So the other day I decided it would be a good idea to walk into a very crowded Black Hole kitchen carrying a plastic nerf gun. Well, see, this alone wouldn’t be terribly exciting except that almost everyone on Black Hole owns some sort of toy firearm. Some people even own entire armories. So when I walked out holding my little toy gun, Jacky, another Black Hole resident, disappeared briefly and then reappeared with a nerf bazooka. A few minutes later, Black Hole kitchen was a war zone littered with rubber darts, plastic canisters, foam bullets, and small plastic discs. All the residents, new freshmen, and any Randomites who walked in were quickly armed and recruited. The entire fire fight lasted over an hour, leaving the kitchen (and my room, which borders the kitchen) looking like a disaster area.

Continue reading ‘War on Black Hole’

Greetings, freshman, and welcome to MIT. I see you’re looking at Random Hall as a possible place to live. While Random is not for everyone, it’s certainly a place that I enjoy very much. If you have the time, I’d like to take you on a visual tour of Random Hall during the summer nighttime hours.

This is in no way a substitute for taking a tour with a real tour guide during Rush. It’s merely intended to serve to whet your appetites for the real thing. I can’t possibly convey how awesome Random is by simply showing you pictures - you have to see for yourself :) In particular, the dorm was unusually empty when I was walking around taking these pictures. There’s really nothing better for getting the feel of a dorm than walking around with a resident.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions and explanations expressed here are my own and are not intended to represent the dorm in any official capacity whatsoever. Again, this is not a substitute for a real tour.

Follow me through the front door, and we’ll begin…

Warning: The following page contains a great deal of images and may take a long time to load.
Continue reading ‘A Visual Tour of Random Hall’

One of the activities many Random Hall residents enjoy is the construction of, and experimentation with, various kinds of electronics. I recently completed an electronics project which is posted on my door (Room 244), so come check it out during Rush.

I’ve posted some photos and a writeup at http://arc-reactor.net/projects/potterclock .

I somehow failed to think of a pun (which is something that is very rare for me…) for the title, so I had to settle with the above.

Anyway, the other day, somewhere between 600 and 700 Smart Start bowls mystically appeared on Pecker Floor. No one quite knows how they got there–quite likely the forces of magic, which are oft known to do strange (read: amusing) things in our humble abode–but it was noted that they seem to have arranged themselves into a giant pyramid consuming most of the lounge. Oddly enough, upon leaving the bowls alone for quite some time, we returned to find that they had assumed a completely different shape. Again, we left the great location of this poorly understood phenomenon to return again, now a day later, to find that the shape of the pile of bowls had once again transfigured itself into a strange star-shaped pattern, spreading downward to engulf the entire floor in a Smart Start sea of bowl-iness.

I have some pictures to share with you on which I will upload thusly
Continue reading ‘The Mysterious and Marvelously Multifaceted Mutating Monolithic Monuments of Mountains of MRandom Hall’

For some reason, every summer the Institvte thinks it should tear things down, build things, or otherwise hire a lot of construction workers. This summer at Random, it’s BMF’s turn.

Right now, you can track every person who walks through.

Continue reading ‘Summer Construction’

Warning: The Sh!t You Are About To See Is Awesome.

Greetings freshmen,

I am teh amazing rando and I will say a few words about bonfire floor (where I do not live, but am part of the active community). We are an eclectic group of geeks from all backgrounds with the common goal of waging war on the easily offended and having fun with irrational thought.

Some of the cool things that we do are:

1. Comment loudly while watching awesome movies
2. Watch lots of scifi
3. Play GOOD video games (nice challenging ones)

Pecker Floor, dear prefrosh, is the fourth floor on the 290 side of Random Hall, and we are all about mathematics, physics, mathematics, theoretical computer science, and mathematics. One of our lesser known interests, however, is prophesying the future by means of refrigerators.

BEHOLD!

More specifically, behold the ORACLE!

All Pecker residents find their destiny on this hallowed piece of paper (recently upgraded to inkjet from dot matrix paper - neat!). Never mind that your destiny changes basically every year - how could you question the oracle? I’ve never heard legends about your psychic powers.

This year, all residents of Pecker will suffer one of four fates:

1) DEATH BY RENORMALIZATION - the self-energy/polarization of the vacuum… a pathological electron-electron scattering mode… Landau pole after Landau pole… you can’t take it any more, and so your run to condensed matter physics, thinking that you might free yourself of those accursed infinities… but when you scrutinize the mathematics that describe second-order phase transitions, you freeze in your tracks as the ghastly, horrifying spectres of Feynman and Schwinger arise from your pages of calculations… it is just too much.

