Wuthering Snow Mooncrash

My first week was pretty good!  It feels a lot like freshman orientation, except at a larger school.  There are about 1000 interns, and about a quarter of them are in my ‘intern class’.  I was set up with a supervisor and a coach, and everyone seems like they really want me to have a good time and to succeed, so that’s exciting.

The details of my particular project are classified, but I’m going to do a technical investigation and ultimately write a report and make a recommendation that will shape the future of my team’s project, which is exciting.  So far, it appears that the first couple weeks of my project will be gathering information.  I’m working on a team with a developer and a tester who are tasked with being my technical advisors as I develop some ideas for the ways that we can solve the particular problem that I’ve been given.  And, of course, there are various intern events and other kids for me to meet, including two mini versions of Mystery Hunt for us to play.  I still miss MIT, but I’m definitely having a fantastic time so far.

My first week out in the Real World was kind of a strange adjustment – I’ve been working 9am to  5pm, which is strange.  My apartment is very quiet and my roommate is the only other person in it, and I need to get in the car and drive in order to see other people.  The vast majority of my job is writing specifications, and it feels weird to develop ideas that I know that I won’t implement.  Feedback on my performance is entirely qualitative, but there is free coffee and soda, which is pretty rad.  I’ve met many interesting people, but it’s somewhat disappointing to not be able to talk about the specifics of my project with my MIT friends.  And it’s *really* disappointing when my new friends tell me that they can’t tell me about their projects because that information’s classified.

So far, it’s a positive experience.  Working at a big company is definitely an interesting experience, and I think that Microsoft is a company that I could see myself working for long-term.  The culture feels very similar to MIT, which is comforting.  Of course, the buildings are slightly less interesting after-hours, though

So this summer, as many of you probably already know, I decided to play the rebellious teenager one last time and have accepted an intern position as a PM at Microsoft in Redmond, WA.  I got to my sweet new digs today, in my powder-blue Nissan hatchback and met my roommate in person.  It is all very exciting, but the whole leaving home and being an Adult aspect is pretty scary, and I found myself questioning many times on the journey why I didn’t just refuse to get on the plane, forfeit all of the money and adventure, and go live under some 5easter’s bed.

I have decided that the best way for me to deal with my anxiety and nervousness about what selling out to the man is going to be like is to share with all of you what I would like to learn by the end of the summer.

whether I like working in a big company or not
- whether I like working in industry or not to begin with
- what the minimum level of social interaction that I need to be a happy, healthy adult is
- whether I enjoy being a manager as opposed to a code monkey
- whether I like the ‘west coast’ mentality (I guess whether Seattle is ‘west coast’ or not is questionable)
- whether not being around my friends is worth fat stacks of cash (I suspect it isn’t, but I might be surprised)
- whether I can actually create and stick to a workout and diet routine (part of the ‘don’t return a fatty’ plan)
- what actually living on my own, as a Real Adult in a Real Apartment in a Real City, is like (because we all know that MIT isn’t the Real World)

I suspect the last one will be the most important lesson of all.

So I have totally failed to post for the past 4 weeks, incurring distain from my legions of fans (ha) and $20 in debt to Iron Blogger.  This was mostly out of hoseage, but I had to stop and share with you what I made for dinner tonight, because it was ridiculously easy and ridiculously delicious.

Roast chicken was one of those things that always seemed like a big deal when I was growing up – my mom would plan days in advance and set the chicken to defrost in the fridge, and she would get my little brother all excited (I was a vegetarian for ~all of middle and high school, so I didn’t care).  And then she would slave in the kitchen for several hours before finally plunking down an often-dry bird in the middle of the kitchen table before wandering off and collapsing in a fit of exhaustion upstairs while my little brother and father fought over the wings.

Jacky and I tried to make a chicken a few weeks ago – we butterflied it and got chicken guts everywhere and stuffed butter under the skin to make it delicious and buttery and rubbed it with various spices and roasted it and it never got all that crispy but the chicken itself was pretty tasty.  Of course, this was a lot of work, and I could totally understand why my mom only did this on birthdays and holidays.

