, and probably teach a class once.

I also started teaching 4th grade yesterday at the Korean church. It's fun and a new challenge, although I haven't seen my friends there in a while due to all the teacher's meetings.

I'm still thinking about upgrading my Canon 300D camera for the new Canon 1D Mark II. It's a big step from the prosumer equipment to the professional stuff: $3600 instead of $800 - but it's got a lot of great capabilities that I can't do now, like: Capture pix faster than 8 frames per second for 40 frames, 45-point auto focus system (the 300D has a 7-point system) with it's own processor, slightly larger image size of 8.2MP (I never even use the full 6.4MP on the current one without cropping/resizing), ISO 50-3200 capability at the lowest Canon sensor noise yet, better color rendition and control compensation, all weather sealed, larger battery (for ~1200 pix), much more sophisticated control system with plenty of options, etc. On my current camera, I've basically learned the whole thing finally, including the upgrades from the sparsly documented firmware hack that I installed. On one hand, it seems like I should be content with what I have; on the other hand, I have enough savings and I'm not using that money anyway, plus the 1D Mark II would probably still be worth about $2000 (more than half) in 4 years, which is a pretty good depreciation rate for computer electronics. You wouldn't even get half the value back on your new computer in one year! If I needed the money that badly, it would be easy to resell it. But the $3,600 price tag is hard to justify. Decisions, decisions.

Today, Heidi and I got engaged!! We went to the mall and bought some engagement rings (wedding bands, actually)!! They are both 14K white gold, which tends to be more popular than yellow gold in this generation. Now we're wearing the rings (on our right hand until we're married!). Our wedding date plan is July 9, 2005!

Heidi and I had a great time back in Pennsylvania over Christmas. We made cookies, made a tree out of Christmas lights for the yard, went to a Christmas eve candlelight service, opened presents, ate great food and spent time with my family. A few days after Christmas, her dad came all the way from Korea to meet my family. Everything went very well and we all had a wonderful time.

Airlines are another story! Heidi and I got to Philadelphia okay, but we waited for 1.5 hours for our luggage to come off the plane because many of the US Airways baggage workers were on strike. The next day was far worse for other travelers - thousands of bags lay in piles with no one to move them; airports were jammed and flights cancelled due to a large amount of snow in the mid-west. On the way back, things were even messier - my ticket reservations said "United Airlines" with a line under it reading "(operated by US Airways)". We decided to go to the United ticket counter, but that was the first mistake ; they sent us to US Airways. At the US Airways ticket counter, I could retrieve my e-tickets, so I waited for help. The guy gave me a corresponding US Airways flight number, but it still didn't work. After about 15 more minutes and another worker, I finally got my boarding passes printed. Then all three of us got "randomly" picked for the extra screening - a slap in the face. Finally, when wre about the get on the plane, the guy told us we didn't have our tickets, only the boarding pass, which won't get us on the airplane (then why is it called a "boarding pass"???) - with 10 minutes left, we had to run down the hall to the "Special Services" desk, where they promptly printed out another ticket that looked exactly like the ones we were holding, except the didn't have a bar code. We got right on the plane with no problems. Why on earth couldn't I board with a boarding pass? After arriving in Boston, we had to wait a little for our luggage again, but not too bad. For me, I'll never travel on any airline starting with the letter "U" again.

It is COLD today - it hit 5 degrees F last night and it was 6 degrees (-14 C) when I woke up! I can't believe how fast the temperature dropped over the last few days. At least there are no clouds and hence no snow.

It's been rather chilly here recently, and it snowed a little this morning too! I think I need some new gloves and maybe a new jacket too.

On monday, I finally recorded organ music at the Korean church - Bach's Kommst du Jesu von Himmel herunter (BWV 650). I recorded it 7 times because I didn't practice much and kept making mistakes! I also had to experiment with the mic position some before starting.

Research is very slow. I've been having a tough time figuring out how this new device operates. The plasma tweeters also haven't seen much advance recently.

I feel like I'm eating lunch like a king today. I've got a bowl of clam chowder (mmm), a salad, a few smoked salmon pinwheels and cambozola creamy blue cheese on crackers. I picked it all up at Star Market a few minutes ago. I really like clam chowder these days and have it about once a week.

On thursday, we had our annual Ashdown fall/holiday concert, but this time there was an art exhibit too. A lot of people came and there was a lot of really neat art and great performances. I played one of my own that I made up the week before (I didn't have much time to prepare due to the qual exam and the conference!) and "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" aka "The Christmas Song" (mp3, 2.9MB).

I picked up my master's degree yesterday, so I did officially graduate!

Tonight, I'll probably send my qualifying exam homework off to the committee (due tomorrow). Hopefully they'll accept it and pass me without further hold up.

Thursday is the Ashdown fall concert and art exhibit, so I'll be busy recording, playing and exhibiting!

Still having trouble with the solid state plasma tweeters. Thermal runaway. I don't know if I'll have anything decent for CES in January, much to the disappointment of my sponsors.

It's been a long time. I went to Savannah Georgia for the American Physical Society meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics (APS/DPP) conference. Since my work is sort of on the fringe of this field, it wasn't all that interested to me, so I had a nice vacation instead! A lot of my friends from the PSFC went, so we had a good time together. One day, we went down to the golf course and hit balls on the driving range for a few hours. Savannah was really expensive - more than Boston, and one day a few of us ate at Quizzno's to save money! (we get a $50 per day food allowance, so if we don't spend all $50, we keep the leftover amount!). The first morning (monday) I was helping Mr. Magnet with his science demos at a local high school - I got up at 4:30am for that, and I had gotten in at 11:30pm the night before, so I spent part of the afternoon asleep!

Heidi's birthday was 11/19, and on 11/20 we went to the Lion King musical in the old restored Boston Opera House. The show was fantastic - great live music (a lot of african drums), incredible award-winning costumes, great acting and an amusing show for kids and adults alike. The opera house itself is very opulent and decorative - gold leaf, ornate carvings in the woodwork, etc.

My old friend from highschool, Rob Terrio, came to stop by Boston on his way back from visiting family in NH. Friday night, he ate with Heidi and I at her house and we talked a lot. We wanted to go candle pin bowling with him, but we didn't make it this time, so we'll have to do it next time.

Heidi has her concert coming up in about 3 weeks - 12/18. She will need to practice a lot as well as finish off her busy semester. She's nervous about her assignment to teach a real kindergarten class once coming up.

So today, it's snowing a lot! It's not sticking though, but it sure it snowing!

I had my qualifying exam on wednesday and it went quite well. Everyone has the same oral qual story, though. You give a good presentation, and then the examiners ask questions until they find something you have a hard time explaining, then they make you turn in some homework explanation before they say you pass - and then they tell you stories of how much harder their qualifying exams used to be than how they are now. So I'm working on some homework now and have to turn it in a few weeks from now.

To celebrate the completion (or near completion) of probably my hardest exam ever, I finally won the Sigma 14mm f/2.8 ultra wide angle lens on ebay. This is a highly acclaimed ultrawide angle lens for the Canon EOS cameras. It's the widest angle non-fisheye lens available currently (although Canon will soon be releasing 10-24mm f/4.5-f/6 zoom lens for $900, but I wanted a large aperture). The last few weeks, I've been watching this lens go for an average of around $630. Today, somehow, I was the only bidder and ended up winning it for only $550! That's my post qual present.

I'm still trying to get the Canon 85mm f/1.8 (~$300), which is probably the best portrait lens under $1000 currently. It will come in really handy for indoor pictures at concerts, seminars by famous people (I went to a talk put on by Bill Gates a while ago), and artistic pictures that require a wide aperture.

Studying for my qualifying exam a little. It's basically as ready as it'll ever get. I plan to have a practice presentation monday morning with some people from my group. I'm not too worried about it only because I've seen two PhD defenses from my group in the last few weeks and they didn't seem too bad. There's always a tricky question no one would have ever though of, but there's no way to prepare for something unexpected. The presentation is about 40 minutes, plus they'll proably interrupt a lot, so that should total about an hour.

Heidi has 3 more teaching excercises for her class that she's a little stressed about - for two of them she has to just teach her classmates during class, but the other is teaching an actual kindergarten class, which she's worried about. Hopefully I can help her come up with some good ideas, and especially help her with the english part.

10/30/04S:

Well, the Red Sox won the world series on wednesday night, the night of the also-rare lunar eclipse! It was the first time since they traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918! It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime scene around here. People were paying $12,000 for a pair of world series tickets on ebay, cars were honking their horns more than usual, general fan mayhem erupted (people lighting fires, climbing and jumping off traffic lights, police using large amounts of tear gas, ...), etc.

Today was the grand Sox parade, attracting millions of people despite the bad weather (light rain, very grey outside). It was ridiculous - probably about the same number of people that come to watch the fireworks on July 4th every year and about 100 times the capacity of Fenway Park. They anticipated it would be the busiest day for the subway in MBTA history. The parade route was interesting - first the players were carted through the city atop Duck Tour vehicles, which were driven into the Charles river and skirted around the outside for all the cheering fans. I took some pictures from my 6th floor kitchen, which overlooks the river.

I never heard of a monopod until I was looking to buy a new tripod. I wondered why anyone would want such a silly thing. Today, I realized they would be really useful for taking pictures above the crowd. I made a jerry-rigged one using the center-column of my tripod with the remote control rubber-banded to the bottom. This way, I could hold the camera 4 feet over my head and snap the picture by pressing the remote button with my thumb. My other hand held an umbrella when the rain started coming. This idea really worked well. I also learned that I should use the "parameter 2" setting on grey days with low focal lengths - otherwise the colors come out too saturated. Oh well, I'll do that next time.

Tonight is a total lunar eclipse, but the sky is pretty gray, so we might not be able to enjoy it - we'll see.

Today I finished my RQE paper and handed it in. It felt good to cross that off my list. Two weeks to go before showtime.

Heidi's had an extremely busy week this week - she had like 5 papers due and had to do peer teaching today. I hope she's getting better at English! She doesn't have class tonight, so we're gonna hang out and eat together.

Today I also found a hack for my Canon 300D online. It involves updating the firmware with a hacked version (only two bytes are changed) which unlocks many of the features that were disabled in the 300D that the $500-more-expensive 10D has! There are also numerous other beneifts, like ISO-3200 capability, Servo-focus on M, Av, Tv or P modes, Flash Exposure Compensation and Mirror Lock Up (waits after moving the mirror before taking the picture - most stable shot possible. Wow, now my camera's got a bunch of great new features! Next I'm looking at getting a good ultra-wide angle lens, like the Sigma 14mm f/2.8 - people have really liked that a lot. I may also get the Canon 85mm f/1.8, which is a highly acclaimed and very sharp lens at a reasonable price. It would come in really handy for indoor lecture/concert pictures and for macros.

