omar eduardo’s blog

Just wanted to share a dooce entry that made me happy this morning.

love it.

[title inspired by bobby's post]

As of yesterday night, I finalized the details of my housing situation for the fall. I’ll be moving off-campus, to an apartment that is a 15 minutes walk from the MIT campus, and a 5 minutes walk from the mall. One good thing is that in snowy days I can take the mall shuttle to school which goes straight to Kendall Sq. Hopefully I wont be tempted to spend more time in the mall than in school. 

The main reason why I chose to move off-campus vs. the convenience of living two steps away from class, was not living two steps away from class. I feel like having my own place, outside of campus, will really mark a distinction between being at home vs. being at school. This doesn’t mean that I won’t do work when I’m home, I’ll have to, but it will give me a physical separation from the ugly MIT campus. This is a separation that I need to keep myself mentally sane. 

Living in a dorm means that you have no control of what happens outside of your door. If someone decides to have a party the night you have a migraine, you’re screwed. If someone decides that cleaning up their own vomit is too much work, you’ll face it and smell it in the morning, and probably for a few mornings after that. Also, I like being able to sit on a clean toilet. 

Something that I’m really excited about is decorating my place. Sharing an apartment with only one other person means that I’ll have much more freedom and flexibility in choosing the layout of the common areas. Although I’m mostly interested in my room. I’ve been thinking of different ways to decorate my room. I was thinking, maybe I could just have my futon mattress on the floor, and have not so tall furniture. I was even thinking I could have something similar to what my friend Suzanne has in her living room. 

Her living room is really nice. It has a tatami mat area which is extremely useful, comfortable and fun. That’s where we have had dinners in the afternoons and I’ve loved eating and then just laying there until the food coma is over. I’ve also witnessed the space being used for other activities such as working out, dancing, and sleeping. I’m a huge fan of that last one. Around the tatami mats there are storage areas, a table, and open space to walk in/out of the mats. 

Here are a few pictures from things/ideas I’ve liked, 5 out of 6 are Ikea’s! I’ll put more up later. 

To compliment my iPhone. 

Bose Mobile On-ear Headset

The noise-isolation makes it easier to ignore people without having to raise the music volume. Love it.

There are times in which all you want to do is lay down and relax all day. Today was one of those. I woke up in the morning, brushed my teeth and used my computer for a while. Later I watched episodes of Sex And The City until I exhausted all my resources (i.e. finished the last season). While watching one of the episodes I realized that I was really hungry, so I made a bowl of noodles that had sufficient sodium to satisfy my daily sodium needs for over a day. All because I didn’t want to get out of my dorm to get food. 

In between SATC episodes, and checking my e-mail, I also read a book I bought recently. It’s a self-help book that made me happy for the rest of my life. Now I’m happy. If you look at me, you’ll only think about happiness. Make a web search for “omar”, it will prompt: “Did you mean happiness?“.

Other than being happy, eat sodium, watch SATC, and learning some Japanese… I did one thing. To think ahead about days like today, in which I don’t want to do anything, and think about how to make them more enjoyable. The answer was, to have a nicer room, of course. So I got back online and looked at gorgeous furniture and room designs. I spent a few hours at Amazon.com and Ikea.com looking through furniture and thinking about how to make my room the place were I want to live. There are certain key issues I have: size and shape. I really need to see how to make a dorm room nice and comfortable. 

But at least my room next term is going to be bigger, so that will make things slightly better. I don’t know what I’ll do about the carpet, since I don’t really love it all that much, and I definitely have to paint the walls. Living in a white room makes me feel foreign to the room. So I’m trying to think about the right colors. The bigger problem is, I then got distracted with YouTube videos and ended up watching Lewis Black, rather than think more about useful things. 

Here’s the coolest video I’ve seen today:

Titanic Inspires All of Us

Since I’m doing laundry, I decided to make a list about the things I love and use quite frequently. Who knows, you might like some of these.

Disclaimer: I’m mainly a Mac user with a PC laptop dual-booting Linux and Windows XP. The total amount of time I spend using my laptop on an average week is close to 0 minutes unless I’m traveling.

‘Geeky’

• iMac - Excellent computer with a magnificent Operating System (Mac OS X Leopard)
• iPhone 3G - I’m in love. As a friend put it: “… it really changed my life.”
• Lifehacker.com- Updates way too frequently, but it has quality content.

Social Networks (with some other stuff)

• Last.fm (music) - the current beta version is pretty awesome, I discover pretty neat music through the ‘neighbor stations’
• Facebook(real social network) - The only social network that I keep up with. Although MySpace is removing a lot of the ‘clutter’ it has, I find that Facebook is the only social network with a rather clean user interface.
• Flickr (photography) - Although I hate the new limitations of limited accounts, a PRO account is only $24.95 a year and has amazing benefits. Unlimited photo uploads? I love you.
• Twitter - simple and sweet.