But, thanks to the internet, tonight I made the most delicious and fantastically easy roast chicken ever, off of a Thomas Keller recipe with some minor modifications.

Ingredients:

• A whole chicken (I used a 4.5 lb one)
• Kosher salt
• Pepper
• ~2t fresh chopped thyme

That’s it.  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.  First, you remove the innards from the chicken’s cavity and thorougyly wash and dry it.  Then, you use about a tablespoon of salt to rub the chicken all over, including in the cavity (Keller says that you should be able to see flecks of salt all over the chicken’s skin once you’re done).  Pepper the chicken as well, and tuck the wingtips under the chicken so that they don’t burn.  Place it in a roasting pan, breast up, and roast the chicken in the oven until it has reached at least 160 degrees (I checked mine about 45 minutes into the roasting time and it was at 170, it was still delicious and moist).  During this time, don’t open the oven or poke the chicken except for when you check to see if it’s come up to temperature yet.

Take the chicken out of the oven and throw your thyme into the juices.  Baste the chicken with the juices and let it rest for about 15 minutes.  Cut it up and serve.  Keller suggests putting butter and dijon mustard on the chicken, but Ducky and I were too hungry to do this.

We also made perfectly-seasoned gravy from the pan drippings – there was enough salt and pepper that we only needed to add flour and chicken stock.  We also made mashed potatoes with chives.  I think the most strenuous part of dinner was mashing the potatoes.

Anyway, I will definitely be making this for my roommate over the summer.

5e can occasionally have nice things!

About a week ago, Ducky Ben, Kathleen, and I decided to form 5e Cooking Club.  I cooked my first meal today, a delicious Indian curry that I’ve made before.  I completely failed to take pictures of the process, but here is the recipe if any of you are interested:

4 Boneless skinless chicken breasts (or whatever really)
1 cup plain yogurt
1 tablespoon garam masala (I usually use more)
1 large onion, chopped finely (I usually use more)
1/3 cup butter
2 teaspoons minced garlic (I usually use more)
2 teaspoons crushed ginger (I usually use more)
1 teaspoon chopped green chilli pepper (I usually use a whole one)
1 teaspoon coriander (I usually use 1.5t)
1 tablespoon curry powder (2T, I mix red and yellow)
1 cup tomato sauce (I usually use the whole can)
salt to taste
1 cup whipping cream
chopped fresh cilantro

Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and mix with the yogurt and garam masala.  Set to marinate overnight.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan and cook the onions and garlic until the onions are soft and translucent.  Add the remaining spices and the chicken / yogurt mixture and simmer for about 20 minutes so that the chicken gets cooked through.  Add the tomato sauce and whipping cream and salt the curry to taste.  Simmer until the sauce reduces to your satisfaction or you get sick of waiting.  Garnish with cilantro and serve over rice.

It is super tasty and super easy, and sitting down three times a week to dinner with good friends is really nice.  Of course, it still feels kind of awkward to get to eat a delicious, home-cooked meal when I haven’t done any work to prepare it.  We are working out some sort of a Celebrity Chef thing where if you come cook dinner for a night, you can eat dinner three other nights with us.  But, so far, it is working well!

As a child, I was pretty healthy – I never broke any bones or spent a night in the hospital.  So, of course, it’s totally fitting that during Spring Break, I have to spend 4 in the MIT Medical inpatient unit.

One of the things that struck me as I watched my IV drip (0.9% saline solution), and which I kind of always think when I get sick, is how amazingly cool modern medicine is.  I was given some Percoset for the extreme pain that I was in (I originally was admitted because my tonsils were infected and I had gotten dehydrated from not being able to drink anything) and it seemed to work magically – just take this small white pill and your pain is gone, for about an hour and a half.  Did you know that, according to Wikipedia, Oxycodone was synthesized by German scientists at Bayer after Bayer stopped mass-producing heroin, in the hopes that it would prevent an alternative analgesic that wasn’t quite so addictive?  I never moved up to morphine levels of pain, which I suppose is fortunate even though I was kind of curious about what one of the world’s best painkillers would be like, but they tried putting me on straight Oxycodone when the Percoset stopped working (Percoset is a mixture of Oxycodone and acetaminophen, so you need to watch how much you’re taking if you value your liver, but apparently you can take a lot of Oxycodone without doing any damage to your organs).  Then it became amazing just how sick two tiny pills could make me within the span of about half an hour.