2) DEATH BY HEAVY METAL POISONING: “Teflon’s killed scores of people just like you,” they said, and so you broke out the plastic spatulas and plastic forks every time you so much as looked at a non-stick pan. Little did you suspect the hundred-year-old pipes in Random Hall would do you in. Murphy’s Law strikes again, I guess.

3) DEATH BY INDIRECTION: “It’s duct tape for algorithms,” old, sagely andersk hissed, but you pooh-poohed him. O(n log n) space becomes O(n)? What’s not to like? You implement it in your code, sure that all your friends will think you’re the coolest coder ever to stumble into lobby 7. Too bad you forgot about the complexity of your algorithm. As you wait for your test suite to finish running, you fossilize. Way to go.

4) DEATH BY DYING: Well, that wasn’t helpful. I guess the oracle can’t produce home runs all the time. In fact, the oracle always strikes out in the last at-bat - Death by Dying’s name hasn’t changed in ages. If you ask anyone around here, they’ll tell you that it’s probably more a statement about the refrigerator than the residents who use it.

So, there you have it. Auguring your future: a splendid reason to live on Pecker!

Let me tell you a story about something that happened in Random Hall a short while ago. I will title it Secret Service Kitten, though, of course, others may object.

Continue reading ‘Angleton, the Secret Service Kitten’

Random Hall has a pretty nifty feature that I’d like to share. There’s this thing that tends to loom a few feet above your head (depending on hall tall you are) within the dormitory. It is composed of many rectangular tiles, stays at a constant height, exists on every floor, and keeps us from falling down to the floor below us (and the rain from falling in on us). Many people call this thing a ceiling. Quite fascinating, really.

Anyway, the ceiling tiles around Random are much more exciting than your average ceiling tile, as they are equipped with dried paint. We thusly have some fascinating ceiling tiles on our ceilings.

Behold:

In BMF lounge, there are paintings of a bunch of classes, most of which are GIRs (General Institute Requirements…the classes everyone needs to take in order to graduate, regardless of his/her major).

(8.012! Now with: Capstan Problem)

Click the link below for more photos of our awesome ceiling tiles!
Continue reading ‘Colorful Things on the Ceiling’

Yuran, Shawn, ekate, and I just finished a spontaneous survey of the dorm. We thought that we would share the results with you. As prefrosh, you must be interested in all possible statistics about Random Hall, right?

Our survey was to see whether Randomites respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question ‘Are you busy right now?’* Our sampling was… well… whoever we could find when we walked through the entire dorm. (Don’t worry, none of us are statisticians.) For people who answered ‘no,’ there was a SUPER SECRET BONUS QUESTION!

We surveyed 31 respondents. This is 1/3 of our 93 residents and clearly a perfect and unbiased statistical sampling. Sadly, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ ended up tied, so maybe Randomites exist in a quantum superposition of being busy and not busy?

*- We think a lot of people lied to us on both sides. Oh well.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Question: Are you busy right now?
YES: 15
NO: 15
Abstentions (due to being asleep in the lounge): 1

Super Secret Bonus Question: ekate lost her pink elephant; have you seen any pink elephants around?
NO: 11
Meow: 2
No, but I saw a pony!: 1
… define ’seen’…: 1
Do you need people to help you look for it?: 1

——————————————————————————————————————————

So… prefrosh… are *you* busy right now?

The more it changes, the more it stays the same. Hello, prefrosh, my name’s Josh, known around here as Josh the frosh. The fact that I am now a sophomore seems not to matter. Last year, I was a rush chair, and so was partially responsible for our current ’11s here in Random Hall. Let me tell you, I’m not sure I’m ready for the sight of another eager young face. I mean, after LAST year, the next freshman that looked me in the eye was liable to get bound, slow-roasted over a fire, and forced to sing “I am Henry the Eighth I am” until medium ra– er… Look! An engaging and memory-erasing distraction!

Now, let me tell you something about Random Hall. I love this dorm. I love the culture. Like how I can run around being as insanely nerdy and weird as I want and merit hardly a second glance. Like how I can run around making obscure video game references that everyone gets. Like how I can (and do) juggle in public spaces and have people merely concerned that they have enough space to walk by. Like how I can participate in an entirely serious conversation on practical world domination. Or like how a food event featuring deviled eggs and cornish hens was dubbed “the dead babies study break.” I love this place right down to the hole we made in my floor’s wall due to an unfortunate consequence of conservation of angular momentum.