Search Engines

• Scour.com (yes, that is indeed a referral link) - Although in Beta and doesn’t support searches with ’special characters’ such as… whatever is not commonly used in English, it’s still a pretty good search engine with relevant results and it pays you for searching (in the long run). Don’t use the image search though, it has no ‘filter’.
• Google.com (I can’t really get over it)

Financial Tools

• Mint.com - I’m still surprised this is free. I love it.

Movie Ratings

• Metacritic
• Rotten Tomatoes

Online Stores

• Amazon- I love it, and Amazon Prime is fantastic.

E-mail service

• Gmail - is simply my favorite.

Blogs (not friend’s blogs)

• Dooce
• Post Secret
• The Sartorialist

Other ways I spend time online

• YouTube

Software
Torrent Download

• Azureus

Media (Imaging, music, website creation, etc.)

• iPhoto ‘08 - simple to use and pretty much everything the average user needs.
• Photoshop - for more complex pimples.
• iTunes - What can I say? I used it even before I had an iPod/iPhone/etc. It’s just great at organizing music/video libraries, and it’s free.
• iWeb
• VLC - the simplest, yet most powerful video player I’ve used. It plays pretty much anything.

Organizing Life and Staying in touch with friends

• Apple Address Book
• Apple Mail
• iCal
• iChat, Skype - both are excellent for instant messaging and video conference.
• Google Calendar - love love love.

Media

• Microsoft Office (one of the few good products from such company)
• Google Documents

Web Browsers (Please do not use Internet Explorer, it has side effects such as… stupidity)

• Safari
• Firefox

I just found out about Scour, a search engine that combines the search results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and lets you rank the results with a thumbs up/down system. While you just search and get your results, you also accumulate points that can be used later on to get rewards such as… money. If you refer friends you get a bonus of 25% of their points as well. Pretty neat, huh? 

I wish Google would give me some sort of rewards for the searches I’ve made in the past few years.

My mother ‘friended’ me on facebook yesterday night. It still feel like a foreign idea. My mom? Facebook? Why would that be? But it’s alright, we’re the coolest friends. She’s in my ‘top friends’ and everything. Imagine that.

I still needed counseling.

Of course, the only reason she’s got a facebook is to ’stalk’ me. So watch out! She might be reading that ‘wall post’ you wrote 2 years ago. ‘RUDE‘.

EDIT: After talking with some people about their experiences I realized it could be even more… awkward… What about your mother-in-law friending you?

-Omar

After two years and a month in Boston (that including three summers) I still find it quite peculiar how big 4th of July is here. But as a good Puerto Rican and US citizen I need no other excuse to embrace the holiday other than… it’s a holiday. That, of course, defeats the purpose. This time I am celebrating fourth of July with friends I’ve known for four years. It’s quite an event.

Two days ago I went out with two of my best friends from high school. We had dinner at Chinatown and then walked back to MIT from there, an approximate 3 miles walk according to google maps. We stopped at the new Apple store in Boston, because when I saw it I simply HAD to walk in. Not only because it was an Apple store, but because it is an amazing store. The building is gorgeous.

I looked around and was tempted to replace my laptop with a mac laptop.There was no logical explanation for this other than, I want it. I decided to just go play with the iPhone for a while and go home. That was enough to calm down my need for a new mac product.

Yesterday, fourth of July, my two friends and I went out to the Haymarket subway stop and visited a very interesting and historic catholic church in the area. It brought back memories. Right after that we visited a graveyard that was nearby, just to get the full picture of the attractions around. After that thrilling experience we went forward with our lives and ate an exquisite meal at Ristorante Saraceno, a great small Italian restaurant in the area. I highly recommend it to anyone. Right after we saw the Holocaust Memorial. This was completely by chance since none of us knew about it. As someone who hasn’t studied or heard much about the Holocaust, only a few remarks, I must say that the memorial really made an impression of me. It really sent shivers down my body and made me realize many things about this horrible event…

After a day of experiences in Boston, my friend and I decided to return to MIT. We spent the afternoon/night at Senior House, the MIT dorm in which I live during the term. We had a barbeque in the afternoon and, afterwards, we all went on the Senior House roof to watch the fireworks. If you Google Senior House’s address (70 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA) you’ll realize that the dorm is located right in front of the fireworks show. There is simply no better view. You’re jealous, I know.

Well, it was fantastic.

My friends and I lingered around and had a quite good night, which culminated with a few burgers and the three of us walking back home.

What will I do today? I do not know. What I do know is that I am getting a much needed haircut. A $50 one that is, but may I tell you it is worth it.

I’m still waiting for the iPhone 3G to finally start being sold so I can change my two and a half years old Nokia 6020.

There is nothing much more I can talk about. My job as a chemistry teacher assistant is very satisfying, and my research at the MIT Langer Lab is exciting. My summer is going pretty well so far, I just need to get my small injuries healed so I can go back to taekwondo practice.

-Omar

I usually don’t agree with Microsoft, and I really don’t like most of their products much, however, this sounds good to me.

Microsoft Launches Office Subscription Service