And then, of course, there were the tests.  I was tested for all sorts of things – it’s kind of cool how the human body can take in any number of outside invaders and spit out many of the same symptoms.  Common questions included “have you had mono” (yes), “how sure are you that you had mono” (very), and “so when you had mono, did they test for it or what?” (yes, it was positive), but I was also tested for cytomegalovirus, which apparently presents almost identically to the Epstein-Barr virus (which is, of course, the main cause of mononucleosis).  This all came back clean, and so I was put on penicillin, despite the fact that my strep test had come back negative.  They cultured my throat, but I wasn’t able to actually see the culture.  Apparently this is a weird request.

Anyway, another medical miracle later (I assume you know the story of penicillin – Alexander Flemming discovering that Penicillium mold was grown on an appropriate substrate, it secreted a substance that prevented the growth of bacteria), and I was almost as good as new!  Medicine is pretty cool, and sometimes I regret choosing computer science over going to med school and becoming a trauma surgeon.  But then again, I also regret abandoning my dream of becoming a super spy.  Anyway, I’m glad that I’m better, and if they show me the petri dish of my throat, I will update with pictures, because I find microbiology pretty cool still.

Argh, what a week.  Friday morning was kicked off with 3 hours of sleep, meaning that I couldn’t put my contacts in and needed to wear my glasses.  Unfortunately my glasses weren’t where I usually leave them, and so I bumbled around in the dark and sent a sleep-deprived and blind e-mail to the 6.01 staff member on duty.  Every time I lose my glasses, I realize just how much I rely on my short-term memory (my eyesight is ridiculously terrible), and I wonder if part of the reason why I have relatively good spacial memory is due to the fact that if I forget where I put things down, I won’t be able to find them in the morning.

I feel like good spacial memory and poor eyesight are two things that a lot of MIT students have in common, but perhaps my sample size is too small to actually make any sort of a guess as to the relation between these two things.  In any case, I found my glasses, took a nap, and went on with my day.

Oh, my little brother got rejected from MIT, so that’s kind of lame.  And, of course, I’m very excited for spring break.

I’ve been teaching SAT Prep through ESP for 3 semesters now that have spanned one truly strange trip to Dubai, and beyond this, I’ve generally been tutoring people in various academic subjects since I was fourteen or so.  In this time, I’ve tried numerous teaching styles, and I’ve generally discovered something that people probably knew all along – it’s a lot easier to keep the kids engaged if you’re friendly and nice.

This came out most noticably in 6.01 lab on Friday – I’m generally pretty awful with signal processing (R is not my friend) and we were doing a lab that was almost entirely difference equations and mathematical analysis.  It is very frustrating to attempt to explain something that you don’t really understand to a group of kids who also don’t get it, and I definitely had a pretty terrible time interacting with the kids.  Of course, I’ve been generically getting comments about my gender / appearance when I LA, so this could also be a part of it.

However, there is a pretty big contrast between 6.01, where I don’t know the material all that well and I’m not entirely comfortable with the format of the class, and SAT Prep, where I’ve been working with the material for almost a year and have my lesson plans and such down.  In SAT Prep, I am relaxed and don’t get flustered if kids point out that I’m wrong.  I throw candy and them and make jokes about spilling coffee on my shirt.  And apparently they like me – out of the 90 or so kids on my roster for 3 classes, I think I was down 2 kids total, which is pretty ridiculous.  My kids are also super well-behaved, engaged, and answer a lot of questions!  Whether it’s me or it’s them, it’s pretty fantastic.