Tonight, the 'Sox play St. Louis in Game 4 of the World Series - the 'Sox are up 3-0, so they might win all tonight!

Tonight is the first game of the world series featuring Boston and St. Louis! Boston broke all the records wednesday night when they beat the Yankees 4-3 in the series - the yankees were ahead 3-0 until the Red Sox won 4 games in a row - first time ever for any major sport during playoffs! People were driving around honking their horns until 3am and there were helicopters outside. There was major meyhem down in Kenmore square all night. Well, I was looking at world series tickets on eay to see how much they were going for - I saw one pair with 30 bids on it that went over $11,000!!! There were dozens of packages in the $15,000 to 30,000 range! It's unbelievable what people are willing to pay to be there while the 'Sox battle for their first world series win since 1918! Man I wish I had some world series tickets to sell this year!

Last night, I went with Heidi to see her Cello teacher, George Neikrug, play a cello concert (with piano accompaniment). He hasn't played one since Heidi has been his student for the last two years. anyway, it was his 85th birthday concert. He's 85 years old. That means he was born in 1919. He played the entire 1.5 hour concert from memory. He played many difficult VIOLIN pieces on the cello!! He was phonominal - he could play so fast and was all over the neck, from the lowerest notes to one high note that left his about 1" of A-string left. He played about half the concert in thumb-position (since there were many violin pieces)!! At one point, he did extremely fast bow staccato that left everyone amazed (very difficult on cello). Heidi says that, even though he is extremely old, she can't play like he does! He is one of the top 10 cellists ever, or something. The concert was phenomenal.

Today, I went with Heidi, Hoon and Sunghee to DimSum in Chinatown. The place was exuberant - it was a very large (conference hall-like) room with a beautiful domed ceiling and hand-painted chinese art on the walls - very decorative. We ate our fill of really good food.

Heidi and I went to buy tickets for The Lion King musical in the restored old opera house. She's been wanting to go for some time, so we got tickets for her birthday. There were very few seats left in the house even a month in advance! The show has been extremely popular and there was a huge crowd coming in for the 2pm matinee while we were there.

I took this really nice picture on the way to church yesterday morning. Wow, that's a nice sunflower!

Okay, I got my qualifying exam scheduled - it looks like it'll be wednesday, november 10 at 3pm. I'm busy working on the presentation, studying and finishing the paper for that. Since I'm leaving for the 04 APS conference on 11/14, I'll have to print out my poster the day after my exam and thus have to have it ready before then.

My parents came to visit on 10/12 and 10/13 (wow, a week ago already?). We had a good time eating out, looking around on the north end, taking the T-boat across the river and taking pictures. We got to spend more time with chris's girlfriend, Tiffany, which was good.

I had some success on the plasma tweeters last week, but I keep burning out FETs, so I have to try a few different things next.

Heidi and I had a good time yesterday - we ate at Koreana for lunch with KyungMin, then we went to Shabu Zen for dinner - wow that was really good! She has an observation paper and a report to do this week so she's pretty busy.

Today's a holiday, but I need to be busy busy busy! I finally got my plasma tweeter power supply stabilized, but I'm worried that one of the power resistors might blow because it gets really hot. I can by replacements though.

I was able to contact Prof. Hagelstein from my RQE committee on friday, so I think my exam will be one day in 10/26-10/28 between 2pm-5pm sometime. Now I have to prepare my presentation and finish my paper. Then I need to study a lot! My list of things to study is growing larger every day, but my time is getting smaller every day!

My parents are coming to visit from tuesday to thursday this week!

Wow, it's been a long time. This past weekend, I gave a 1-hr talk at a junior high and high school retreat put on by the Korean church. When I practiced my talk, I sounded really boring and dry, but I think the talk sounded a lot more lively in person. It was my first real long talk. I was only there on saturday, but it was still fun. I played games with the kids, etc., but most took pictures of them. It was a good chance for me to practice taking pictures of people. I took about 200 pictures, kept about 90 of them and had about 2 or 3 really good pictures. I put the 90 good ones on a CD, so maybe they'll show a slide show or something. It was a really inspiring time - listening to other people's talks, making friends with people I didn't usually talk with, and relaxing knowing that I couldn't get any research work done! I also learned why people like prime (non-zoom) lenses - they are really fast and take artistic pictures well.

Monday (october 6) was our 6 month anniversary, so Heidi and I ate out at Legal Sea Foods and had clam chowder and seafood casserole. It was good! Hopefully, this is the first 6 months of a much longer relationship. Over the weekend we were discussing some more marriage questions, like 'why do we want to get married?', 'why us two?', 'are we willing and able to make that commitment for the rest of our lives even if we live only in one country?', 'what do we expect of marriage?'.

Here I am again, spending lots of time doing various things. Buying and selling stuff on ebay (up to 60 transactions!), going to three Bible studies per week (Monday night at Ashdown, Tuesday with the MIT Korean group, friday at the Korean Church), working a little on my RQE paper, trying to schedule my RQE, trying to study for the RQE, applying for a TA in the spring, getting ready for the APS conference in GA, doing research (well, not doing it!), and hoping I can get a working plasma tweeter really soon! Also, I'm still on the no-work-on-sundays kick.

Yesterday was the annual MIT glass pumpkin sale, so I took some nice pictures of the pumpkins before a mob of about 400 people bought them all!

I've been a bit stressed out trying to get some electronic equipment gathered quickly for the solid state plasma tweeter project I'm working on. I've spent about $800 in the last week on it (I'm getting reimbursed) and I needed an oscilloscope - desparately! I really wanted to go to the MIT Swapfest to try to find one for around $150 or so, since that was less than the $250 + shipping than I was finding on eBay. But it was sunday and I felt bad about doing "work" related shopping before church! So I prayed to God and told Him how I felt I would miss a really good opportunity if I skipped the swapfest. Well, I decided to put it in God's hands and make seeking Him my priority, so I could trust Him to provide, and I skipped the swafest. I also needed some random wire, which is terrible thing to pay money for. Well. Today, I talked to the elevator repair guys who have been placing the elevator for a few months now. They sure did have extra wire!! Praise God, I got free wire! Then I remembered seeing literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of old, unused lab equipment just sitting in the basement of my building. I asked the lab technician guy about deactiviated equipment and he said "Sure, anything down there is basically free"!! Not only that, he showed me another room where I could just go in and grab equipment, wire, parts, etc. and told me about a surplus room at Lincoln Lab where there is loads of free equipment!! God provides abundantly!! Now I want to try to gather extra equipment to give it to homeschooled youngsters interested in electronics back in PA.

A lot has been up recently. Sunday, we had our first Wine and Cheese tasting with all kinds of great food and people.

I got my Canon 70-200mm f/4.0L USM telephoto zoom lens. Their professional "L" lenses are very very nice and I think this is the cheapest one they sell. All the others seem to be over $1000. Now I have this and the 35mm lens that I need to try out, but I haven't had time to play with them!

The plasma tweeter project has kicked up the stress levels! They want the final product (solid state) to be finished and perfected for the Consumer Electronics Show in January 05, which means the prototypes have to be done by early November! Although I have not even built the flame circuits yet, I think with enough spending (of their money) it can be done. For them to go to CES, it will cost five figures, so they want something great, which is reasonable. I am the only person who is working on this type of project.

I'm scheduling my RQE qualifier for sometime between 10/25 and 10/29, so I should prepare for that too. The first draft of the paper is done. I just have to make a presentation and study E&M and some plasma stuff again.

So to keep these items in perspective, I've heard some very powerful sermons this week: (1) to avoid problems with temptation, we should pray that God would keep it away from us (from the Lord's prayer) and Satan is most interested in derailing strong Christians who face temptations - God always provides a way out. (2) We must not worry because God will provide for us (Matt 6:25-33) and we must first seek His kingdom, even if that means we sleep less so that we can study or work fully and also take time to read the Bible and pray. Park Moksanim refused to work sundays while in gradschool, but God provided him with more results than all of the other students (and then sent him to China for mission work!) - when we obey these things, the body actually requires less sleep (both Park Moksanim and Choi Moksanim survive perfectly fine on only 3-4 hours of sleep per 24-hour day, including weekends!!).

The weather was so strange yesterday because of the hurricane system. It rained hard in the morning, then the sun came out, then it rained again, then the sun came out, then it poured rain while the sun was out, then it was cloudy and not raining, but hot and extremely humid. Today it's cool out and not humid.

I made a bunch of purchases on ebay for some stuff. I just got my Canon 35mm f/2.0 lens yesterday, but haven't had much chance to try it out - it seems like it will be the perfect size for indoor shots with friends. After trying out the Canon 70-200mm f/4.0L USL lens, I decided to buy one and got it on ebay. I also bought a cheap wired remote so I don't have to touch the camera (causing a slight shake) when I'm taking long exposure pictures.

Our Wine and Cheese Tasting will be this sunday at S&P. It looks like the turnout will be quite high, maybe 20 people, so I'll have to buy enough cheese.

Over the weekend, I found out that one of my friends has the Canon 70-200mm f/4.0L USM lens that I wanted to buy, so today, I woke up at 5am, took some snacks with me (for the animals!) and took the lens out for a test (along with the kit lens). Wow it's really great! You can see some of the great photos I got at the photography webpage or at pics.

Yesterday, I went with the Korean church for their annual street ministry at Harvard Square. They bring tons of band equipment, mics, etc and sing praise songs, arrangements, etc., while the rest of us hand out tracts. It's really amazing how music can attract such a large crowd.

Check out my new Photography Webpage!

Today I went to "Ditz" Camera to get some stuff: I wanted a remote for my Canon 300D - they don't carry those; I wanted to see the Canon 70-200mm f/4.0L USM telelphoto zoom lens - they don't carry those; I wanted a 52mm UV filter for my incoming 35mm f/2.0 USM wide angle lens - they don't... oh wait, after 10 minutes, the guy found some old one. I bought it: optical glass, coated, 52mm. That was all the box said. When I got home and looked more closely, I found it's actually a 52mm "+2" UV filter, meaning it acts like a magnifying glass! I'll have to get another UV filter somewhere else, but this might come in useful for something, someday... maybe. Ditz Camera. Anyway, I handed the guy a $100 gift certificate, but he looked at me like I gave him Monopoly money and said "I can't give you cash - you have to use it all at once." So I paid him in cash instead. Ditz Camera. Then I went to Brookstone and picked up one of these great FOM pillows for Heidi. Bright pink! I tried giving them the $100 gift certificate and they said "sure, no problem" and gave me my change: $65 cash. Ditz Camera. They should learn from Brookstone. I left the mall richer than when I entered - that's a great feat!