ANYwho, what I’m trying but failing miserably to get at is that Random Hall is an amazing place. I hope you’ll find the time to come and visit us during this coming CPW. I’m going to take time off from school and make liquid nitrogen ice cream for any and all comers, so don’t you dare miss tasting the 77 Kelvin delight.

The more it changes, the more it stays the same. Here’s a little hint: you, prefrosh, will be the change. And I have no doubt that you will be every bit as awesome as we hope.

Cheers, and I look forward to seeing all of you for CPW,

-Josh

Hello all you frosh out there!

I bet you are all brimming with excitement about coming to MIT for orientation and Rush!

Several friends of mine got together with me and created an alternate dorm video to tell you a little more about Random.
You can see it on youtube Here or download a high quality version Here.

I hope to see you guys soon!
Have a great remainder of the summer!

~rando

Preeya is right; don’t unpack your bags. In fact, bring a small handy travel bag with a towel, toothbrush and a change of clothes so you can refresh yourself without having to dig through luggage. This bag may come in handy if you find yourself staying the night in another dorm (which can and should happen quite often) during REX. If you think you like Random, I highly recommend taking a look at EC and the other east campus dorms. You should also make it a point to visit at least one of the west campus dorms briefly, even if you don’t think you’ll live there. Just pick an event that looks interesting and go. It might make you some connections and/or friendships that could prove useful later.
In short, unless you are sleeping or at an event here, we should not see you constantly hanging around Random. REX is about exploring all the dorms, not just Random, and finding the one that is right for you. In many schools you are simply assigned a dorm and a room; take advantage of the opportunities you are given here.

I think you freshmen have now received your temporary room assignments, so hopefully those of you assigned to Random are reading this now. Hello! Welcome to the Random Hall blog.

You probably want to know what to expect when you get here in the fall. Here’s the major point: DO NOT UNPACK! I repeat, whatever you do, do NOT unpack your bags! One of the perks of the MIT housing system (which you will discover is one of the best things about this place) is called REX. It’s a chance to explore the living options available to you and choose which one you like best! I know you’ve seen the i3 videos and maybe came to CPW; trust me, you still haven’t gotten the full impression of most of the dorms yet.

At MIT, each dorm has a specific culture. While all of MIT is united in nerdiness, you’ll find that nerdiness comes in different flavors. Do you like to pun? Blow things up? Read webcomics? Watch movies? Watch really bad movies? Play with cats? Go to parties? I could keep going, but I think you get the point. By exploring your options, you can optimize your happiness by finding a dorm with people you really like.

You may think that Random is the place for you. You liked our i3 video, and maybe you met some residents over CPW and enjoyed talking to them. Chances are that you’re someone we’ll enjoy having. But please, please keep an open mind. There are 10 other dorms on campus — you may get here and find out you like one of them better, even by a little bit. If so, moving between dorms in the Adjustment Lottery is quick, easy and reliable, as long as you follow the advice: do not unpack your bags.

Really punchy right now…
I’ve spent the past week and a half writing a LARP (http://www.mit.edu/~assassin/about.html) with a bunch of friends, so I’m more than a bit punchy right now. So…I guess I’ll tell you guys about the interesting things that have happened.
We spent the second night of Guild Camp up until 5AM ranting about characters…and going absolutely nuts. We also staged a fight on zephyr for our zampolit (guy who’s supposed to make sure that we’re on track and not just screwing around while deadlines pass us by). It went downhill pretty fast, degenerating into statements like “ooh bubble tea, I MEAN I HATE YOU ALL” but he didn’t actually read the whole thing and thought we were actually serious…so we staged another fight the next night :)
There was the one night where we had to rework the whole thing and ternus ended up drinking about 10 cans of Mountain Dew and stayed up until 6AM generating stuff for the game…
I’ve spent the past few days trying to convince my team that I am not, in fact, an Anime character.
Today, Hubert, our zampolit, became Pacman and munched all of our \ldots, because we were kind of ellipse happy…wakka wakka wakka
Whoo…going back to writing character sheets…

No recent entries? Shame on y’all! I guess we haven’t had any schoolwork to procrastinate, so writing Random Hall blog entries is slightly less tempting…

Does Random have people around for the summer? Certainly! What, did you think that we all go *poof* over the summer? Of course not. In fact (unlike most dorms which tend to be deserted over the summer), the amount of social events and random hanging out in lounges remains more or less constant between term and summer.

