Press Pause with Erik Wahl 7/11/2016
This morning around 10am, Salesforce hosted "Press Pause with Erik Wahl" in the auditorium of my office building. Erik's an artist, author, TED speaker, and entrepreneur. He spoke about bringing disruptive and creative thought processes to our workplaces and our daily lives. He told a captivating tale of his experiences recovering from a financial and professional freefall by finding his passion in art. His spiel features shorts burts of intense, passionate painting accompanined by motivational music and videos. In 3 or 4 short minutes, he whips up elaborate and colorful paintings, some of which I snagged photos of. You can see them below. In our show, he crafted paintings of people famous for their unconventional thinking and learning styles. People like Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, John Lennon and Mahatma Gandhi..
This Einstein one is my favorite.. he painted the entire thing upside down, and it wasn't clear what he was painting until near the end. And then, when he flipped it over.. wow. I was convinced for the first couple minutes that he was drawing a man with a mask. Talk about looking at things with a different perspective..
As somebody who's made many calculated and cautious choices in my my life, Erik's message really resonated with me. It's a pretty depressing feeling to look back on a week and realize that, for the most part, I've just been going through the motions, doing things the "right" way, plugging and chugging, if you will. I think I get it from my dad.. He likes to claim that he's a creative thinker!, but don't be fooled by his "think tank", grayscale photos of a notebook and a cup of coffee on Facebook. (Hi dad :), if you're reading this.) At heart, we're both very task-oriented people. Often, I find that I get tunnel vision when I'm working on something. This can be a good thing! don't get me wrong. But, I'm going to make a concerted effort in the remaining month that I have in San Francisco this summer--as well as during the upcoming semester--to ask more questions, consider problems from unconventional viewpoints, surround myself with creative thinkers, and perhaps do a little bit more art! That's all for now. Enjoy the photos. -Max
A lifesize carepackage.. 7/10/2016
On Friday, July 1st I was expecting a care package. This package was a little heavier than most packages I've received.. but by far the prettiest! It turns out my package got delayed.. some FedEx issue or something... :( and I didn't receive it until Saturday morning, but it was still as beautiful as I was expecting! It greeted me with a beaming smile and open arms! Here it is!
Amanda and I had an amazing weekend. She stayed until Tuesday night. When I was picking her up at the airport on Saturday morning it seemed like all of eternity stood before us, and that Tuesday afternoon would never come. And then, when we woke up Tuesday morning, it seemed like the past few days had gone by in the blink of an eye. :( it's funny how times works like that..
The photo above is from our first adventure.. the newly renovated San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, aka MOMA. Despite featuring seven floors, the museum itself felt pretty small. I think it's because the exhibits are fairly spread out, especially on the first few floors. Here are some of my favorite pieces.
This first one is really cool because it looks like a pile of sticks, unless you look at it from a very particular angle.. then it looks like this man. Pretty gnarly.
So we were both pretty tired after this first day. Amanda had missed her connecting flight in Dallas the night before (which is why she didn't make it to SFO until Saturday morning), so she spent the night in Dallas. I was tired because I was up late waiting to find out if she'd make the connecting flight, and then up early to meet her at the airport around 7 after she was able to get on the next flight out of Dallas. So we crashed early Saturday night. But Sunday!! Sunday was an adventure-packed day. We woke up early Sunday morning and rented bikes at this really awesome place called The Bike Hut, which happens to be just a few blocks from my apartment! The Bike Hut is a non-profit whose goal is to essentially get people out of their cars and onto bikes. They rent bikes for really cheap, and even offer some good deals on bikes for sale. I'd highly recommend this place to anybody visiting San Francisco. Enough on that.. so we rented the bikes, biked through the city, along the Embarcadero on the east coast, up over the Golden Gate bridge and into the cozy town of Sausalito. Here are a couple photos from our bike ride...
We had lunch at a cool burger joint in Sausalito, parked the bikes, and hopped on a shuttle that took us north about 15 miles to Muir Woods where all of the California redwoods are located. Amanda really loved the redwoods. I kept referring to the park as Father Nature, because those trees are so damn phallic. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of this trek, but as soon as Amanda sends them over I'll put them up.
