On another note, I picked up a new Sony Ericsson cell phone (T610) this week. It looks like it's about a year to the day that my T68i died. What the heck is wrong with these consumer electronics companies? Can they not make a device that lasts in a boy's pocket for longer than a year? Apparently not. The price of modernity is high.

Lastly, I passed my oral PhD qualifying exam on Wednesday. So I am official a PhD Candidate. Yippie!

Yes. I passed. After months of carrying on about studying, and a week of waiting -- kept up at night worrying about sign errors in the photoelectric effect relationship, it's all over. It feels good...it feels damn good.

Now, to focus on the upcoming oral in February.

On another note, today's the two year anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. I can't believe it's been that long. I can still remember smelling the burning metal in the park for weeks after. Such a tragedy.

So here I am, sitting in my office with my heart and brain in my stomach and lower intestine. It's 8:36 PM. At 9:00 PM I'll have the results of my qualifying exam. Scared, hell yeah. I haven't felt anxiety like this since those days of high school cross country races. I remember the nervous feeling that you have until the shot of the starting gun goes off. Until then, the nerves just drain all life out of you. I'm practically weak right now.

I really shouldn't worry so much. Every single person I've talked to is "pretty sure" I'll pass. Still, it wouldn't be the first time that I screwed up on the big go around. Too much pressure, you disaster....

Maybe I'll have to write another entry later tonight to cleanse if I feel too dirty from not making it. Maybe I'll write another just to put some further closure to this entire ordeal. Regardless, until then I'll sit here listening to the new Silver Mt. Zion cd, playing F-Zero as my sweat palms slide off the keyboard and my bowels churn their buttery goodness.

Did you ever want to feel completely stupid and useless? If so, I suggest taking a qualifying exam. There's nothing else to morally break you and your pompous, arogant academic ass into mush. Indeed.

So today was the day. Took the exam, all 6 hours of it. I don't think I've ever been so exhausted in my entire life. Just drained to the point where I was completely incoherent to what others were saying to me. I couldn't sit still, I couldn't slow down, but I was useless, the brain utterly fried.

After the first session, I had to force myself to eat lunch, which is never a problem. I was so completely disgusted and felt simply wretched. Even now, at almost 9PM, I still haven't eaten dinner due to the physical manifestations of my ill mental state.

There's really nothing left to be said. It's kinda like if you got completely drunk and wasted, then woke up in the morning and said: Well shit, why did I do that? So I ask myself, well, shit, why did I go and put myself through that?

Well, it's been quite the lousy summer. I went to the beach but two times. Thetemperature reached above 90 degrees a couple days in June, but was this breezy damp rag for most of July. And August, well, that was full time study mode, so there isn't much I remember. I'd like to relate it to running the marathon: You remember the start, the finish and all the points of intense pain, but that's about it. I do want my money back...NO REFUNDS.

Tomorrow morning I take my exam. Haw. It's such a crap shoot...you try to contense years of knowledge into 6 questions. Just pretend you know more than the next guy for a few hours...that's the secret to success.

On another note, I found a hack for FZERO to supply infinite turbos. Is there a deeper meaning to this... probably not. But it sure does make it fun; invincibility is addictive.

Godspeed....

There's less than a week until the big exam day. Typical of high stress situations, I have resorted to FZero and FZero2. The story goes something like this:

During my sophomore year of college, I downloaded this SNES emulator and played this FZero racing game extensively between study sessions. It's not a very complex game -- not exactly a thinking man's pursuit. What drew me to it was this idea of the turbo booster. For every lap you complete you get one of these booster things, so on the last lap I'd use them successively just racing through the game. Its like your almost to the finish and you just keep jamming the boost button so that you sprint home. Of course, life won't let you do that...everyone fatigues during sprinting...but I guess that's why I love the game so much, it makes you feel invincible, if only for 30 seconds.

Every exam period thus far has been coupled with some Fzero play. I think it's definitely a secret to any limited success I've had thus far. :)

Tomorrow will be 4 straight weeks of qualifying exam preparations. Indeed, I am exhausted. Lately I've been more edgy than a pregnant woman in 3rd trimester. I can't work for more than 2 hours without a significant break. Coffee/caffeine effects have long warn off. Summer never came as far as I am concerned. All I really see is the inside of an unbareably cold lab office with no windows. Ugh...a graduate student laments.

Sometimes I feel that I started too early -- that the chemistry I reviewed in early July has long escaped the confines of my psyche. Then again, I still have two more courses to review before the heavy iterations (READ: memorizations without contemplation) begin.

It really sucks.

It really, really, really sucks.

How many different ways can you solve for the bound state of a deuteron....lots.How does the heat flow in an infinite slab? Ask me how much I care. And I think the saddest part will be that this is all for naught. I won't ever really use this stuff in my research, like most other scientists don't use their graduate work in their research. It's all a game, and I'm the lonely little pawn trying to take out the king on a board that's all too black and white. Ah but I digress.

Two weeks away. Bite down, grind through, then begin the therapy to erase this awful experience from the depths of the pysche. Too bad it won't leave as easily as acid-base titrations.