Yesterday, I won an ebay auction for a "mint" but slightly used 35mm f/2.0 USM wide angle lens with a lens hood for $205. Normally you can't buy them cheaper than $250 for the pair. I can't wait to try that. I've been borrowing my friend's Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens and it's great, but the focal length is too long for me, so I think 35mm will be perfect. The 50mm tends to overexpose on wide aperture settings, but it seems to do great around f/6.0.

I also bought a CompactFlash to USB memory card reader. Wow! Only $20 and the pictures download in a flash! This morning, it took about 1.5 minutes to download my 30 pictures from the Canon 300D, which only supports USB 1.0. This reader had them downloaded in about 3 seconds, since it can run USB 2.0! Only the newest Canon 20D camera supports USB 2.0. The reader also means I don't have to carry my camera to the office just to download the pictures. Ahh technology. If I was even lazier, I would demand a wireless transfer.

I'm trying to sell some stuff on ebay: my Magnepan flat speakers - I like them, but I don't have anywhere to put them in my dorm and if I had a decent room, I'd get the big ones so I don't need a sub. Looks like they'll sell (~$250). I'm trying to sell the RF car amp again too (~$80). Then maybe my Hughs and Kettner Rotosphere pedal (~$200). All this will go to finance my next lens, the Canon Telephoto Zoom 70-200mm f/4.0L USM (~$570). The nice thing about buying lenses is you can just swap the camera and not have to buy new lenses. The Canon "L" lenses are pricey and heavy, but hold their value very well and are really built well. For example, my 35mm f/2.0 USM lens can be found for about $220. The "L" version is a whopping $1200!!

Oh, research. I'm working on the TWT stuff now. Gaah, I dislike equations. I finally solved the dispersion relation for its 4 roots, but I don't know if it's right yet. I have to check it against a paper.

Heidi and I just got back yesterday from our visit to Pennsylvania (8/21-8/25). We had a great time and here's what we did:

Saturday: We left for the airport at 8:30am and arrived in Philadelphia at noon. We had brought with us a bunch of gifts, including some great cheeses and an 'Apple Mostarde' from Formaggio Kitchen near Harvard; my favorite Korean food, Kalbi Jjeem made by Heidi; my master's thesis; a framed picture of Heidi and I (below) and a gift certificate to Trader Joe's for my mom's birthday. It was a lot of work to bring some of those things: It took about 45 minutes to figure out how to get to Formaggio Kitchen and it was pouring rain with thunder and lightning when we came out 3 minutes before closing; Heidi stayed up until 4am that morning finishing the side dishes with her Kalbi Jjeem. We thought it was really important to bring something Korean so my parents could get a "taste" of Korean culture so they could learn more about Heidi. We had a great meal that evening and my dad admitted that it was very good (he usually prefers to critique food!) and even finished it for breakfast the next morning! Heidi was very happy that he liked it and can't wait to bring another dish there next time we go.

Sunday: we went to Church of the Savior with my parents and met the (American) pastor who had been to Seoul twice and had been given a Korean name (Ku Yeh Bon) and he used the words "Hanin Gyohwe", "MokSaNim" and even said goodbye to us in Korean - it was really a surprise because we had no idea he knew so much about Korea - it was a nice welcome for Heidi. In the evening, my best friend from undergrad, Mark Blattner and his fiance Sarah came to take us out to play mini-golf. We had a great time there - Mark won and it was Heidi's first time playing. Then we all went back to my house for a great dinner prepared by my mom. Afterward, Sarah and Heidi talked about teaching while Mark and I yapped about engineering. See all pictures here.

Monday: we planned to go to some Castle-restaurant place for lunch that my mom had been to over 30 years ago. She found directions somewhere online (we still can't figure our where) and it took us almost 2 hours to find the place. When we got there, the sign said "closed mondays", so we went to Wendy's instead! Furthermore, I had gotten a migrane headache and the right half of my vision went blind for about 30 minutes. After that, I felt very sick the rest of the trip and was doubled over in the back of the minivan only popping up momentarily to take a quick picture of the Amish people we were trying to find. That day and the next, I had a head ache.

Tuesday afternoon around 4pm, we went to Villanova University to look around and meet some of my old professors. We met Dr. Mercede, who talked non-stop from the second he spotted us approaching his office door! He is always like that. He told us about academia, his time in gradschool, his kids, how he went to a karate tournament with his son once and was really impressed, how he's still trying to learn about building electronics projects in the lab with the students, ... it was entertaining for Heidi and I! Then I met Dr. Amin, who, in his rough Egyptian accent, said "You should have contacted me earlier, the we could have had lunch together," somehow making you feel like you did something wrong while making it feel like he's trying to be your friend at the same time! We then went to the engineering building to look around. There we saw my old electronics display featuring hundreds of electronic components of all shapes and sizes, as well as our first-place winning senior project on display. Then we walked around a little bit and saw hundred of incoming freshmen at orientation. Next we hopped on the train one stop ($5!!) to Rosemont, where we went to my old karate gym. I trained there very hard until 9:15pm. It was good to be there again, but today I'm really sore! My instructer, Master Dave Kremin, was really happy to see me again and to meet Heidi.

On wednesday morning, we had breakfast with my parents and then headed home to pack up and go to the airport. Heidi had a great time and was very relieved and happy: she had been so worried about not feeling welcomed there, because we expect to live in America most of our lives, so we would probably visit my parent's home more frequently - if she felt rejected by them every time we visited, she said it would be unbearable. She felt very good though, and that was a big relief for both of us.

I got my new Canon 300D digital SLR camera on wednesday. I was playing around with it today nd took this pretty good picture of a Russian doll keychain my friend gave me. This camera is GREAT! I really like how well it takes pictures, even at the ISO 1600 setting. My previous digital camera was the Canon S30; it takes awesome pictures at ISO 50 and 100, but at ISO 800, the pictures are very noisy. The autofocusing performance is great too. I really like having good control over the depth of focus that you get with a camera with a flexible aperture. As you can see in the picture, I was trying to blur the background slightly to put the doll into sharp focus. You can even see every speck of dust on the doll and chain. Hopefully I'll be taking many more great photos. I think I'd like to get a telephoto lens sometime. I really enjoy taking close-up shots.

Tomorrow, Heidi and I are going to PA by airplane! We're both excited and hope my family will accept her as much as her dad accepted me! He even told her (privately) that he thinks I'm better than a Korean guy would be! Wow, I'm flattered!

Last night, Heidi, her dad and I went to a Redsox vs. Bluejays game (Redsox won). The weather wasn't that great, but it wasn't raining hard enough to delay the game. Anyway, we had a great time and tried to avoid buying all the yummy treats they were selling for really high prices ($4.75 for a bag of cracker jacks?!?). For some reason, hotdogs, ice cream, cotton candy, cracker jacks, nachos, etc all seem to taste better there at the stadium! I got some good photos over the last few days, including the two shown.

Today was busy so far! I got up around 7am and decided to play piano around 9am. Then I really wanted to record some songs, so I took my scooter to the office to get my mp3 recorder, which I left there. Then came back, dragged my recording equipment down 6 flights of stairs since the elevator is still out. I finished recording at 11am - they came unusually good. Then I went and bought a sandwich, followed by a trip to the art store for plexiglas and masking tape for today's planned painting session with Heidi and her dad. Today, I plan to work on "Parabolic Tulip" (blue) and I also want to make a "Triangular Sunflower" (yellow) after that to compliment "Spiral Rose" (red/pink). Then I came back to the office to eat lunch and work on the recordings.

Today's nice again - a little warm, but nice and clear outside.

The last week plus was really cool. The weather was very clear and sunny - it was great! I had to pull out my winter blanket so I wouldn't get cold at night!! Yesterday, the heat and humidity came back, so the AC is on again.

Yesterday, we had our Ashdown Summer concert. Heidi and I played our "Psalm 36:7" on cello and piano, then I played two others. It was fun, but I was busy since I recorded the whole thing and tried to take pictures.

I've decided to buy myself a graduation present - a new digital camera. I going for the Canon 300D, a very popular DSLR model (6.3MP) in the "prosumer" class. The DSLR means I can swap the lenses out, add filters and do other fancy stuff. At around $800, it's cheaper than the Nikon equivalent D70 (~$1000) and performs very much the same, or in some cases, better. Many of my friends recommended it, and it's got a great review. I found the site www.dpreview.com to be very helpful, as they have extensive reviews of these cameras. One thing I was really surprised at was that even the most expensive digital cameras only cover about 40% of the visible color-space. My prosumer photo-expert friend Jeankun says that's why film cameras still exist. There's a lot of package deals available with cameras like this at websites like www.PriceRitePhoto.com. I'll probably get a 85mm f/1.8 portrait lens and maybe even a 70-300mm telelphoto lens along with the 18-55mm one the camera comes with. Good lenses are shockingly expensive. The Canon 75-300mm telephoto uses a fast, silent ultrasonic motor to control the focus and costs $480! A cheaper one is made by Sigma for only $180, but doesn't focus a fast or smoothly. Maybe I'll get some filters (UV, polarizer, fluorescent, etc), and even a shoe-mount flash unit (although they seem rather pricey). I found out that 4GB flash cards are available! My 1998 laptop has a 4GB hard drive! I'll probably stick with a 256MB or 512MB, since I can't imagine what I would do with all those pictures even if I only filled a 256MB card!

I've spent the last few days in the 140GHz gyrotron lab trying to learn how to retune a system. Just about everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong: the filament would slowly cool off (we still don't know why, but it's not happening now), there were problems with the gun coil, alignment - these are things that shouldn't go wrong! Today, we're charging the magnet higher in the hopes of getting into the right mode and right frequency. Right now, it puts out good power at 137.2 GHz, but it should be at 139.9 GHz.... Oops, nevermind. This morning, they filled the magnet with helium so we could charge it up, but something just went wrong in one of the contacts (probably just ice) and the magnet "quenched" - meaning the superconductor that was holding 65A suddenly warmed up for some reason (probably the persistence switch was the problem) causing all the liquid helium to boil off rapidly. The whole room was quickly filled with helium and condensed water vapor, so we had to leave for a few minutes (not much oxygen in the room). We'll have to recharge the magnet from 0A now.

I miss Heidi - even though I saw her last night (for about 20 minutes during the concert when I wasn't running around), I haven't seen her in the last few days! But I understand, because if I had a relative visit from the other side of the world, I'm sure I would cut down on my activities to spend more time with them too! I'm still working out a few times a week, but I miss my workout friend Heidi!

In the last 24 hours, I've met two first-degree blackbelts who used to practice Tang Soo Do and want to start again. It's so strange because I've met so few people who have even heard of it. I guess I'll start practicing with them once in a while. It should be fun.