So, why are we around over the summer? Well, UROPs are a great way to get experience in your preferred field (although much easier to get in some than others). Work in a cutting-edge MIT lab, make useful contributions (or not) to science, eat free food… The Institvte (aka MIT) is really good to its students in that respect. UROPs aren’t just some impressive thing made up for the admissions office- pretty much everyone does actually get at least one really cool UROP at some point or other.

But the 9 AM - 5 PM job (or if you’re like me, 9 PM - 5 AM job) isn’t what’s important.

At Random this summer, there is so much fun to be had that it can barely be contained in that 5 PM - 9 AM block (or the 5 AM - 9 PM block, either). There are extra summer D&D runs (do you prefer a ninja, pirate, or Stargate basis for D&D?) in addition to the year-round runs; frequent board games; random lounge conversations on anything from cats to the biological workings of obscure diseases; lots of catching up on reading and watching anything from awesomely bad YouTube videos to awesomely shiny television series (Babylon 5, anyone?); food mobs to local restaurants; chocolate-making; almost any computer or video game you can think of, playing individually or in groups; playing our own, customized circle-of-death game where you “kill” your target by tagging them with a (clean) sock, like my fuzzy pink weapon of doom; ice cream parties celebrating our GRT’s successful thesis defense; and so much more. These aren’t infrequent, either, just what comes to mind immediately- all but about two of these have happened in the past 24 hours.

Just imagine what can happen during term when even more people are around the dorm!

Oh, right, I have to prepare for a work meeting that takes place in 4 hours… later, people.

Welcome to Random Hall!

Click the link below for more pictures of the first day of CPW.
Continue reading ‘CPW: Thursday’

Here it is: the list of events that Random Hall is hosting for CPW! Hope to see you there!

It was the Saturday before spring break. Jeff Cohen and Dan Yuan and Kendra Beckler and I decided to do a little 2v2 Magic: the Gathering.

[ For those who haven't heard of the joy of MtG: Magic the Gathering is the first and the king of collectible card games. You may have seen people playing it at your school if you heard phrases like "untap, unkeep, draw!" or "combat phase" or "trample". It's a fun and very intricate game that's a meld between high fantasy, chess-like strategy, and computer programming. About a dozen people here play it from time to time. ]

We gathered around Clam lounge, got out the community cork counters I had made by slicing up wine bottle corks from home, and Jeff tutored Kendra (who was learning) a tiny bit while I finished creating a “sliver” deck.

The format was two-headed giant, where players on each team take their turns simultaneously (makes the games go alot quicker). It was me and Jeff vs. Dan and Kendra, and about to be an exciting session…
Continue reading ‘Random: the Gamer-ing’

A little snapshot of how excited we are for CPW, courtesy of BMF’s mildly internet-famous Dinosaur Comics Whiteboard (for the original entry about the whiteboard, see Riv’s post)

(Click on “more” to see close-ups of the panels!)
Continue reading ‘Dinosaur Comics (again) and CPW’

Hi!

I’m ternus, one of the Random Rush Chairs, and I’ll be helping ensure that you all have a great time during CPW.

I live on Black Hole, the second floor on the 290-side, and one of two co-ed floors in Random. The residents of Black Hole are renowned for our consummate appreciation of computer science geekery, video gaming, and tabletop roleplaying games. We also enjoy cooking—according to Wikipedia, we have the nicest kitchen in Random; if Wikipedia says so, it must be true, right?

One reason that I enjoy living in Random Hall is its great sense of community. One of the things that makes Random unique is that, with less than 100 residents, it is possible to know everyone living in your dorm. This tends to create strong ties between Randomites: Random is a very social environment, and being able to walk onto any floor in the dorm and immediately strike up a conversation with the residents thereof is one thing that makes Random such a special place to live.

Randomites as a whole are also known for our love of technology, and we’re fond of using technology to make our lives easier. As Random’s Computer Chair, I’m responsible for maintaining our world-famous Bathroom Server, which allows Randomites to view which bathrooms are in use (and for how long). This comes in handy, especially during (say) Finals week, when everyone in the dorm is waking up at about the same time, and the nearest free bathroom may be 1-2 floors away. (Don’t worry—our floors are small!) Additionally, our Laundry Server tells us when our laundry is done—useful if you live on the fourth floor and don’t want to walk downstairs to check the status of the (free!) laundry machines.

