This Friday and Saturday, I went to Olin Alumni Weekend (15 year reunion for my class). Took Erica on Saturday. They were trying to make it a kid-friendly event, but there weren't quite enough kid activities for the day, I thought. She had a good time nonetheless and enjoyed seeing the school. Julie was able to join us in the evening after a cycling event Saturday morning. She'd been expecting to be busy all day originally, but her event was shortened due to weather.

Erica went to a friend's birthday party at SkyZone trampoline park Sunday morning. Julie and I had a light lunch at a Moroccan bakery nearby (CasaBlanca Pastry), then dropped by Night Shift. (Viva Habenera is back!)

Sunday afternoon we went to Union Square's annual Marshmallow Fluff Festival. This had been postponed to the predicted to be less rainy (but maybe actually significantly more rainy) day of the weekend. Which was fortunate for Erica, since she actually got to attend.

Masala Square's fluff samosas were pretty good, but Carolicious served fluff arepas so tasty I think they need to put dessert arepas on the menu. Counter Culture Coffee was serving some delicious drinks (including one made with their new coffee concentrate) out of their Union Square coffee school. It was fun despite the wet weather, and there were definitely a lot of people out in the rain.

Enjoyed watching an episode of the second season of Is It Cake? with Erica in the evening, though she really didn't want to go to bed after.

The current situation: This essay, The Hammer and the Dance, is one of the best-written things that I've read about controlling the current epidemic.

On the home front: Second week of distancing, the grind continues. At least five more weeks to go. Eris mood continues as before. Some good times, but also a lot of screaminess. We've been playing Ring Fit and Just Dance in the evenings, and it's good to get in the extra indoor exercise, but it's another two items in the already interminable bedtime routine. I need to write more, but keep failing to find the time for it. At least I am getting some work done.

Elsewhere: Olin College has chosen its second President: Dr. Gilda Barabino, currently Dean of the Grove School of Engineering at City College of New York, a luminary in the field of bioengineering whose research focused on the biomechanics of sickle cell disease.

Managed to get a few fun things in recently.

The previous weekend, we got out to Waltham for the Watch City Steampunk Festival and had tea on Waltham common with some friends. Then we got back to Somerville in time to catch the end of Porchfest.

This weekend was mostly quiet, but I did take Eris to an Olin community get-together, a discussion about the search for a new college president.

Still, things have been particularly rough and exhausting. The Erisian mood has been tempestuous, and I deal poorly with all the screaming. Don't get me wrong, she's in a good mood a lot of the time, but the tantrums have been worse and more frequent. Early development is very two steps forward, one step back.

Eristic improvements: Tracing letters and numbers, writing her own name.

Last weekend, we went to Lubbock to visit Julie's folks. Erica got to spend some quality time with her grandparents and get in another visit with her great-grandma. We also took her to see the animals at the South Plains Fair. Scott (Julie's dad) made homemade paella, which was really good! Was nice to get in some good times with family.

This week work was quite busy. Wednesday I went out to the Olin campus for the fall career fair. I love helping with campus recruiting, it's always great to get back to Olin and see the current crop of students, they always really seem to have it together. It's strange to be so far removed from undergrad, still feels like not that long ago. (Enjoyed the lunch, too. The Olin dining hall is now run by Rebecca's Cafe instead of Sodexo, and that seems to be a big improvement.)

Speaking of Olin, I've also been reading a book by one of my Olin profs, A Whole New Engineer, about Olin and Olin's collaboration with the iFoundry at the University of Illinois. Pretty interesting so far. While I already knew a lot of the background about Olin, I didn't know much about the iFoundry program, which seems to be an attempt to replicate some of Olin's successes with a small, low-budget program at a much larger university.

This weekend was mostly pretty quiet. I managed to play a bit of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Saturday (worth the time, though I stayed up a bit later than ideal). Sunday, went to Octoberfest in Harvard Square, which was for some reason not postponed to the rain date despite pouring rain. The weather was pretty lousy, but I don't regret trying to make the most of it since it got me out of the house. Erica napped in her stroller and I enjoyed a little bit of the music (though from a bit of a distance; Erica's ability to sleep through brass bands, while impressive, is not unlimited).

I took down the AC yesterday, just in time. So much easier when I get to it while the weather is still dry.

Of course, I've also been following the presidential election with great interest. Looking forward to the second debate tonight (will probably brave the weather to watch that in company instead of streaming it at home). Though I'm also looking forward to this whole thing being over. (How much crazier can it get in less than a month?)

Erisitic improvements: Erica is eating a bit more adult food (she really liked having some of Julie's scrambled eggs this morning), she's more interested in playing with blocks (though not yet up to nesting or stacking, mostly just hitting together or knocking down), she seems to be understanding some words (maybe???), she's more visibly interested in hearing people read aloud (though she doesn't yet follow along or turn the pages or pay attention to specifics).

Very tired lately.

Olin Career Fair last week was great. I enjoyed the panel discussion. Career Fair is very lively, my voice was really tired by the end of the day.

There was an Ingress event in Boston last Saturday, a lightning-round version of the global game of keep-away that was part of the last round of events. Each team fought over 36 in-game objects, jumping them from landmark to landmark to one of their team's goals. The field was set at 20 minutes past noon, with jumps every 15 minutes from 1PM to 5. My team (the green Enlightened) fought our way to victory, 18-15. Was a good game, strategy was dynamic and interesting, and both teams brought a good crowd of players and high-level gameplay.