Yesterday, I spent the whole day working on getting my thesis handed in. I had to go to MIT CopyTech to print it out on archival-quality paper because a campus Unix "Athena" computer and printer are there, but it didn't have a USB port, so I had to go back to my office to transfer the file to my account and go back and try again. But then I couldn't get it to print double-sided, so I just paid CopyTech to print it. I took it straight to my advisor and got the signitures and then handed in the two copies to the department. Then I took the third copy back to CT to have the thesis copies made. The nice hardcover theses were $45 each and the other 10 office copies were around $6 each. But it's official now - I graduated!

I had a great lunch with Heidi and her dad today. We had Kalbi Jjim (my favorite), Kalbi Tang and Kimchee Bokum Pap. It was really good. I promised her dad I'd study Korean for 3 hours tonight, so I have to go home soon and start that. He wants to give me a Korean test with oral, writing and reading parts!

The weather today is strange. I'm wearing a coat and it's the middle of August!! It's cold out!

The last few days have been great fun. Heidi's dad came from Korea to visit on friday. We picked him up at the airport and he was immediately very easy to get along with. His english is very good, he's really funny and very nice. Yesterday, we went to a Japanese restaurant for lunch, and then went to the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, which was really fun. Then we had dinner together. Today, after church we went to Koreana for a big Kalbi lunch and then toured the new Stata center on MIT's campus. Tomorrow, we're planning to go to dinner and candle pin bowling together.

Tonight, I'll try to make some more changes on my thesis and then practice piano.

Last night, Heidi and I finished our latest art, "Trio", which consists of three 4"x6" canvases mounted to a 15"x9" frame. We wanted to use black velvet for the background, but could find it in any stores, so we went down to the abandoned clothes pile in my dorm's basement and found a nice dark polyester shirt, cut it up and taped it to some cardboard. Then I sewed velcro onto the cardboard so the paintings can be removed, interchanged and rotated, if desired. It's really a fun piece with bright colors. Except for maybe 3 or 4 patches, I don't think any of the colors are exactly the same.

Tonight, we're planning to go to a park near Fenway to hear Interoceanico play.

I'm still pushing my research to get up to 1kW of power now. Getting that much power is not too difficult, but getting wide bandwidth and good efficiency is tough. They want 10% efficiency, but right now it's at 5% and only 550 watts. I'll make a few designs; one at 27kV, 0.4A and one at 35kV, 0.3A to see what happens.

Yesterday, I handed in the draft of my Master's thesis. It was 106 pages long. Hopefully I won't have to do too much more work when I get it back. After fixing it up, I need to get about 15 copies made for people in our group plus parents and grandparents, etc.

I also had a meeting about the project yesterday. The director of the lab this will be used in wants to change the specs to increase the power delivered to about 500 watts with all kinds of pulse specifications. This means we need to design for about 1kW instead of 100W - the electron gun will be bigger, the voltage and current will have to increase considerably. So, I'll be doing more design work for a while until we know what we're going to build.

Yesterday, Heidi and I went to the "Taste of Cambridge" restaurant food festival. It was great. You pay $25 in advance (I did it online) and you get to eat as much food as you want from 50 restaurants and shops from the Cambridge area that gathered together at MIT's Tech Square. You also got 4 (small) glasses of wine or beer with your ticket. Each restaurant had small samples of their food. The food consisted of high quality restaurants, like Formaggio Kitchen (cheese, mustard and jam store), Legal Sea Foods and Harvest (great crab cakes!), to Italian pizza and pasta, Hong Kong food, Mexican, Indian, a pulled pork place, pub food, Japanese and sushi, etc.. We had fresh mussels and clam still in the half shell with their special sauces at one place (very good), some great desserts at a few places, including a thick chocolate mousse from Finale and cheesecake from Trader Joe's. I wanted to get an eclair at one table, but I was too full at the end. I had a glass of beer and one of wine to go along with the free 20 oz. bottles of Vitamin Water that VW was handing out.

Still my favorite place was Formaggio Kitchen, being manned by the owner, Ihsan Gurdal, who knows everything about cheese and fine foods. He gave us samples of sheep cheese, goat cheese and an aged Vermont cheddar along with a top quality sweet fig jam from Tuscany and a mild, dry cherry jam from Italy. He shaved off the cheese with a knife from the center outward in accordance with his strict practice of only cutting the cheese radially so you can taste the difference in cheese maturity at the center and outside of the cheese. He had some nice-looking blue cheeses I really wanted to sample, but when I came back later, there was a long line of enthusiatic connoisseurs already in line.

After visiting about a dozen tables, Heidi and I were stuffed and began rolling home for a nap. I'm definetely planning to go next year if I'm around!!

Here's our paintings! Hers (left) is untitled right now. It's really bright and happy! Mine took longer and is called "Silhouette with Joshua Trees". The background color consists of 15 blends and took about two hours to do. I didn't the detail in the Joshua tree ball things using a tack and paperclip.

Today, I'm presenting my research so far on the cavity circuit for the gyroklystron amplifier. In theory, I've exceeded the design goals, so when the experiment comes, which is always worse than theory, hopefully it will meet the spec. I still have a lot to do, though: non-linear uptaper (maybe 2 days), input coupler (almost a week), MIG design (maybe a week), mode converter (a week) and finish writing my thesis, which is due in a month. It's got 60 pages and three chapters so far. It'll probably be over 100 pages when done.

I haven't been working on the double tube plasma tweeter for almost two weeks. I got some advice from Joe Fell today, so I have an idea how to proceed.

Wow, Heidi and I had a great time watching the fireworks last night! We got a really good spot about half way between where the Boston Symphony Orchestra was and where the Harvard bridge is at around 8pm. The fireworks didn't start until 10:30pm, which was a really long wait, but it was worth it for such a good spot. Check out the pictures. The weather over the weekend was awesome (7/3 and 7/4), but today it's raining like mad.

July 4th was also our sok dal gi-nyum (3 month anniversary). And our pegil (100 day anniversary) is next week, 7/11/04.

Over the weekend I taught Heidi how to reverse-paint plexiglass and she made a beautiful 8" x 10" painting (pic above). I'm working on "Silhouette with Joshua Trees" (8" x 10") that should be done today.

I'm really excited about going home to PA with Heidi in August. My mom is planning to take us to Amish Country to show Heidi how those people live without electricity and cars. My mom wants to cook all kinds of special foods (and Heidi can see how to make them). We can look at picture books my mom made and slides of my dad's pictures. I'll show her my electronics lab that will follow me around wherever I go. Maybe we'll meet my undergrad friend, Mark Blattner and his girlfriend Sara. Sara's teaching elementary school kids ust like Heidi is planning to do, so maybe they can talk about that stuff some. Maybe we'll stop in at my old Karate gym for a workout too.

This week, Heidi has been teaching the kids camp. Today, she had to invent some games for the kids - I found cute clipart images of instruments for her yesterday that she will use in the game.

My parents and brother Gavin have been in the Poconos since 6/30 selling fireworks for some guy. This is their 3rd year doing it, but it's slower than previous years. Gavin is working at the "illegal" fireworks tent, where they can only sell fireworks to people with out-of-state drivers licenses and license plates. Gavin usually gets a "gift" share of the illegals and has a fun time getting together with his friends to set them off. His friend Rob sold a $200 bag of 'works for over $1k to some guy on the street who was willing to pay for them! He felt so guilty but at the same time so successful!

Heidi's had a tough time carrying her cello around Boston for various things. I wish they made inflatable cellos, but the next best thing is a minimalist electric, which weigh as little as 5 lbs. Maybe we'll go try those out sometime soon. They cost more than I thought (around $3000), but they're still cheaper than a good acoustic cello (over $10k).

This week, Heidi will be teaching music to elementary school kids at the Korean church everyday from 1pm-5pm. She has to teach violin and flute too, which is tough for her!! But it's good practice for an elemntary school music teacher, who has to teach multiple instruments. She won't be able to practice much of her recital music, though.

I need to study more Korean. I've been too busy this week surfing the internet for electric cellos, audio stuff and coming up with new projects to build. I want to quit school and start making audio stuff full time, but I've already decided to stay for my PhD, which is a little less risky and less costly than starting a company from almost nothing.

Well, in my research, I was varying parameters like beam current, pitch factor, velocity spread and beam voltage and I figured out I could lower my voltage from 15kV to 11kV without losing bandwidth or power (gaining, in fact!). I got 150W and 1.2GHz at 50W (almost 900MHz of 3dB BW) at this regime, which is exciting (~8% efficiency).

I've finally been able to obtain over 1GHz bandwidth at the 50 watt level in my research with a peak of around 120 watts. The power is higher than the specification, but the corresponding bandwidth (half-power points) is slightly lower. However, according to the spec, I should get 100 watts at 1GHz bandwidth, which means there should be at least 50 watts available over a range of 1GHz with a peak somewhere reaching 100 watts. The simulation gives me just over 1GHz of range over 50 watts with a peak of over 120 watts, which is a "gift" above spec in my opinion, even if the 3dB bandwidth is below 1GHz. Anyway, the experiment is always worse than the theory, so I have to over-design it to make it meet spec. I'm shooting for ~150W at 1.2GHz at 50watts. We'll see if I can get there.

Last night, there was a birthday party for Jon Bratt and Daniel Nagaj, which was really fun - lots of food, ice cream and really heavy cheese cake! At midnight, I was treated to another jackhammer concert put on by the construction company working on the bridge outside.

I've been reading up on some minimalist amplifier designs - the "Zen" amplifier series by Pass Labs. So now I'm busy trying to figure out what to do. I want to build a class A amplifier (with the Zen version 7 circuit) of around 10W x 10W, but that means I need to get decent speakers and I don't have much space. Furthermore, this class A amplifier throws away about 500 watts of heat using the resistor method (or about 250 watts using a heavy power transformer as an inductor). Everyone is using enormous heat sinks and expensive parts, but they claim it is really amazing and it's so neat to see how 30 different people came up with creative ways of building enclosures, choosing parts and dealing with heat. Hmm, what kind of speakers should I buy/build? The j-lo looks easy to build, except it takes 5-sheets of plywood (!!!) and takes up a lot of space ; maybe a transmission line would be really nice; but should I try to match it with my plasma tweeters? Will I need a sub?

Yesterday, I finished building the first part of the plasma tweeter kit for Russ. I built a filament/main power supply that houses 2 Plitron toriodal power transformers, one for the main power (230VAC, 500VA), one for the PL519 tubes (40VAC, 30VA). A few weeks ago, we decided to try doubling the PL519 tubes (2 in parallel per tweeter unit = 4 tubes total), so I ordered a second filament transformer from Plitron (which takes about a month!). The toroidal transformers are the way to go: they are smaller than EI-core, less leaky, quieter, more efficient and often cheaper! The plasma tweeters are a kit from http://hardcoreaudio.de run by Ulrich Haumann. The kit has some problems, but overall I think it will work okay. This is just a temporary solution so that Russ and John can experiment with matching the plasma tweeter to mid-basses. Eventually, we will build a solid state version to market.