As kevinr pointed out, we also love cooking. Star Market is right next door and very convenient—who needs a convenience store when you have a full-size supermarket 2 minutes away? There is a convenience store literally next door to Random, though, which is open 24 hours a day—useful for 3AM Ben & Jerry’s runs! The proximity of Star allows Randomites to save money by buying our own food, and our kitchens (and substantial stock of community cookware) allow us to cook food in style. As much style as we can in a dorm, anyway.

We have lots of fun and exciting events planned for CPW. My co-Rush Chair and I will be running around, making sure everything’s in order—so if you see us, say hi!

Speaking of which, there’s some event preparation I have to do. See you during CPW, or if you can’t attend CPW and have questions/concerns/comments/anything you want to talk about, send us an email at ask-jarthur@mit.edu.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may be under the impression that everyone at Random has Internet memes jacked directly into their brains (omgwtfbbqkthxbyelolz!!!!!!!1!!11one). This is untrue.

Among the other things Random residents do is a fair bit of high-quality cooking; more than just ramen and frozen pizza. Random has comparatively ample kitchen facilities — a fully-furnished kitchen on each floor (stove, sink, dishwasher, microwave, et al…) and a fairly decent supply of community cookware.

Since the produce at Star is of… highly variable quality, Kelsey and I are splitting a box from Boston Organics, a company which will deliver high-quality organic fruits and vegetables on a regular basis, at fairly reasonable prices. Our theory is that, if we have fruits and vegetables around, we’ll eat them, and it’s mostly borne out. Over the summer, I bought a lot of produce at the local farmers market, but they close after Thanksgiving and don’t open until Memorial Day.

A couple weeks ago Boston Organics sent us a giant leek, and, since I had some potatoes which were starting to sprout, we decided to make leek and potato soup. (You can substitute white grape juice for the dry vermouth in that recipe; you mostly just need something a little bit sour.) The soup turned out well; creamy, savory, and just a little tart. We made a salad from a beautiful head of romaine lettuce, also from Boston Organics, with a dressing of balsamic vinegar and olive oil; ate the soup with a decent loaf of crusty multigrain bread from Star; and baked a ham to accompany it all. It was a tasty and appropriate meal for early spring. :-)

The ham yielded a nice ham-bone, which seemed too good to waste, so later that week I made Senate bean soup with a recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook. The recipe at the linked site isn’t quite the same, though it’ll give you the sense of it. The recipe I used was more like the second one on the site, since it included mashed potatoes, though my batch was rather smaller, since I could fit it all in a saucepan. The soup lasted about a week, and I’ve also got a batch of ham-stock put up in the freezer for more soup some time in the future.

If you live at Random, you’ll have ample opportunity to learn to cook or hone your skills. You probably won’t be cooking three-course meals every day, but you can make more than Pop-Tarts and ramen. :-)

Well, as long as people are starting to plug for their events and activities, I suppose I should too. Random Hall is a diverse place, and one of the things that has been passed down for at least a decade (besides The Milk) is the tradition of boffing. A small number of you may know what this is, but for the unenlightened, boffing is medieval weapons combat for people who prefer not to shell out an arm and a leg (literally and/or figuratively). That means lightweight padded swords, staves, spears and a motley collection of other cool weapons. Or in some cases, really cool weapons.

So, if you’ve ever wished you could do your own swordfighting, you should check out our station at the CPW Festival (or whatever they’re calling it these days) and stop by Random afterwards for our Boffing on the Roofdeck event. I’d also say check out our i3 Residence Exploration video, which is awesome and another reason to choose MIT. ^_^ Of course, you’ll have to sign your name at the bottom of that contract for four years in Hell…but you know it’ll be worth it. Y’all should come to CPW and have a good time.

CAMPUS PREVEIW WEEKEND. BE THERE.

Hello prefrosh! I’m illix, and you’ll be seeing a lot of me over CPW. I’m ringmaster of the LN2 events as well as the person running the two media events, Bad Science and Cheesy Scifi. I am also a proud denizen of Bonfire Lounge; I’ve even got ops in our analog IRC channel, #bonfirelounge (no, I will not op you). Because I am a man (or woman, whatever) of the people, I’ve decided to ask you, the prefrosh, what you’d like to watch during these two media marathons.

The Bad Science Movie Marathon is Friday night from 22h until we fall asleep. The idea is to showcase movies that proudly display science so reprehensibly wrong that there is no recourse save uncontrolled laughter and unbridled misanthropy. I have a few films already lined up. I’m open to suggestions, but remember: I’m looking for movies where the main plot point is complete crap. So for example, The Core counts because it is based on completely bullshit science, whereas Independence Day has literal tons of inaccuracies but would not count because it is not about the science, it is about blowing up national landmarks.

