Tales from the MUP Hut

So much is happening I don't know whether to shit or go blind. I'll be brief.

My parents are redoing the house I grew up in. Siding, roofing, doors, windows, front steps, shrubs, and even the entire kitchen. It's pretty cool to go home each week and see what's changed.

My cousin Jamie headed back to Korea with the Air Force a couple weeks ago. We had a little cookout in Salisbury with my aunts, uncles, and grandparents to see her off. That morning I hilariously bumped into Jon, Kevin, and Alyssa at Stop & Shop in Amesbury whilst holding 4 pounds of hamburger meat.

After work the next day, I bolted to Beverly to see Ashley's kids at Camp Mitchman put on a stellar production of The Aristocats. It was adorable and hilarious. I was amazed to see what Ashley and Emma were able to do with a rag tag group of hooligans. Well done, fiend!

Marmaduke's birthday was on the 29th. I drove home and joined the rest of the family getting dinner at Not Your Average Joe's in Newburyport. We ate out on the patio, then surprised Gram and Daba at the concert out on the waterfront. It was a fun night!

Last weekend, Ashley and I snuck away to Maine. On Friday night we headed up to North Conway and where we grabbed dinner at Friendly's. As we walk in we notice the night manager... Don freakin' Bryant! Hah! Last time we were up there hiking Mount Chocorua with Jamie and Julia, we stopped at the same place and cracked up over this guy's name tag. "Friendly. You bet we are Don Bryant!" Still funny. Don't ask. Theron, our crack-up of a server, even got ol' Don to make a cameo appearance at our table. The awkward factor was minor, but we ramped it up a notch by getting a stellar photo of Ashley and DB.

The weekend was amazing, although it seemed like it might rain the whole time. Saturday night we crashed in the MUP Hut, Mean Uncle Paul's cabin that he built in the woods. Unfortunately, this meant we had to trek two mattresses down a muddy, sluggy path. Of course this was accomplished barefoot on my part, while Ashley found yet another use for those orange Crocs she bought for color wars at Camp Mitchman. Sunday turned out to be gorgeous. We went swimming tubing, rope-swinging, and soaked up every possible drop of sun.

Monday was our monthiversary. We celebrated with sushi at Bangkok Paradise where I finally asked our friend what his name was. Ben! Funny guy that Ben fella. We capped the night off with some painting and photos.

Toaster Strudels Eclipse Harvest Moon

Slow day today. I spent the morning poking around for jobs online, had some cereal and a couple Toaster Strudels (mMMMmm). Visited some people up in the research labs in Olsen around 11, then spent a good part of the day at Eggroll Cafe learning to use the Eclipse IDE for Java development. So far, I'm loving it. Finally, after a couple good conversations with Joel and Zach, I headed to the photo lab where I spent the remainder of the day and night working on a photo exhibition with Monika. I've got about 20 prints picked out for the show, and managed to matte 10 from my Harvest Moon series. So far, so good.

The good: I have a phone interview with the director of the Imaging Platform at Broad Institute on Wednesday.
The bad: So many applications, so few interviews.
The ulgy: The Patriots lost Superbowl XLII to effing New York.

Weekend, Interviews, and Photos

Tonight I have many scattered and relatively unimportant things to write, nevertheless I shall write them as they come to me.

First off, the Patriots are going to the Superbowl again! My whole family gathered together on Sunday and watched both games. I love this tradition. Speaking of traditions, Sunday also marked the finale of The Amazing Race. Ashley and I have been rooting for "the hippies" Rachel and TK from the start and they freakin' won! w00h00! Rest assured, soon enough we will applying for our chance to travel the world and win a million dollars! Saturday, the roomies and I threw a massively successful '90s-themed party. Good times were had by all who attended. Today (Monday) was strange, lots of little ups and downs that manifested themselves inside my head and my aching, feverish body. I'm happy to say, it is ending on a high note. I took a nice 2 hour nap and some ibuprofen around 7:00pm, and now I feel like a million bucks! Go figure.

This week has gotten off to a slow start, but I've still got a lot to look forward to. Tomorrow morning I'll help Silvi get started with my hexadecane research. Then Nick and I are meeting for lunch and our 3rd Matlab/C++ tutorial session.

On Wednesday I have a phone interview with the Imaging Platform at MIT's Broad Institute. The research group there built a piece of software called CellProfiler which helps biologists perform automated phenotyping of thousands of images of cell plates. This type of stuff is extremely interesting to me so I really want this job. I don't usually get nervous for interviews... this one I'm very nervous for.

Thursday I have another phone interview with eScription, a privately held company that leads the market in speech recognition software for medical transcription. I was actually contacted by the manager of the speech recognition and natural language processing technologies group about a software engineer role they are trying to fill. I'm very confident for this interview, but I really need to see what kind of company they keep before I seriously think about working there.

I'm trying to get an interview with The MathWorks for a position working on their SimBiology product. I'm keeping my fingers crossed on this one because I've heard this is a great company to work for, and the nature of the work is right up my alley.

Lastly, I've posted some new and old photos on flickr. Here are a couple portraits of girlf'iend...