My mom was in town last weekend, so we got in some lunches at Google and dinner with extended family. On Sunday, we wandered into Honk! and the annual Octoberfest in Harvard Square. Very nice to have an opportunity to catch up.

Next weekend, Julie and I will be visiting her family in Lubbock.

After the snow last week, I got out to Olin for career fair, which was awesome! Also ran a resume workshop, which went really well.

I came up with a silly metaphor for my resume remarks, which I hope will stick in students' minds: A resume is like a cupcake, served upside-down.

You have the wrapper, essential but not exciting. That's name, contact information, what are you studying and when, and your summary of skills (useful, but that's a summary of a summary, so keep it short).

You have the cake, the main point. That's delicious work experience! Ideally, this section is the closest approximation you can muster to, "I did exactly this job, did it extremely well, and have the numbers to prove it." Prioritize discussing relevant paid work, followed by relevant close approximations of paid work and relevant projects that produced something concrete. Discuss unrelated employment if necessary, but more briefly. Use metrics to quantify your achievement (at least showing that you set goals and measured results, ideally show that your results were impressive). Estimate if necessary. On the job learning is a good thing to demonstrate, and that can be something to quantify as well.

Finally, you may want to add a bit of icing, some leadership position or award or hobby that makes you look cool or smart or interesting but isn't directly relevant to work. I don't think there's a real risk that the person who doesn't put any hobbies on their resume will be looked down on, but if you have something cool, it might help your resume be memorable and might help you have something good to talk about in interviews that have more social-skills-y "so tell me about you" sorts of questions.


The rest of the week was very busy, and this weekend is once again mired in snow. (With more scheduled for next Tuesday and then a significant amount next weekend.) I braved the snow to have Valentine's Day dinner with Julie at Cafe Artscience. We went out for brunch at Puritan and Co. and I made hot chocolate at home.

I'm glad to have the day off tomorrow.

I've started playing Ingress (a territory-capturing MMOARG game by Google's Niantic Labs). I originally tried the game when it was first in beta, but then didn't get into it until just recently. It's pretty fun, and I got Julie to start playing, too. (My username is Macrologist, my faction is Enlightened.)

Other things:

Olin Expo was awesome! Especially the Principles of Engineering projects (a "create a hardware/software prototype" class, which in my day was PIC micro-controller + PIC assembly or C, but now is a lot of Arduino or Raspberry Pi + Python using libraries like OpenCV). The tech available for hardware/software prototyping has come a long way in the last eight year. Olin's computer science curriculum is getting stronger, too.

Hanukkah parties with extended family and family friends were fun.

Wednesday, we woke-up super-early to fly to Lubbock and visit Julie's extended family for Christmas. I am really enjoying the vacation.

Work has been crazy-but-productive for me the last few weeks. I'm doing a presentation on some of the stuff I've been working on for my coworkers on Monday, hope it won't be too boring.

Pi-Con last weekend was fun, with not nearly as many hurricanes as last year. Skipped most of the panels, spent a lot of time on games: More Innovation, a round of Fiasco (a quick collaborative storytelling game that produces convoluted movie-like plots), Red November (a crazy collaborative players-versus-environment boardgame featuring gnomish submariners), and a one-off tabletop RPG the Fallout universe (played with the Savage Worlds system). Due to organizational difficulties, there was no video-gaming at Pi-Con this year. And the whole con is on hiatus next year, returning in 2014.

Today, I went to see Red Bull's cliff-diving event (in which athletes jumped off of the ICA into Boston Harbor). Was pretty awesome!

Tomorrow, there's an Olin alumni meetup on the Cambridge Common. Should be fun.

The better my life gets, the less time I find to write a coherent blog post about how well things are going.

Last weekend, I was at this, which I discussed more at length in my other blog (and seriously, even if you don't read that, read the speech here). There was also this, which I only saw a bit of, but it was fun, and the resulting photos were good:



That's myself and DJ. The immediate reaction of Michelle (and Tara) was that we looked like certain muppets. I'll accept that.

Other stuff: Went on a lot of good dates, watched 5 Centimeters Per Second (good, and pretty, but a little sad) and saw Incendies with Film Club (sadder than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be sad; still a well-crafted film), worked on v1s and v2s bouldering, attended an annual Olin alumni event and caught up with some old friends, continued to be overwhelmed by Google-ness, and stumbled home after dawn.

Enjoying the weather and very much looking forward to summer.

I've been friending a bunch of distant (and not-so-distant) relatives on Facebook recently after being friended by a fourth cousin (my father's father's father's father's father is his father's mother's father's father's father) who seems determined to friend everyone in the world he can prove he's related to (and to get all of them to friend eachother).

Graduation weekend for Olin was this weekend! Went to the alumni get-together, saw lots of people I hadn't seen for some time. Oliners are an awesome bunch indeed.

Lots of housing arrangement switches coming up. Xave is moving to Zuul with Patti at the end of the month. Patti's other roommates are moving out. DJ is moving in with Maya and me in July. Ginneh is going elsewhere, probably back to California.

Urgent Evoke is wrapping up this week.

Trying to figure out travel plans for June and July.