A Korean friend studying linguistics told me about a famous linguist who gave a talk to Pres. Bush. Afterward, Bush said they needed more Korean language skill in the US. The reason is that he wants more involvement (maybe spies) with North Korea and Kim, Jong-Il. I am in a unique position, being of the very few native American citizens with heavy involvement in the Korean language and culture. Perhaps I might be useful to the US government in Korea! It would be nice since I know I'd be treated well for my skill. I probably wouldn't have to risk my life somewhere, being on track for an MIT PhD, although being in NK would be a good opportunity for mission work. It's an exciting and motivating prospect, even if it is vague and far-fetched at this time.

My research is getting closer, but slowly! I've exceeded my power goal of 100 watts, so now I'm just trying to get 1 GHz of bandwidth at the 50 watt level. So far, I've got just over 900 MHz, but it's been that way for almost a week! It's exciting to be almost done! After that, I should finish the electron gun design, mode convertor design and evaluate possible Photonic Band Gap structures for my thesis.

I was discussing the classes I've taken with my office mate, Eunmi, when I realized I had already taken enough classes for my minor! I was agonizing over taking another math class and worried about how much time it would take me, but now I don't need to worry about it! Wahoo!

Well, a few days ago, I figured out how to make the simulations I'm using for my research run about 10 times faster. Stuff that I used to do over night now takes about 20 minutes. Basically, I reduced the resolution of my simulations until the error was just big enough to be acceptable. I should have thought to do that months ago! Anyway, now DOS windows pop up on my screen a few times a minute because it's so fast. No more 3 hour breaks for going to the church to play and tune the organ, though, but at least I can do work more efficiently.

Heidi and I are still learning more and more about each other. It's great! Yes, I want to spend the rest of my life with her. Learning Korean is still tough, but I'm getting better and better. She has to start practicing for her recital once her cello comes back from the shop. She'll also be taking the MTEL test next month - she's not expecting to pass it this time. We're still practicing Tang Soo Do a few times a week and eating lunch or dinner together almost every day. These are great days!

I ordered a bunch of parts for my electric scooter, like lights for turn signals, head lights, etc. so I can use it safely at night. It's still the best $400 I ever spent. I get comments and questions about it everywhere I go.

Sometime this week, I can start building the power supply for the plasma tweeters I'm building for Russ. I'm using Plitron power transformers - wow they are really great, but they took almost a month to be built and shipped. Hopefully that project will be done by the end of the month, after which I'll start on another solid-state version.

Today, the indian postdoc Jags in our lab brought in some "Kaju ki Burfi" today (see picture). It's made with cashew paste, milk, honey and silver. Yep, silver! They put a very thin silver foil on top of the dessert after it's cooked. In India, the medicinal values of silver are well known - silver plates and utensils are common among those who can afford them. I'm not sure what happens if you have metal fillings, though. Silver plus another metal basically creates a battery in your mouth.

I'm still riding the scooter. It's still great. It really does travel fast and it's really convenient for getting to my office and back in about 10 minutes. The only problem I had with it so far is a squeaking sound from the brake, but it more or less went away when I loosened the very tight brake. Also, the lowest point on the metal chassis can scrape the ground if you lean into a turn too much - it'd be nice if they just made that about 1cm higher. I'm thinking about putting tail lights, headlights and other lights on it so I can safely ride it at night. I also want to get a tarp so I can keep it outside in the rain without worrying about damaging it. I'm thinking about installing a hidden "kill" switch so no one can turn it on while it's tied up. Since there's only a nicely marked "0/1", clearly visible power switch on the side, anyone could turn it on and mess with it. Actually, it's not really practical to have a key either, because who wants their keys dangling off the scooter while your flying down the street?

Tonight I'll be leading HwaYo Moim and sharing the gospel in English. It should be fun!

I finally felt good enough today to take my Tiger Shark electric scooter out for the first time since I got it on tuesday. I didn't know if it would live up to the sales hype on the webpage or not. Let me tell ya... THAT THING IS AWESOME!! I was hesitant to take it out at first because I thought I would look awkward, but I took it out anyway and gently squeezed the accelerator grip, hoping no one was looking. It responded right away like a big dog on a leash. I got to a more open space and began to turn the grip more. Each time I gave it a twist it responded with a boost of acceleration. It was FUN!

I rode it to the office, then the Korean church, then back to the dorm, then back to the office, then way into Boston to my brother's apartment, where my undergrad friend and first-place winning senior project teammate Rob is staying for the summer. They did their fair share of joy riding it and slapping the accelerator. Then I rode it back to MIT. The battery went out when I was about 1/10 mile from home. I probably put 8-10 miles on it today.

It's got a 36 volt, 12 ah lead-acid battery pack and weighs a not-so-light 75 lbs. The top speed is about 25 mph, and the range is about 18 miles max, but with city street inclines and jabbing the accelerator, the range goes down. It was $400 plus $60 shipping from CA on the Rad2Go.com website.

Gas powered ones are definetely superior: 40 mph, 200 miles on a dinky 1L tank of gas, 40 lbs weight, generally cheaper -- but they are extremely noisy and require a lot more maintenance. Imagine a loud gas lawn mower going down your street at 6am. This is why I bought the electric.

I'm convinced this is the way to go around the city. It's fast, can be used on the sidewalks, doesn't take up much space (something like 40" long by 20" high with the steering column folded), and it's fun!

The last few days have been interesting. I don't know how to explain them. I woke up with a sore throat monday morning that got worse through the day, so I couldn't go to the dinner and candle pin bowling event that I organized! My research didn't go well that day either. The weather was beautiful and no one was in the office but me, because I thought I might get worse unless I took it easy and stayed inside.

At night, Heidi came over and visited me and brought me Kalbi Tang soup from the Koreana restaurant. I ate it all, but it was too much salt. My heart rate was high and my stomach didn't quite feel right. Heidi was with me for about 2 hours and she was quieter than usual. She suddenly started to cry quietly and left. I was confused, puzzled and felt far from God, Heidi and everything (combination of being sick, high heart rate and rough day). I was wondering why God gave me such a hard day. My choices were try to sleep (hard with an elevated heart rate) - knowing I would wake up and throw up - or take a walk.

So I wrote an encouraging email to Heidi saying things like 'I love you and want to share in your suggles and joys' and such and then took a walk on the bridge. I realized it's easy to say you love someone but hard to act it out. So I walked all the way to her house (remember, I'm sick) - about 3 miles, I guess. I didn't want her to know I was there, but I wanted to leave something behind. I left my blue lanyard that I got my first year at Villanova University - almost no one kept them. I had it for 6 years and it had been with me through some of the hardest times of my life. It was the only part of my key ring that didn't change when I came up to MIT - it represented something of a comforting friend to me. Well, I tied it to the fence post under her window that night and attached a yellow post it note. I wanted to write "To Heidi, Sarangehe (I love you) - colin" but my pen didn't work, so the only mark was the lines left by my stuttering, nearly empty wallet pen tip. Then I walked home, praying the whole way. It was a long walk back home, but I felt like I accomplished something that day and felt that I knew why God gave me a hard day.

I realized just how much I love Heidi - even more than myself and my comfort. If I became twice as sick because of that walk, but was able to show her my love, then I'm happy to bear that sickness. She read my emails and found the blue lanyard, which she keeps now as a symbol of our love. The reason she cried that night was twofold: (1) she didn't feel like she could measure up to what she thought I expected, (2) she didn't know why I picked her out of all the girls out there and thought she was no more special than anyone else.

Now, following my prayers again, we are again stronger than before. Every day so far, we've grown closer together and closer to God. I really want to share the rest of my life with her.

The weather has been excruciatingly terrible this whole week. Grey, rainy and cold. With the exception of yesterday, where the sun came out for a few hours, it probably hasn't been above 70 degrees. I've been wearing a jacket all week and the heat came back on in my office building, which just makes it really hot in my office. I know once this blows over, the temperature will rocket up to 95 or something equally terrible. Where's those Global Warming activists now??? Aren't they hiding!!

My research has been gathering twists. I thought I was on the right track (still think I was) but now we're trying a different approach that I'm a little skeptical about. Hopefully the new approach will work. If not, we'll use a hybrid design between a gyroklystron and gyro-TWT called a gyrotwystron. Those words are not in the Scrabble dictionary. If the gyrotwystron doesn't work, it's on to the gyro-TWT. There's a lot of work to do!

A lot of things have been up recently.

I'm starting work on plasma tweeters again. Now I'm trying to build a simple vacuum tube plasma tweeter kit from Ulrich Haumann in Germany for a buisnessman who I'll be working with to develop a solid state plasma tweeter to market. I'm really excited about trying the solid state challenge again, especially to build something marketable.

So after spending 4 months working on a gyroklystron design and only meeting half the spec in terms of both power and bandwidth, Jags spent about an hour on a gyro-twt design and got three times the BW at more power than spec! That's good news, but I've got 45 pages of gyroklystron thesis written and now I have to add gyro-twt to it!

Tonight, I'll be practicing my song Psalm 36:7 with Heidi for Pastor Choi's inaugurational service at the church he just became a pastor of. The problem is, I wrote the song, which means I wrote about 4 lines and improvise everything else. Heidi, being classically trained, needs notes to read, so we'll have to figure out exactly what to write for her benefit.

I'm still waiting for my scooter!! Tomorrow is two weeks! I sure hope the scooter is faster than they are!

My mom and middle brother Gavin came up to visit for three days. We had a good time of eating together, looking around the Berklee campus (Chris's school) and MIT campus (mine) - especially the new Stata Center, which looks like it went through an earthquake on the outside, but looks like Dr. Seuss land on the inside (and the back). Monday night, we all went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory (including Heidi, our newest family member!). After dinner, we went Candle Pin bowling, which is like regular bowling, except the pins are much skinnier, the ball is about the size of a softball at ~1lb, and the fallen pins aren't cleared between your three throws per frame. It's great fun, since you can really wail the ball fast! Heidi and I brought our friends Daesun and Soona too.

I'm still waiting for my electric scooter...

I'm also waiting for some parts shipments so I can finish building a plasma tweeter kit someone sent me to build. Actually, I'm also starting work on a new solid state plasma tweeter with the end goal of selling them in about a year. Hopefully, I can find enough time to do that job!

Today, the weather was really nice, so Heidi and I had a picnic lunch in front of the main MIT building out on the lawn. We took a really great photo together that I'm going to frame and give to my mom for mother's day. She made us a really good lunch - it was like jalapeno rice with cheese and shrimp.

