Friday, July 31, 2020

What do you do for fun around here

What do you do for fun around here A friend of mine ended up studying lit at a nearby college here in Boston. (If you didnt know, Boston has approximately 10^24 colleges. Per m^2). She asked if Id mind showing her around the tvte, as it seemed like a pretty interesting place (SPOILER: It is.) and I happily obliged. As I walked her around the myriad of different labs that serve host to mechanical wonders in various states of disarray, blabbing incessantly about how cool and entertaining everything was I remember her looking me dead in the eye and saying What do you do for fun around here? It caught me off guard. To me, this was fun. I get to spend every waking hour (which Ive traded a few sleeping hours for at market price) surrounded by gadgets and gizmos soldered and smoking around me. I love that. I love that I can spend 16 hours straight in the shop soldering my PCB boards* and carrying on a conversation with my friends who are desperately trying not to kill themselves while trying to build something that is both impressive and a valid psychological analysis. One of these friends recently completed an analog controlled segway knockoff called Segfault and made a video of it. I think its a pretty good peak into the sorts of things a few of us think are fun, and youll probably find no better video clip to summarize life at MIT than the segway jousting at the end. *This is belongs to a class of acronymically redudant phrases (or ARP phrases as I like to call them) that bug me. Other such examples include PIN number, and ATM machine. But if you want to be a functioning member of society you have to speak like them. *grumble grumble*