Mitt liv som Tobin

B. Seeing MIT was quite an experience, trapsing through all the dorms with these crazy things going on. I wrote about this before, how they were kind of like the Berkeley co-ops but kind of not. Though my non-admission to MIT still stung as a fresh wound, though seven years old, I was glad I went to Berkeley, with its redwood- and riverbrook- filled campus, but the x0xb0xen were near sensory overload. It was a deeply moving trip in the sense that it has inspired me to change the course of my life in Rochester.

Despite this meeting being incredibly boring, I have had good adventures. Wandering back towards the hotel last night, I stopped first at the Model Railroad Club (!) (TMRC) and then at good old MITERS, kennyjensen's old hang out.

TMRC was, coincidentally, hosting their semiannual open house, and the railroad was well staffed by a collection of awkward geeky types, which I mean in the best, most heartwarming way possible. I needed ask only one question to launch a quite satisfying technical discussion, lots of people jumping in to contribute details, bits of history, and so forth; that question consisted of me pointing at some circuit board and asking, "What is that?" (The coolest bit is this: they take advantage of the lows in the pulse width modulation of the rail power to measure the back-emf generated by the trains and thus measure how fast they are going.)

I popped in over at MITERS, right next door, and asked exactly the same question. This time that was a home-made nitrogen laser, made of a scrounged furnace ignitor (essentially a 1:166 transformer), a fistful of diodes, two rails of aluminum, and some nuts and bolts. The kid handed me some ear protectors and set the thing off, and amidst the sparks and the ozone, there was a pulsing ultraviolet beam, manifested in a fluorescent green spot on a white piece of paper that'd been accentuated with yellow highlighter. ("Are we blinding ourselves," I asked.. "Probably not..." I was told.) MITERS is, in other words, the awesomest thing ever. Maybe I will start ROC ERS !

Christine is a trooper of a tourguide, exuding enthusiasm, lighting up with stories, and letting us into all kinds of places with secret keys. I was, of course, beside myself, as she took us down through the tunnels, to a drag party at one house, and through innumerable, amazing other MIT residences, all very Casa Zimbabwe but with the odd caveat that they have University cleaning service (a point that Alex and I found oddly perplexing). I did ask some people whether they knew kennyjensen. At first they said no, until someone said, "Wait, you mean [insert crazy nickname]?" and then it was clarified that, yes, they all knew kennyjensen! In particular, we met a few people from SQUID Labs, which seems to be a lab of MIT expatriates now based in Berkeley. So that was exciting too, though sadly many were in town for a memorial service for a TEP alum. In one dorm lounge we encountered a jacobs ladder, tesla coil, van de graaf generator [and these three items were duly set into motion], various other items i couldn't even identify, and an amazing x0xb0x (pronounced "zox box"—imagine my crazy Google-foo in dereferencing that utterance, ultimately discovering its local Lady Ada origins) which I would also classify as the awesomest thing ever.

I won't even attempt to describe it, really, except that I couldn't help but dreamily imagine my parallel life in the alternate universe in which I was admitted to MIT.

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The TEP alum who died was Kevin McCormick, aka Frostbyte, someone, oddly enough, whose work I was vaguely familiar with. Story in the Tech (campus paper): http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N55/mccormick.html . A google search reveals many very touching blog entries. There is also, somewhere, a memorial wiki.