In a few minutes, I'm running off to go teach English to some friends, then I'll go to my dorm for a wine tasting. That should be good fun.

Been a long time! The trip to California for the IVEC conference was nice. I got some good pictures (see pics). Now I'm waiting for my reimbursement - wow hotels charge a lot!

I missed Heidi a lot (and she likewise missed me), so we've been catching up ever since! She just finished her semester today, so from now on, she'll start coing to MIT for lunch, where we'll share spiritual thoughts, discuss marriage questions, and practice Korean. I can't wait! Yesterday, we had some good theological discussion. We're becoming better and better friends all the time.

Today, I ordered an electric scooter! Because I've often been walking probably close to a mile round trip to the Korean church (sometimes more than once in a day) for organ tuning, my feet started to hurt and I felt really tired. I wanted to get one of those Segway gyroscope-balanced upright scooter things, but they're around $4000! Today, I ordered a $400 more traditional electric scooter (the "Tiger Shark") that runs on a 24V 17Ah battery and can go around 16 mph (faster than the Segway's 12 mph) with a 12 mile range. We'll see how that turns out. I wanted an electric, but I saw that gasoline ones are far superior in terms of energy efficiency, weight and speed, but they make a lot of noise, so I ended up with a nearly silent (and 75 lbs) electric one. Hopefully it'll be as useful and fun as it sounds! It's even got airless tires (special foam inside) so they can't go flat!

On sunday (Mother's day), my mom and middle brother Gavin are coming up to Boston to visit me and my youngest brother, Chris. I'm excited, because I haven't seen any of them since Christmas (even Chris and he lives right across the river! Maybe I can visit him more often if the scooter works well), plus they'll all get to meet Heidi for the first time.

I've been busy getting ready for my poster presentation at the International Vacuum Electronics Conference (IVEC), 2004, in Monterey, CA. I'll be leaving monday morning and returning late friday night next week. I'll probably print the poster today. It's 36" x 48" in color and costs around $110 to print (photo papers), but they look fantastic!

Heidi has a few papers due this week, and one is about a taped debate, so I've been helping her try to understand the conversation. We have to finish before sunday since I'm leaving for CA and won't be able to help her after that!

Last night, a few friends ours (Heidi and I) went to dinner at the California Pizza Kitchen and then to candle pin bowling. The food was really good and filled my stomach! Everyone liked candle pin bowling, which is a little like the mini golf of real bowling.

I did learn that my Korean needs a lot of work, though. It's hard for me to keep up in a group of Korean friends because I don't understand most of what they say and sometimes feel left out. When I catch little pieces of the conversation and can tell what their talking about, I feel better, so I think the key is practicing and studying the Korean language more. In such group situations, we found it's important for Heidi and I to spend time together before meeting with the group to "warm up."

We had our first pre-marriage councelling session with Pastor Daesung Choi at MIT (yes, ordained pastor and PhD in biology!). It was very very helpful, especially for pointing out culture items that we need to overcome.

He said:
• there are two main camps of intercultural couples in Korea: the high-level, well educated couple where the (usually) American guy speaks Korean fluently ; and the low American GI solder who doens't speak Korean and who married an uneducated woman. He sees us in the first group, but usually Korean/non-Korean couples are viewed in the second stereotype from outside.
• if we were to break up, it would be relatively easy on me, but for her, it would be terrible because of the expectations and peering eyes of the Korean community, not to mention she would probably be placed among the second group in the eyes of her people and friends.
• we should think about getting "couple rings" - sort of pre-engagement rings to show her friends that we aren't just playing around, but that we are serious about being together. These are fairly commonplace in Korea.
• the most important things are for us to protect each other, especially from the Korean culture, and to ignore what other people think. Some of her friends have already challenged her with statements like "how do you know God wants you to marry him and not another Korean" or "if I faced the problems you guys face, I'd break up."
• there will be jealousy from the Korean community - not only because I'm taking her away from other Korean guys, but also because he had a suspicion that other Korean girls were interested in me too.
• he thought it was important for us to attend (if not migrate toward) an American church, where she could not only learn about the Bible in english (helping her share the gospel in English), but where we would be freed from the mono-cultural pressures and stereotypes. We were planning to attend both churches.
• we should consider getting married in about a year, not too much longer, because some interruptions may try to occur.

After we talked through the hardships she and I face, and after we met with the pastor, our hope and love for each was even stronger than it was before! We're both willing and eager to do whatever it takes to stay together. Maybe in another week, we'll go get "couple rings." We were very much encouraged.

Wow, we really love each other a lot, we're becoming very close friends, her English and my Korean are improving, we're learning more about each other's life goals and how we can meet them together, we're learning how to be more devoted to each other and we're trying to learn how to speak each other's "love language". I think our "communication barrier" is actually making our relationship very strong, because we don't assume, like couples in the same cultures & languages often do, that the other person knows exactly what we're thinking, but we talk through problems in detail very openly and try to understand what we think and how we feel.

Both of us are not interested in looking around for other people. We found each other - rather God shaped our lives and miraculously brought us together. The more I think about finding another girl, the more impossible it seems that I could part with Heidi.

Today at morning prayer, I was thinking about the circumstances that led up to where I am now. I almost cried with thankfulness to God for guiding my every step from childhood. I was homeschooled for 12 years, which gave me a huge head start in electronics before I entered college, as well as a sizable electronics lab which directly led to the success of our bachelor's senior project, which also took first place. Starting in highschool, I had a paper route that lasted 7 years (outlasting 6 supervisors!). At Villanova University, my undergrad, I had continued the paper route until the middle of my sophmore year. The paper route required that I get up between 5-6am every day so that I could stretch out, eat breakfast and make my way to school in plenty of time for my early classes. Meanwhile, I had started Tang Soo Do (a type of martial art similar to Tae Kwon Do) at age 15, and it kept me up until around 11:30pm while I drove 45 minutes home, ate dinner and showered. The nights were short. I prayed every day that God would give me the strength to get through. He did, and not only did I graduate, I was the top in my class!

At MIT, I struggled terribly the first year getting several letters on my transcript that I had never seen before, namely B's and -'s. For my qualifying exam, being distraught as I was, I prayed that if it was God's will for me to leave MIT, that I would not pass the Qualifier. Not only did I pass, but I aced it! Now that I'm here and continue to struggle and still pray to God for strength, I know that I am where He wants me to be. It gives me strength to know that I am fulfilling part of God's will.

Starting in january, 2003, I began attending First Korean Church in Cambridge (FKCC), MA. I was always interested in languages and took German for a year at college. In my Tang Soo Do training, I had learned a considerable amount of Korean from the commands and terminology. I fell in love with the tight friendships at the Korean church and wanted to be a part of it all, since I hadn't had Christian peers for my 4 years during college. I began studying Korean, attending the Korean Bible study meeting at MIT (as well as an English one and Park Street Church for an English sermon on Sunday), and even attended their dawn prayer services during Lent, which started at an early 5:35am. Not wanting to give up my habitual stretching routine I developed from my 7 years of arduous Tang Soo Do training that earned me my 3rd degree black belt, I arose at a brisk 4:30am every day (including saturday) to stretch, eat, and read the Bible before the prayer meeting. I've been attending there for over a year. I'm not fluent in Korean yet, but I will be someday.

In mid-november, 2003, God introduced my to Hyun-Young (Heidi) Kang, a native Korean who didn't speak English much, but who eargerly prayed during Lent that she could meet an American to practice English with, since she lived with Koreans and interacted only with them. I began teaching her English regularly - even going to her dorm room, where she would make dinner for us while we studied.

On 4/3/04, after praying and talking to her parents, we decided to become more than just friends and began planning for marriage. (No marriage date set yet! I guess I'm a goals-oriented thinker here).

My vision for the future is to go to Korea as an intern through the brand new MIT-Korea program. Perhaps someday, we can learn Japanese together and evangelize in Japan, where the Christian population is a meager fraction of a percent. In Japan, there is a lot of the research that I'm working on now at MIT.

As I look back over my life and even toward the future, I see God's hand at work within me setting the framework for His service. There are many details yet to be worked out, but I'm trusting God to guide me every step of the way! Amen!

So here's the important and exciting news: I think I have a girlfriend. I emailed Heidi last saturday and told her I thought she was a potential wife for me and told her to talk to her parents (especially since she's 100% native Korean). Both she and I expected her parents to say "but... but.. he's american!!" - but instead they both said "That's ok. We trust that God will do the right thing" and she, out of surprise, found herself saying "but.. but..!" because they didn't have objections! During Christmas break, I talked with my parents about marriage a little and my conservative dad said "what about Susan" (another Korean whom they met when they visited once) - my first reaction was a surprised "but (she's Korean!) ... but she's 3 year older than me!" to which my dad responded "that doesn't matter." Another surprise. I guess both Heidi and I expected our parents to object.

It's not like we're getting married next week or anything - we still have a ton of things to talk about and we have to seriously consider difficulties we could face. I think the most difficult thing for me (and most important) is keeping God in the center of my life. It's true that many couples put each other as an idol in the middle of their lives and when one person fails because they're human, it's catastrophic. So I'm actually praying that God might give me hardships and struggles now, because I know I can build my faith in Him if I have to pray to Him more eagerly and trust Him more.

• Why am I interested in her?
  • I know she has a strong faith in God - her father is a pastor, her mother was a tough, conservative mom. I know she has spent a lot of time in prayer - I saw her once alone in the sanctuary at 11pm praying and it really touched my heart.
  • I've seen her serve in Church a lot: taking responsibility to lead small group discussions and organize events, playing cello with the orchestra every Sunday morning, praying with a prayer group for other's needs, washing dishes, helping out...
  • She has very good interpersonal skills and has made a lot of close friends. She was shy toward non-Koreans for a while, but she's getting over that very well.
  • She's a very talented musician and has spent many years practicing and taking lessons.
  • She doesn't just cook, she went to cooking school! wow!
  • Many more...
• Why would God put us together, since we're from such different backgrounds? I believe we can reach out to more people and can act as a bridge between two (and maybe more) cultures.
• Why did I pick her? I believe there are probably thousands of suitable girls I could marry - Why her? Well, God hasn't given me the opportunity to meet any of the other thousand girls!! He brought her to me first! She is the first person I've ever seriously considered as a wife. Sure, there have been girls who I thought might be fun to date, but they hadn't quite met all of my criterion/expectations. Without trying to get to know her deeply, it's tough to say if we could make it work - but because I think we can, I want to take it seriously. In fact, I feel God has led us together - she prayed very eagerly during the Lent prayer meetings for a native english speaking friend. Then we met and I eagerly taught her english.