Make your suggestions now so that I have time to…uhm…rent them! Yes! Renting them is what I will be doing!

(P.S. And if anyone suggests An Inconvenient Truth you’re getting k-lined, mostly because I’ve heard that joke a conservative estimate of ELEVENTY THOUSAND TIMES.)

Current Movies:
The Core
The Day After Tomorrow
Armageddon (maybe)
Jurassic Park (maybe)
Supervolcano! (this movie is actually scrupulously scientifically accurate, but it’s also hilariously cheesy and contains no less than 4 minor Stargate SG-1 actors)

The second media event is Cheesy Scifi Night, on Saturday from 22h until we fall asleep. This is…well…cheesy scifi. Is there any such thing as non-cheesy scifi? Okay, maybe Battlestar Galactica. And the Twilight Zone. But those are allowed anyway, because they’re awesome. The idea of this marathon is to indulge your secret (or not-so-secret) love for aliens, robots, alien robots, spaceships, alien robots flying spaceships, and saving London/England/Earth/the galaxy/the universe. We have an impressive array of cheesy scifi available, so feel free to pick your poison or suggest something new in the comments - Bonfire Lounge is always hungry for new media. We aren’t limited to scifi, either; chances are if it’s good TV (or even not-so-good TV) we have it.

I’m amenable to requests to change things up, since none of these themes are really set in stone. Honestly, you can wander up to Bonfire Lounge at any time, find someone with authority to work the media server, and play whatever you like. Don’t worry about prying the TV away from the video gamers; there are three.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Be seeing you lot in a…week and a half, actually. Be prepared.

Hey prefrosh, I decided to share my love of making costumes with you guys.

If you have any cool costumes you should bring them to MIT over CPW.

Many of my costumes are cool…
lol and some of them are also disturbing.

I decided to show some of them to you guys to see what you think :)

Some of my favorites are below:

My Sith Lord costume

My Tingle costume (from Majora’s Mask)

I made these Ghostbusters costumes this past October. Dave, Brad and I wore them to the SAVETFP Costume Contest and won first prize - which meant a free round trip ticket from JetBlue for me.
There should be some others that I will break out over CPW!

I hope you guys are having a great senior year and I’m stoked to meet you guys soon!

~rando

What better way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day than by sitting around with 10 friends loudly singing the engineer’s drinking song? “We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the engineers…”

You can find more verses here, not all of which we got through, but we made our best effort.

We might have gotten farther had we not gotten distracted by various silly math songs.

Then we slid seamlessly into Tom Lehrer.

Mmm…it was a good night.

Hey.

I’m Mats.
I’m a course 6-3′er (comp sci) in the class of 2008.
Nice to meet you.

About the blog:
I’m partly responsible for helping Josh realize his lifelong dream of setting up our dorm blog, so…, perhaps I should give a little account of the background behind all this.

Wordpress is the software (written in PHP — the hackish language that manages to work) that runs this blog. Three years ago, MIT didn’t even offer students the ability to run server-side scripts on Athena* hardware. Fortunately, a friend who also came to MIT from TJHSST a year before me, named Jeff Arnold, set up scripts.mit.edu. It involved lots of work and some Linux black-magic — the end result is that he and volunteers made possible the platform that Wordpress is running on now. That’s the kind of awesomeness you can expect to find at MIT.

Teja helped set up some plugins for the blog.

Anyway, stuff that remains to be done:
- modify theme code and layout
- replace image of car in tunnel with cool view of the dorm…
- get that Ozok* favicon I made to work
- find a way to make randomized pictures appear in sidebar

About me:
Life goals: 1) make the world a happier place (sounds lame eh?) 2) destroy the world by breeding an army of carnivorous death-squirrels, if not in conflict with #1

Interests: digital/3d art (see website), computerized music composition (see website), sci-fi, fantasy (just read George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, which I found to be better than Lord of the Rings — thanks Kate & Christian for the recommendation*), Magic the Gathering (the squirrel reference above), StarCraft (8-player LAN party on some weekends!), stuff

Academic interests: Artificial Intelligence (Computational Cognitive Science), Physics

Miscellaneous links:
my digital/3d art
[also coming soon: my website]

Upcoming posts:
- classes I’ve taken
- about MIT’s computer science department

References
[Ozok (the destroyer)] - Our dorm’s mascot, a fearsome and circlular Viking-like character with spear, invented a few years ago by Lael.

