Da’s Entropy

Recently I have moved from Toronto to Boston (more precisely, Cambridge), as I started my graduate student life at MIT. I have also visited New York City with my parents before school starts. Below is a brief summary:

• Aug 17: drove from Toronto to Boston, with my parents. Actually it was the first time for my to drive on highway, but it wasn’t as hard as I expected. I found myself quite comfortable with the car running at 110km/hr.
• Aug 18: brief tour around Boston with my parents. We walked along Newbury St., visited Prudential Center and took the Duck Tour
• Aug 19: drove to NYC with my parents. We arrived in the afternoon and stayed at a Howard Johnson Inn in Queens. We visited American Museum of Natural History and walked around Times Square and Broadway. We had dinner with my friend George, in a nice restaurant that is not far from Morgan Stanley’s midtown office, where he worked.
• Aug 20: We drove across lower Manhattan to the second place we would stay at, a Ramada in Jersey City. Then we took PATH to the WTC station, glanced at the site, and went to midtown for Guggenheim Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Arts. The first one is unique, and the second one is HUGE! Then we went to the UN Headquarter. Afterwards, we went up the Empire State Building to enjoy the nightview of NYC there. Oh, one more thing, we tasted Pinkberry before that.
• Aug 21: We took PATH to WTC again, walked to Battery Park, then took the ferry to Liberty Island to visit Statue of Liberty. After that, we had a walk around the Wall St. area, and then headed back to our hotel and departed NYC.
• Aug 22: Drove to IKEA and Walmart, which are 30 miles south to the Boston downtown. I bought all kinds of stuff for my dorm, which is unfurnished.
• Aug 23: Move in work. Some more shopping. Some organization of the dorm.
• Aug 24: A little bit shopping and more organization work.
• Aug 25 – Sep 1: MIT Orientation. A fun week. We got lots of good free food, and had many fun activities, such as Boston Scavenger Hunt, Edicott House Retreat, etc.. It was also great to get to know more people around.
• Sep 2: Registration day. I had a very nice meeting with Prof. Alan Oppenheim, who is my graduate counselor. Besides giving me helpful course selection advices, he told me that when thinking about research topics, don’t restrict one to new future like “next generation cell-phone” or something like that, but rather think in the long term. Looking back 20 years, many things at that time seem very stupid, and many modern technologies were virtually non-existent at that time. It is quite likely that we get the same feeling if we look back again 20 years later…
• Sep 3: My first class at MIT
• Sep 4: Life goes on…. I hope it will be fun