The Sunday Times Magazine Lives article from today, entitled Portrait of a Sailor as a Young Man with tagline ``Sure, sailing a boat to France is a fool's errand, but you try telling that to a 23-year-old", struck a chord in me. (You can read it here. The lousy NYT charges for articles over a week old. Note to self, you should archive NYT daily.)

I'm not really sure if the point he is trying to put forth is the one thing that I like about it so much. It seems to me as if he's saying that those crazy ideas you have in your early twenties aren't really all they are cracked up to be. In his quest to build (or rather rebuild) a ship to sail transatlantic he sacrificed both love and money to no avail.

However, i see it in a different light. Being 23 and a sailing enthusiast, I'd rather be dreaming of Southern French shores than studying Laplace transforms and RedOx reactions for a qualifying exam. In the midst of monotony, a little adventure and something completely unexpected is essential. I'm not saying I want to move to City Island to slave in the sun all day, though my grandparents in Throggs Neck would probably like me to be so close. However, there is something to say about being able to create something that has great personal meaning with one's own two hands. My only commodity I feel I can bring forth is code or trivial proofs. I wonder if the great writers, poets, and philosophers ever struggled with the fact that all they could produce was distilled to ink and paper. Sure, ideas are as powerful as objects, but there is something organic about having an idea and phyisically bring it about. I also wonder if everything you start in your twenties turns out to be one big unfinished project, as that surely what life feels like these days.

And I'm supposed to be an experimentalist... Ouch!

Finally, a nice Saturday! After much obsessing about the weather, I'm finally satisfied by occurence of sun in the absence of humidity. Such an obsession has revealed how connected I feel to the weather. I think to some extent everyone has a symbiotic relationship to his environment , but perhaps my own is more accute. Too much rain during May and June has left me rather spent and resistant to any kind of change whatsoever (school, music, tv, etc).

Today, in the sun's full glory, I just kind of moped around, knowing full well that I should have started to study for my doctoral exams (September). I couldn't bear to sit in front of books when every part of my being wanted to go sweat in the sun. Strange enough, I was also sad. I waited so long for something to happen, some sign of a season, or a break in the monotony that is life at MIT, that I just staggered through May and June. I can try to blame the weather, but should instead blame myself. For the first time, there is no "summer vacation". Sure, there aren't any classes, but I think I miss not going back home, seeing old friends and catching up on gossip. During college you live this dual life, one at school and one at home, that rarely connect. Graduate school makes me feel like both those have merged into some forgotten chapter of some forgotten book, left only to read the same lines over and over again: (To steal from Yaoza) Three months past.

So maybe I embellish I bit. It's really not that bad, but as my girlfriend puts it: I just don't want to grow up.

Some may say that summer doesn't officially start until the earth tilts itself to maximize the daylight hours, the summer solistice for you druid-type folk, but I think Memorial Day is the official American commencement of summer. I can remember back to my youth the long days of sunshine, cool breezes, and the infamous summer-swim-scream (that's a pool party with ice cream). And although we should be inching closer to these sultry summer days, given the current weather, the lack of spring, and the overall malaize that haunts these days, it seems further than ever.

With that I give my 100% Yahoo ripped-off, 99.999% accurate summer weather forecast for Cambridge, MA :

Currently: 71º  Cloudy Scattered Showers Hi: 72 Lo: 57

I came across an interesting article in the Weekly Dig entitled My Kingdom for a Scene: A Hipster Lament The guy basically starts trying to validate himself as a Bostonian true blood, shunning the hipster scene of Brooklyn for his own New England wanna-be version. He realizes however that Boston is just lame. In a town full of fresh-outta-college trust-fund babies with real goals and ambition, you just can't create the edge that Brooklyn has.

Frankly, I agree. There's something about New York City that no place can mimic, even the outer boroughs have it! Despite the fact that all those cheater kids I went to college with (Henry & Ali obviously excluded) flocked there after May, I still would love to make it my home. Too bad there aren't any good graduate programs in Quantum Computing in NYC.

If life, or rather, my life at MIT during these past two weeks, were a high school track meet, i'd say I have about 2 laps left. The bulk of the race is behind now; all the jitters and jockeying at the beginning are gone. Now we are poised to strike. Yet, don't sprint just yet. There's alot of tar between this point and the finish line. Focus in, control the mind and body, and go for it.

Apparently this guy is meritous of something. Nonetheless, it remains interesting how he tries to relate technology as a means to an end, that being creativity.

Bought the new Yo La Tengo album last week. So mellow and cheese...it makes me feel like I'm 30-something. It still rocks though. Also, added my "Day in the Life of MIT" shots to the photos section. Check those out for major boredom.

IAP is a dream! No class, lots of time for research and thought experiments, hanging out, drinking coffee. Classes will start up again, back into the Fry-O-Matic alla Stress. Alas, such a polar place this MIT. Luckily, after a month and a half of relaxation, the missing element of a vexed 2002, will set our adrift ship on course.

MP3 removed since I see altavista is linking to it...grrrr.