I know neither of us is perfect. I expect dissapointments; she's human, I'm human. I know every couple thinks they have something extra special that the other couple who didn't make it didn't have, so I know I need to be realistic and look at things objectively. That's why I kept things off of my list like "I love her" (how do you define love?), or "she's beautiful to me" (of course she is; but external beauty may not last), or "we get along so well" (in tough times, little differences can seem major!)....

I know we won't agree on everything, or always think the same way, or want the same things, etc., but we have the same larger purposes in life: to serve God wholeheartedly and do His will, to love and care for one another, and we've been preparing for careers (and we're all called by God for mission work).

Next on my list: become fluent in Korean.

Today I had jury duty. I went to the court house at 7:30am and started waiting. There were about 14 groups of jurors - I was in group 8. We had a juror orientation video and then right away they took groups 1, 5, 7, 10, 11, 14. Whew, they missed me! Then an hour later, they called groups 3 and 4. Safe again! Then at 12:30pm, they called only groups 2 and 8 into our "assembly" room where we had the orientation. They told us to get our stuff (like the other groups who were sent to a court), so I was sure I was en route to a court. Then he told us we were finished and wouldn't have to serve for 3 years! Wahoo!! Wait a minute... I wasted 5 hours of my day! They tried to tell us that we should feel like it was wasted time because when they threaten the lawyers with preparation of a jury, the case often gets resolved before the jury is impanelled. But it was still a waste of time. Rrrrr. At least I learned a few more Korean Bible verses in those 5 really boring hours. I didn't get a single benefit from it - they don't even serve free coffee! For working people, their employer must pay them as usual for the first three days - it's like a paid vacation; but for grad students, it just sucks! We lose research time and don't get paid.

Had a great weekend! I'm still going to "Sae Byuk GiDo" (morning prayer) every day. I thank God I've been able to make it every day so far. It's really been a blessing. Saturday morning we finished installing the new air filter for the organ blower, which has been in a dirty soot-laden boiler room since maybe the 1920's. Hopefully that will last okay. Then in the afternoon, I went to Hyun Young's house (her english name is Heidi) to help her with english for a class - she made some really really really good beef stew ("Kalbi Jjeem" in korean) that was slow cooked for two days. Then sunday was a busy day - park street church, korean church, a pastoral ordination service for Dae-Sung Choi, working out and finally music practice with Saikat, Brent and Chintan for our Ashdown concert on april 15. Busy weekend!

Today, I learned John 3:16 in Korean (in Korean letters, actually - I'm transliterating them to english here: "Hananim-E Sesang-eul E-Choram Saranghasa Doksengja-reul Jushosseuni, i-neun Cho-reul Mit-neun Jamada Myol-Mang-Chi Anko Yong-Seng-eul Otke Haryo Hashiminira." (yes, I did that from memory).

Today, I got my TE₀₃-mode gyroklystron amplifier design up to 37.3dB of power gain! Wahoo, only a few more dB to squeeze out and then I get to start all over again by adding velocity spread and tweaking cavity length and Q a lot.

By saturday, I should have an answer to an ~important issue~!! more big news to come!

Yesterday, I finally set up an Ikea shelf I've had in boxes for almost 2 years! I'll take some pics of my new room once I get it more organized - it's still a little messy now. I finally bought some of those angled power plugs because two or three of my most important outlets (out of five) are trapped behind furniture.

Did my taxes today. It looks like I'll get over $1200 back between Federal and MA state! Except I owed a measely $4 to PA - lousy PA, still trying to take my money even though I don't live there (still have a bank account and a CD that gain interest).

Today, because of the threat of snow, the early morning prayer service was cancelled. I heard it second-hand this morning after I got up at 4:40am, so I trekked to my office to check the webpage and start running my program, but didn't find any info, so I went to the church, but, indeed, it was closed. I came back and starting running again at 6am. I felt like I put in a full day by noon! Actually, I did put in a full day by noon!

This past week, I've been reading "The Five Love Languages" by Gary Chapman. Wow, it's a really good book for anyone thinking about marriage or just married, or been married for 35 years. It talks about how marriages begin to fall apart because one spouse doesn't feel loved by the other and starts to draw away. The reason for not feeling loved is that they are not being loved in their "love langauge". There are five basic ways to show love to your spouse: Words of Affirmation (like praise or encouragement), Quality Time (time spent doing activities or talking), Gifts (giving purchased or homemade gifts), Act of Service (doing things around the house, making dinner), Physical Touch (communication through the senses). A husband can buy things for his wife and give her lots of spending money (Gifts), but she won't feel loved if he doesn't spend time listening to her or doing activities with her if her primary love language is Quality Time. Her "love tank" will drain and she won't want to show love to him. In this manner, marriages easily degrade. He gives examples of even very "far gone" marriages that were saved by applying these concepts.

I moved rooms! Luckily, it was within the same dorm. I have a single on the top floor now and force myself to walk the stairs whenever possible for excercise. The room's a little small, but it's bigger than splitting the double I had. I'm still moving in and have boxes lying everywhere. I hate moving! I haven't moved in almost 2 years.

This week is the last week for MIT ice skating, so I'm disappointed.

Next week is MIT spring break, but I'm only doing research now, so all the days are the same to me except the weather changes.

These last few days have been very busy for some reason - I've just been running from one thing to the next. I'm co-leading a book discussion on "The Purpose Driven Life" which takes up about 2 hours every week; I've been meeting about once a week for a music practice for a concert next month; morning prayer every day; I've got the 1.5 hour manuscript study every week (that's very good!); I iceskate twice a week for an hour (that ends soon); AHEC meetings every week; and random things come up, like a conference call, recording piano for a music major friend, checking english on friend's papers, etc.

Yesterday, I had a great time ice skating with my friend. She taught me some korean during skating and lunch, and I felt like I learned it so fast - it was great! I felt like my Korean abilities were stuck for a long time and wouldn't go anywhere, but I think they're starting to pick up now! Now I really want to be fluent in Korean after I watched my friend's parents chat with each other at his PhD defense. His dad is American and his mom is Chinese, and they're both fluent in both langauges! So I know there's hope for me to learn Korean! Now I have to make the decision whether it's a good idea or not to have a Korean wife, given questions like 'where do we go to church?', 'where do we get married?', 'where do we kids grow up?', 'which country do we live in?', etc...

Today was the beginning of "SaSoonJol SaeByuk GiDo" (early morning prayer during lent) at the Korean church. The van leaves MIT at 5:10am - that is early morning! I got up at 4:30am so I could stretch before leaving, so I'm really tired now by mid afternoon. My roommate doesn't go to bed until about 2am, but luckily he's pretty quiet. Actually, there are a lot of open single rooms in my dorm now, and I've lot plenty of seniority points to get something good, so I may be moving to a new room next week. The early morning prayer service consists of a hymn or two followed by a sermon and then 30 minutes of prayer. It's really a great way to start the day, except you have to go to bed at around 9:30pm.

Yesterday I taught some basic english to some people at the Korean church. I think it helped a little. I've really been trying to reach out to some of the new people from Korea who need practice with English conversation, and now I'm making a lot of friends too! Here's the diligent english padawans, Hyun Young and Yoon Ji.

Today, my good friend (and fellow 1980'er) Jiseok Jeon left to go back to Korea. Everyone will miss him a lot. He spent countless hours serving in the church as the sound and media guy. He could set up all the band's sound equipment in 30 minutes and have no feedback or wiring problems. It will take a team of people to replace him. He came to the early morning prayer (at 5:30am) every day during lent last year to make sure the microphones were set up for the pastor's early morning sermon. Hopefully he'll come back soon after his mandatory army service.

Last night, there was a big party for Jiseok. About 25 of his friends crammed into a little apartment room to wish him well. I missed most of it since my Korean's not that good, but it sure sounded like it was a good time.

Wow, I was at a great retreat with the Korean church yesterday in Cape Cod. The pastor's message was very powerful and clear (even though I only heard it indirectly through English translation). The worship was great and inspiring, as it always is when you put half a dozen Berklee musicians together with another half-dozen singers. The leaders (all students) put a tremendous amount of work into the reatreat to make it run smoothly and it did!

I went to an IVCF sponsored retreat last week too, in NH. The title was "You're not at home" and it focussed on living as a foreigner in a new culture. The speaker was a dark indian guy from Sri Lanka who has lived in the USA since 1981. He is the missions director at Grace Chapel in Lexington, MA. Very energetic, full of relevant stories and insight. Here are the People who went.

Last night, I brought the Airzooka to our Bible study. Everyone had fun with it while we were waiting for everyone. Afterward, we tested it in the hall way and were amazed at how well the air packets stay together. Though aiming is difficult at long distance, the air packets don't seem to lose much oomph at all and stay about the same size at 15 meters as they are when they exit the toy! Next: hook it up to a fog machine and shoot fog balls!

Yesterday, I had a great day with the Pal-Gong-Saram-Dul (1980 people). We went to the Cheesecake factory for lunch (and wait for almost 2 hours for a table for 10 - that restaurant is ALWAYS packed!). At night, we all went to Jae-Yeon's for a birthday celebration (I was too full to eat again!), which was fun, except they played some Korean games at the end and I think I slowed everyone down because they had to translate everything for me.

I need to learn from Jonah's story, where he was mad that God took away the leaf that gave him shade, even though Jonah didn't work to make the leaf grow or anything. At the end (Jonah 4:9-11), the story doesn't come to resolution (God doesn't give Jonah another leaf or anything), but God shows Jonah that the people of Ninevah need the gospel preached to them... I often spend my time complaining to God that He is withholding something from me rather than being thankful for what I have and then focussing on mission work. God gave me a body that usually obeys what I tell it to do - I can feel my hands and feet, so I'm much more blessed than those who can't walk or even use their hands, so I should stop thinking about what I still don't have and be happy with what I do have.

Every day, I pray that God would give me Patience, Prudence and Preparation for a wife, but I obviously need work on all three!!!

Luke 16:10
He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.

Luke 19:17
And he said to him, 'Well done, good servant! Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities.'

1 Corinthians 7:1
"Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman."

Today's my birthday! Happy 24th Birthday to me! My small group Bible study put together an 8am breakfast this morning of pancakes, fruit, scrambled eggs and bacon, complete with a drowsily sung "happy birthday" ;-] It was great! Then I went ice skating at the MIT rink at noon for an hour. The MIT rink is great compared to Frog Pond because it's three times the size, the ice is really smooth and the air is a lot warmer! I do enjoy being outside at Frog Pond, though, but I learned I can't go unless the temperature is above 30 degrees F.

Today, my "Mark Manuscript" study started. The "Manuscript" method is one where you take a book of the Bible and remove all headings, verse and chapter numbers, paragraph notation, etc., and study it very slowly. We spent about 15 minutes just looking at the first sentence in Mark: "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." and wrote down as many observations as we could find. Wow, I learned a lot out of that little sentence fragment. It took us 1.5 hours to get through, I think, 6 verses! The key is observation. I don't think I'll ever read the Bible the same way again!

