a week plus on the east coast

I'm here! I'm doing it! I'm a grad student! You have no idea how weird it is to say that.

Random thoughts and observations:

• Why do people endure such cold? Why would they ever build a university somewhere where they have sleet?
  
• You get a lot of discounts as a student (my T-pass is half price and i get into a bunch of museums for free).
  
• The T is much awesomer than the BART.
  
• Cambridge/Boston has lousy, lousy, lousy food compared to the bay area (even if you leave my previous employer out of it). Campus food is the worst of all. If you are from California, DO NOT eat at Anna's Tacqueria. Yech.
  
• MIT's campus is seriously, horribly depressing, but the stata center is really cool and i will spend 99% of my time here so that's ok.
  
• People here are all brilliant. all of them. i walk through buildings with doors labeled things like "Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication Group". I feel like if I open the wrong door I could accidentally create a black hole.
  
• We are actually responsible for restocking things ourselves. Like no magic people come and restock the fridge with milk. and someone has to go steal sugar packets from the 4th floor every so often. crazy.
  
• I was using way more open source/universal stuff at work than I realized.
• they make 64-bit laptops now
  
• I am capable of administering my own machine! who knew!
• MIT has charm school. this scares me.
  

I'm living in Back Bay, on Newbury Street, which is really nice. I'm still getting started on research, but I think initially I'm going to work on this.

So far so good. But we'll see how things are after classes start next week.