Perhaps this is just confirmation bias, but I maintain that the best way to get people engaged in your teaching is to be friendly, patient, and excited about what you’re doing – I haven’t had a single issue with any of my SAT kids being rude or disruptive.

Of course, it’s possible that they’re all afraid of me anyway.

On Thursday, a group of us met and Jacky started teaching us how to make corsets.  An hour and several rolls of duct tape later and I was wearing the beginning steps towards my very own fitted undergarment.  It felt very silly to be in Talbot and covering my friends in duct tape, but hopefully everything should turn out to be pretty awesome!

Jacky showed us where to place the duct tape in order to properly form the corset pattern, and then we proceeded to draw on panels and shape our corsets however we wanted.  Mine ended up being made out of 16 panels to better fit to my natural curves, which I will probably end up regretting.  And, unfortunately, I suspect by the time that we finish the corsets, I will have forgotten what my ‘vision’ looked like to begin with!

After we drew on our designs and our panels, we cut the shirts off and pinned the t-shirt / duct tape pieces to muslin, which we cut out and pinned together.  This is the step that I’m currently on.

Kendra and I went to the fabric store today to get fabric, and I ended up with a soft black polyester lining and a royal blue patterned outer layer.  I’m excited, especially since our Mardi Gras party isn’t until April so it will hopefully be done by then!  I had kind of forgotten about the part of me that liked to be pretty and crafty until recently.

To further the overall girliness of this weekend, Rachel and I are hosting a ‘crochet your own Cthuhlu’ party tomorrow, sponsored by CCCth.  Further updates as events warrant, I guess!

When I was young, back in the day, I heard about a glorious place dedicated to the human mind and its triumphs called the Masachusetts Institute of Technology, and I decided that I would go there.  I would wear a maroon and grey sweatshirt and major in molecular biology and become a geneticist, or something like that.  Well, I guess I got part of it correct.

Anyway, the Brass Rat had been a defining aspect of MIT in my mind, and I very much looked forward to the day when I could slip one on my right hand and call myself a real engineer.  I was profoundly envious of all of the other, older students who could open beer bottles at parties and got to be real adults, and so Ring Premiere on Friday was exciting and scary and weird.  It’s very odd that I’ve already been through three semesters here – it seems like I really haven’t learned enough to be almost halfway done.

Oh, also the part where my laptop is dying so I don’t *actually* have enough money for a ring and a new computer (or really a new computer, to be honest).  Being an adult kind of blows.

My relationship with 6.005 is going decently, I’m dropping 6.033, and the tinycats are adorable.  I guess this semester’s off to an OK start?

I spent the entire week at UPOP, pretty much.  It felt awfully lame and getting up early was disappointing, as it prevented me from having fun with my hall.  I’m starting to panic when I think about making a decision about a summer internship – I’m thinking that the only reason why I had so much fun in Seattle was because I knew I’d be back home soon and could hang out with my friends again.

UPOP was generally a negative experience – there was a really frustrating member of my group who I had a really tough time getting along with.  He took everything extremely seriously and didn’t catch onto things easily – I was trying to direct our group as we were specing out a model of a phone, and I explained how our state machine diagram worked multiple times, and he just kept asking me the same questions.  I ended up getting really frustrated with both his inability to understand and our time limit, and it turned out poorly.  I hope that this wasn’t actually an accurate representation of the real world.

I had a fun time this weekend, though, between Liz’s housewarming and the Hackadrunkathon.  I’m disappointed for IAP to be over and I’m really not looking forward to 6.005, but hopefully my mad Java skillz that I learned in 6.092 will give me a leg up (though I didn’t actually learn that much).  I’m running for SocComm on Wednesday and just was elected a Hall Chair, as Meldicore is moving off hall.  I’m not really sure if I’m comfortable with having to be more of a social force on 5E, but I guess I’ll have to be.

I feel like a lot of things happened at the end of IAP.  I suppose we’ll see how they play out in the coming semester.