[Athena] - MIT’s modified version of RedHat Linux: effectively MIT’s personal linux distro it uses across campus. Also refers to Project Athena; the giant computer science initiative that spawned many important technologies and filled our campus with computer clusters. It’s logo is the owl (Athena/Minerva’s symbol representing wisdom, for all you Latin buffs). Freshmen should activate their Athena account with the passwords you receive in your admissions brochure; this lets you do things like start using your MIT mail. For more info, Google [MIT IS&T].

[MITSFS] - Kate, Christian, Kendra, and I had a giant discuss-sci-fi-and-fantasy-books party on the floor of a dimly-lit unoccupied double. That was the day Christian first arrived at MIT… Anyway, you may want to check out the MIT Science Fiction Society if you’re into that kind of stuff.

edit: Thanks Tim for correcting me regarding scripts.

Sunday, 10pm. Bonfire Lounge is packed with as many people as it can hold - the couches are full, and even space on the floor has disappeared. Why?

Because, of course, Battlestar Galactica is on.

Galactica is only one of our many scifi conquests, however. Firefly, Stargate SG-1 (Yes, all 10 seasons.), Stargate Atlantis, Eureka, the new Doctor Who…pretty much anything that we can get our hands on that is good, and even some things that aren’t. We’ve gone so far as to dedicate a computer to holding it, and have it hooked right up to the tv for easy viewing. We’ve also started painting a stargate in the hallway, and there have been talks about possibly adding other things like a TARDIS as well…

…and if there isn’t scifi on, you can be there’s something else, like House, or the Colbert Report, or someone playing one of the many games on one of the game systems that have found a home in the lounge. Or maybe we’re playing a board game, or talking about a webcomic, or watching things on youtube or ytmnd…we are full of internet culture. We also have a coconut.

Bonfire Lounge is rarely quiet, but it’s a great place to go when you want to hang out, take a break from work, and see people. Feel free to drop by, hang out, have a snack (if it’s in the lounge, it’s fair game for anyone), and be surrounded by wonderful crazy people who spend far too much time on the internet and watching scifi.

Welcome to Bonfire, Home of the Internets. No, we are not a big truck, but you might be able to liken us to a series of tubes. ‘Tis a silly place, but what the hey. However, if you would happen to have 32 tons of naquedah, drop us a line; we’re building a stargate to pecker floor. Just remember, long cat is long (and weak force). And if you can figure out that reference, you’re the man now dog. Mail us at bonfire-lounge at mit dot edu. I’ll even give you a hint: long cat is demon doggy.
Cheerio.

Quite a while ago, Yoz and I had this crazy idea to make a mural of Dinosaur Comics. But how could we pick just one to paint? With an eye on extensibility, we came up with a plan involving reuse@mit.edu, a whiteboard, and a shopping cart. This was before the 290-side stairwell had Random Nucleic Acid, so when we brought our whiteboard to Random, we realized that the best way to get it upstairs was to get a bunch of people to cluster around the stairwell and pass it vertically upwards (sort of like it was crowdsurfing, but up). We were lame and didn’t do anything for a long time, but eventually we figured out what kind of paint sticks to whiteboards, brought the projector up from AIW, and painstakingly traced and colored in the image from the comic. Preeya helped us a lot with this (she’s a sophomore who was a new freshman when we first retrieved the whiteboard). It turned out that we also had to put a special glaze on top of the paint so it wouldn’t chip as readily. Finally, ninjas hung it on the wall of the hallway between BMF and Clam…

(Click on “more” to see pictures!)
Continue reading ‘Hey look, a new shiny thing!’

Welcome to Random Hall. Warning: contact with this dorm may cause you to contract a severe case of confusion. Beware this place. (The Ides of March have nothing on it.) Don’t worry; it doesn’t make any sense to us, either. Oh, and don’t forget: in case of emergency, don’t use the elevators.

Let me take you on a (virtual) tour.

Come on in! I’ll let you in. The deskworker won’t bite- you’re with me. Well, she won’t unless you do something stupid. Welcome to Foo and the main lounge. The couches are great for naps… mmm… naps… Oh, and meet Mjollnir. (That would be the huge speaker over there in the corner with the chair on top of it. See it here: http://neurosis.mit.edu/mjolnir/) People sit in the chair if they are taller than I am. *grumble grumble grumble* Noooooo, stop it with the short jokes! *mock pained look* Please! Please! I’ll continue the tour, really I will!