Last night, I went to my friend's Orchestra recital at BU. It was great. They played some Mozart, a modern piece (written by a film music composer) and some Dvorak. Afterward, we went to a coffee shop for some drinks and dessert. I haven't been to an orchestra concert in a long time and it was great to listen closely to the whole ensemble, because I wanted to hear the glory of a full orchestra and compare it to recorded music. It's always tough to make stereo speakers make it feel like you're sitting there at the concert. The dynamic range and frequency content range is enormous. At times, it was loud and powerful, or so quiet I thought my breathing could be heard, while the frequencies ranged from thunderous movements of air to the highest harmonic whisper of a violin.

Today I played organ at FKCC for 1.5 hours, just practicing Bach's "Kommst du nun, Jesu, von Himmel herunter" - BWV 650. It's great fun to play- very upbeat and clever and I get to use that lovely trumpet reed sound. It is a very difficult piece for one person to play (I've heard it with trumpet and organ, which would be a lot easier). Then I worked inside the organ for 2 hours and got really really dirty. I was wedged in a little tiny space behind the keyboards working on tiny tracker action pieces that were packed very tightly together, but I fixed the problem!

This week, I've been taking the MIT IAP Korean class. I'm in the advanced-intermediate class taught by my officemate, Eunmi Choi. The class is very hard, because most of the students were born in Korea and understand everything. They don't know much about the grammar and spelling, though. I'm learning a lot of vocabulary and grammar (and also not learning a lot of it! there's sooo much!). Last night, I was getting distressed because the class was too hard for me. There was also a large grad student free food/wine/beer event, so I went there. Three Korean girls happened to share my table, so I got to practice a little, which was fun and helped me get motivated again. It's hard to just learn grammar and vocab if you don't have a fun situation to use it in.

Tonight is the last Korean class, immediately followed by the last IAP Apologetics class (taught by an MIT alum), immediately followed by the first meeting of the new year at the Korean church. Busy days.

I was also able to buy an "Airzooka" on ebay today! This is one cool toy. It shoots packets of air trapped by vortices that can travel 20 or 30 feet - you can make people's hair move across a room!

Oops, been a while again... Did a lot of stuff lately. Went to the MIT IAP cheese tasting put on by Formaggio Kitchen - it was awesome! On saturday night, our Bible study group and the S-P dorm one went to a good Indian restaurant in Davis square, followed by Candle-pin bowling.

Candle-pin bowling is really fun, like mini golf. The pins are very narrow, like 3" or so and the ball is much smaller, like a softball and ~1 pound in weight, so you can really wail it! You get three rolls per frame instead of two, all the balls are the same and the fallen pins don't get cleared between rolls. This means you don't have to wait for your ball to return before bowling again and you get to use fallen pins to knock other ones down! Out of 15 people at 2 games each (900 rolls), I was the only one to get a strike (all 10 down on the first ball) - it's very hard. I got 73 and 84 and ended up with the highest average!

Yesterday, I finished installing the lights in the organ at FKCC. I'm sure I'm the only one to see inside the Swell chamber 20ft above the floor in a long time. I've got a few difficult things to fix near the keyboards (mechanical couplers) - it's difficult to get in there and there's not much space to work.

Last night, we celebrated my roommate's birthday at S-P with 15 people, Anna's Taqueira burritos, ice cream and strawberries, board games and "Wallace and Gromit" claymations on TV. It was a good time.

Today I finished the 40th chapter of "Purpose Driven Life" by Rick Warren. It's very good, but to get more out of it, I need to read it again and take notes this time.

EEeeeeeppp! It's cold out today! It was around -2 degrees Farenheit this morning at 7am, and went up to a high of only about 10F. It's going down to -4F tonight!

Yesterday was out first tabla class. I was having second thoughts about co-teaching it and wasn't feeling motivated, but I had a good time anyway and was glad I did it.

I read some decent advice about Christian marriage:

• Pray, pray, pray!!!
• God first, potential wife ought to be a Christian already before you get serious.
• Know yourself and make necessary changes in your life. Remember that you shouldn't expect marriage to make you happy.
• Know your needs and the needs of your potential spouse so you can figure out whether you can meet each other's needs.
• If you sense during dating that you weren't meant to be married, don't ignore the warning signals. You must not try to keep the relationship together if you're driven by the fear of being single.
• Don't let pressure (peer, parents, etc) or emotions drive your decisions.
• Don't be controlled by other gods (alcohol, drug addiction, bad habits, various idols, ...).
• Have a good pastor or councellor to help you out.
• In marriage, the emotions will fade, so you must make the decision each day to love your spouse as Christ loved the church.

I went ice skating yesterday with my friend Hyun Young to teach her how to ice skate (Hey Junhi, I can hear you sarcastically saying "to teach her how to skate?.... rrrriiiigghhttt"!). The weather was great for outdoor ice skating at Frog Pond, even though at about 32F, it was a little cold. A few friends ate dinner with us and we chatted for a while and played poker. It was great!

Today, I went to the early morning prayer service and was planning to work on the organ afterward, but it was terribly bitter cold in the organ, so much so that my feet hurt, so I couldn't do anything. It's only going to get colder in the next few days!

Oh yeah, I'm trying to do research, but I can't get motivated enough. Probably b/c I got up at 4:30am.

Did a lot of things recently... Went home to PA on 12/21/03, tuned our old piano, Christmas came. My mom organized a day where many of my old friends could come over and hang out, so maybe 25 people came. We showed the slide show that chris and I put together for my parents a lot. We went to my grandparents' for a day, then I came back up to Boston on 12/30/03.

I went to a great event at Park Street Church new year's eve with some fantastic musicians playing, then went to the Korean church for a midnight service. New Year's day, a bunch of friends went to the pastor's house from the Korean church for lunch.

Last night, I worked on the organ at the Korean church for about 4 hours. I cleaned it, mostly, since the catwalks are very very dusty and dirty. One problem I wanted to fix and thought would be very hard to fix was actually very easy to fix, so I even feel like I accomplished something!

I got a "B" in optics, miraculously. I was seriously expecting a "C".

Studying for my killer Optics final on monday. The smartest person I know in electromagnetics (Marcus) only answered 4 out of 6 of the problems on the final last year! I think if I had another week to prepare, I still wouldn't be ready. I haven't done the pracitce HW set, which is supposed to be useful for the final. I've just been copying notes from the last few topics trying in vain to understand how to solve these problems. They are terribly complicated and the methods are vague. I've got about a dozen sheets of notes I should compress down to ~4 pages for the exam sheets.

I've got a million things I want to do after finishing the final monday. I hope can get them all done! I want to repair the organ in the Korean church, find more pictures for a slideshow as a Christmas present for my parents put together by my brother Chris and I (with us playing music together), go ice skating a lot, prepare for co-teaching a tabla drum class for january, etc., etc.

Whoops. haven't written in here in a while. Had a great Thanksgiving at Mok Sa Nim's House (the pastor fo the Korean church), who invited the entire singles ministry to his house. About 50 people came and enjoyed great food, fellowship and games. I even had fun, despite playing some games in Korean.

On monday 12/1, I handing in my new worst homework set ever in my optics class. I'll be happy with a 40 or 50, I think. Today, I handed in the final set (#11) and don't really know what to do now. I still have plenty to worry about with the final. I'm trying to waste time before going to another plasma forum where they serve pizza for my dinner.

Last night, we had the Ashdown Holiday Concert at 8pm. We started setting up at 6pm and it took me over an hour to set up all the sound equipment! I wanted to record the concert, but I think I pressed the wrong button at the end of the night and my Archos recorder hung. This morning, I found there was NO file! I'm so disappointed, because I wanted to use the music of me and my brother Chris as part of a slide show for my parents' Christmas present. We'll record our part again this saturday, hopefully with better quality anyway.

Wow, time flies. I haven't written in more than a week! Well, I had a great weekend. On saturday, my brother Chris came over from Berklee College of Music to practice a little with me. He'll be playing in our holiday concert with me: Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring (Bach), Christmas Time is Here (V. Guaraldi) and the swing version of O Christmas Tree (arr. V. Guaraldi). We'll probably try to record it. That night I went to a Korean culture show at MIT - good food, saw some friends, watched some stuff I'd never seem, like traditional dances and music. I'm still more of a fan of Indian music than traditional Korean, which lacks melody and harmony.

I have a friend who has been in America for a year and I never heard her speak English, so I had been trying to converse with her a little. She's so shy! After some small conversation a few times, I found out that she's really been praying for a friend to speak English with! I had no idea! I am so happy to be her friend now!

We (the mission team at the Korean church) had a great evening together. We had a farewell dinner for Bokmin, who is leaving for DC for Patent Law. After some great Korean food, we went out for dessert (coffee and ice cream) and then went bowling at Boston Bowl in Quincy. It was great. I bowled a 127 and 147 (better than usual) and got home at 12:30am!

I recorded a few piano songs yesterday and ws happy with how they came out. I used the Sony small stereo mic made for MD players. The sound was a little lacking in low bass and treble, but it was very easy to use - I just plugged it into my Archos and turned the input recording level all the way up (this mic doesn't put much signal out to keep MD players from distorting).

I played keyboard and udu drum for the Indian Diwali night tonight. It was fun to learn some new song and try to adapt to a different music style. What a mission field. Tickets were sold out. It was a room with 500 Indians, probably none of them knowing Christ. It was recorded, so hopefully I'll have an mp3 of it soon.

Today I spent a lot of time thinking about cults after my friend sent out an email inviting a bunch of us to a Taize service, which I thought sounded suspicious. See discussion for details. Still not sure if it's a cult or not.

I had a really stressful couple of days on tuesday and wednesday finishing my homework for Optics. I spent the ENTIRE day on tuesday, from 9am to 11pm and was back in my office at 7am the next morning to finish it by 2pm. I probably will get a 70 on it. It feels so terrible to spend so much time on HW and get the wrong answers.

Anyway, I realized I get very angry and frustrated under stress and subconsciously demand some kind of attention. I realized this when I would crumble paper loudly and miss the garbage basket and it would skitter across the floor while I muttered things under my breath. I don't seem to approach such difficulties with a clear head and earnest desire to finish the problem. I just wanted to get mad at it and myself and attract attention or something to get some kind of sympathy. Unfortunately, I probably dumped it all on my poor officemate, who studies quietly and consistently without acknowledging my struggle. Ugh, I can't imaging seeing myself through someone else's eyes. I'm like two different people when I'm free and under a lot of stress. I think I need to fix that before getting married - I don't want my wife to deal with me like that. It seems like a tough thing to pull myself out of; maybe I'll never get married then.