This post has been simmering in the back of my head for a while now. However, a multitude of orientation events and more generally, “getting settled” has taken priority. There’s also the small matter of finding a research group and a project that I like before all the good ones get taken. But that can process in the background. Let’s get on with the blogging.

So, after a largely comfortable (albeit hot) three months at home, I arrived in Boston/Cambridge on August 27 and immediately got to work taking care of administrative nonsense and settling in. I have a nice room with enough space to store all my belongings and still have room for a few people to sleep on the floor, shall the need ever arise. My dorm has a small gym, a games room, and a decent DVD library for residents to utilize. Our incoming class is pretty large (60 or so new students in the department) so I’ve been meeting a lot of people. I haven’t had much opportunity to explore Boston yet, but I have five years to rectify that.

My stored items showed up on Saturday and I’m oh so thankful that I have my speakers back. After spending a week using only my laptop speakers, I had forgotten what bass (not necessarily the instrument) sounded like. At the same time, it sounded too deep for my liking initially so I had to turn it down! Speaking of music, this will be a busy month for me. Porcupine Tree, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam are releasing new albums and I have a ticket to see PT live on the 27th. You can rest assured that a review of their new album is forthcoming, as is the concert review. I won’t be doing a review, but I saw District 9 recently and loved it. If you like sci-fi, do yourself a favor and watch this movie. It does get a bit nasty, so I wouldn’t recommend it for the squeamish.

I had my first class today. Now that I have an MIT ID, have registered for classes, and started attending them, I finally consider myself an MITian. I’m happy to be here and I keep reminding myself that I can’t slack off at all. People are nice, but most professors are notoriously difficult to get hold of, which explains why I haven’t picked a research group to join yet.

Some people have asked me to put up pictures of MIT and the surrounding area. I do have some pictures but I’ll take some more before uploading everything in one go, so please be patient. In other news, I dumped Firefox 3.5 for Opera 10. The other day, Fx was hoarding 1GB of RAM which convinced me to finally make the switch – Opera is speedy, stable, and sexy. I dislike how some websites won’t work with Opera, but the “Identify as/Mask as” option seems to work pretty reliably.

P.S.: That title really doesn’t make a lot of sense in the context of what’s in the blog post. Meh.