Coming around the back way, we end up on Destiny. No, this is not the destiny you get a date with. Sorry to disappoint you. Be sure not to trip over the quantities of bikes, robots, and random electronics. You wouldn’t want a horde of irate residents on your hands, now, would you?

Up the stairs, we come to Loop- just in time for cookies. IT’S TUESDAY!!! (It is Tuesday, regardless of the fact that it is actually Thursday.) Quick, grab a cookie before the rest of the dorm sprints in to get theirs. Let’s escape the trampling masses and go play with the cats. Abacus is kind of shy, but LS is a bold little fluffball. Fluffy fluffy fluffy. Aww… ahh! The fluffball is squirming. The great fluffball is displeased. Run! Run for your lives! Run up the stairs- you can’t get to the other second floor here!

Finally, Clam. Whew. That was close. Don’t miss the Clamhole. (That would be the manhole cover in the floor.) We’ll tell you the great and wonderful secrets of the Clamhole later. *ring* “Eitline. What’s your problem? … Eit … Eiiiiit, man … … Eit. Man, that sucks…” Shh… let’s not disturb the clams watching the movie in the lounge or the course six’ers in the kitchen discussing today’s lecture on ethics.

Let’s continue on up to Bonfire. Don’t mind the people tooling in the kitchen. The center of things here is the lounge. The lounge is packed with a dozen people, like usual. What are we watching today? If you stay here too long, you may learn about t3h internets!!1!1

We need to get back across to the other side now, so go down the stairs, across through the hole in the firewall, and back up the stairs. Yay, we made it! Welcome to Pecker. Pecker is like a year-round math summer program. MegaHal is in the lounge. “MegaHal is a lover of math, integers, derivatives, integrals, power series, primes, unique factorization, quadratic reciprocity, proofs by contradiction, counting things two different ways, and proofs by induction.” Come on, you should talk to MegaHal. “Tell me about Random Hall.” “Random is a lover of math, integers, derivatives, integrals, power series, primes, unique factorization, quadratic reciprocity, proofs by contradiction, counting things two different ways, and proofs by induction. Pecker is a lover of math, integers, derivatives, integrals, power series, primes, unique factorization, quadratic reciprocity, proofs by contradiction, counting things two different ways, and proofs by induction. Kendra is a lover of math, integers, derivatives, integrals, power series, primes, unique factorization, quadratic reciprocity, proofs by contradiction, counting things two different ways, and proofs by induction.” Right. Back in the day, MegaHal was a bit brainwashed, but it actually talks about other things most of the time.

Let me tear you away from Pecker for a little while. Down a flight of stairs is BMF! The lounge is filled with residents pretending to do work but actually talking and playing Gluck! (it’s a card game) and Munchkin and Set and other games. That isn’t all, though, look in the kitchen. Someone is making specialty chocolate bark and chocolate ganache for an upcoming event. Here, try some. We aren’t stingy with our food- usually.

Only one left! After this, you can escape from the tour and run free, free as all the other prefrosh. This floor is Black Hole. Watch out, it might suck you in. The kitchen is filled with people discussing the latest video game and role-playing game obsessions. Ooh, and we must stop and play with Chani, the kitten who lives here. Watch out, she might think you are food. Yes, like that. Isn’t she cute?

Okay, we’re done. Hop along down this last flight of stairs, and you’re back where you started. Go see a bad movie or something else useful. We’ll see you later!

May I be the first to welcome you young prefroshlings to the blog of Random Hall conveniently located here on the mighty tubes of the Internets.

Yes, I know…
You’re probably thinking to yourself “ZOMG! I mUsT b3 t3h r0×0rz f0r |-|1m t0 B t4Lk1ng t0 m3!!!1cos(0)”

Well, cool it buddy I’m talking to everyone! lol

There will be plenty of time for you to get to know us in the coming weeks before CPW…

Heck, I’m bored right now so why not drop me a line!?

~rando

This is only a test.

If this had been a real emergency, you would have grabbed the Milk, a disc gun, and a pack of sandwiches and vacated the premises immediately. Screaming would have been mandatory. Oh, it would have been wise to watch out for the boffer-wielding psycho on the way down, and remember to mash the awkward button if you get hit. And you should have let the ambulances through while singing the Pinky and the Brain song at the top of your lungs, and remember your manners: Have a loud nerdy conversation, don’t have a life, and do I see your eyelids closing on me?
But again, this is only a test.