Went out for some ribs and drinks with The Sleepy Kitten and some of her NYC pals. Turns out the place we went offers “a Vodka-based drink” in a fishbowl, with about a dozen straws sticking out of it. Umm…our group had 2. After that, we tried to catch a bus and eventually ended up in this one guy’s lab at MIT, where I spent many minutes ogling the equipment and generally having a severe case of bench envy. (“These fuckers have more and better kit in this one room than my entire lab!”) And their very own Faraday cage, no less. “Everyone, take out your cellphones. How’s your signal?” *slam* *click* “Whoah….freaky.”.
Incidentally, got to see some truly fascinating work being done on implementing an almost completely analog cochlear implant chip using tuned bandpass filters rather than a power-hungry DSP to do the dirty work of spectrum analysis. (Still in the early testing phase of course…the demo chip’s about the size of a Pentium Pro and recognizes a whopping *12* frequency bands…but getting rid of the DSP would save a ton of juice.)
But anyway, by the time us geeks finished drooling over the electronics, the T had long since turned into a pumpkin for the night, which could only mean one thing… okay, make that a couple things: 1) Ungodly amounts of Dance Dance Revolution (who came up with this shit?); 2) Me spending the night at a strange girl’s apartment. (Er.. sleeping as in sleeping… Not what the rest of the world thinks sleeping is.)
QOTD: “Driving in Boston is a lot more tolerable if you think of it as more of a logic puzzle.” -Jane
Leave a Reply