After Muir Woods, we took the shuttle back to Sausalito, grabbed our bikes, and hopped on the ferry that took us back to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Overall, an exhausting day full of photo-ops and fatigued legs from biking up SF's many hills.
Monday was the 4th, and Amanda and I (appropriately) celebrated by getting drunk and going to watch a baseball game.
The Giants won, we got sunburned, and Amanda bought a sporty new SF Giants cap! She posted a photo on Snapchat and all of her friends called her out for being a traitor. When in Rome, I suppose..
Monday night we hiked up to Coit Tower which is in the northern part of the city. From there we met up with my roommate Aaron and watched the surprisingly dull SF fireworks. I guess fireworks are just a bigger deal on the east coast. I don't have any photos, but if I get any I'll be sure to put em up.
And Tuesday Amanda had to leave me :( I took the day off from work, and we went downtown and did some last minute exploring. We had lunch at a popular Mexican place called Rosa Mexicana (awesome guac, btw... and they make it right in front of you).
It was so sad when she had to leave me! I wish I could have come home with her and spent sometime in Attleboro with all of you. I think about everybody every day. I know I don't call as often as I should, but I miss all of my family and friends back home. Word on the streets is that Dad is going to try and come visit the weekend that Harry and G+P Lancaster are out here. Also, I think I've convinced Mom and Glenn to come visit for a long weekend in early August. Andddd Amanda is coming back out for a week after I finish work. For anybody wondering, I'm scheduled to finish work August 12th, and my flight home to Boston is booked for August 20th.. signing off for now. Love and miss you all. - Max
Long overdue UI changes 7/10/2016
OK, if you're reading this you can (hopefully) see some of the UI changes that I've made on here. I've added some more links on the right, and now you can click on my face on the left to navigate back to the homepage. Also, you'll see when you scroll down that my face watches you... :) Also, the site should be more responsive on mobile devices. I'll be posting another post about my adventures with a certain lone traveler soon..
Comments 6/12/2016
So I added Disqus to this page.. but Disqus uses global variables to manage the instances, so this means I can only have one comments thread per webpage.. hm.. I found some workaround that I'll look into, but for now the only entry that has a comments thread is the one below!
Aruba 6/12/2016
As promised, here's the post from Aruba. The trip was better than I could have imagined. It was my first time out of the country, first time at a tropical destination, and was just all around unforgettable. There's no way I can do justice to the trip with my words, so I'll let you see for yourself in the gallery I've put together. I built this gallery using Bootstrap Image Gallery, which uses the Bootstrap framework to create a responsive gallery. Click Start below to launch the modal.
I'm also planning on implementing the comments that you see below. Right now it's just a placeholder, but I plan to actually allow comments sometime soon.
Another Long One Cuz I'm Lazy 06/01/2016
Again, it's been quite some time since I've posted anything up here. I think just about a week now. I was hoping to post updates at least a few times a week, but I've failed to do that so far. I'll be better. I actually had some content lined up to push, but I came down with some stomach bug this weekend so I never got around to it. Anyways, this post will be a big update of the past week.
So this weekend, I met up with a friend from home who works at Uber. His name is Dave Stevens, and you can see a picture of him below. He's been in the bay area for just over a year now after graduating from Williams College, so chatting with him was a really good way for me to figure out some San Francisco "must-dos" for this summer. We met up at a place called starbelly, which had a nice outdoor patio. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos :( but I had the wild mushroom pizza which was solid.
After lunch we headed over to the famous Dolores Park where essentially everybody in SF goes on the weekends. I had heard that this was a *magical* park without any rules, but I didn't fully comprehend that until visiting. This place was absolutely packed (and I was told that my visit was on a slow day!). By no rules, I guess they mean that people can drink and smoke and do all sorts of drugs to their heart's content, because that's what Dolores Park is like. The views are stunning; you can see a few in the photos below. In the distance of the first picture you can see a bright light... I was told that this is known as the God building. I still have to find out what building that actually is.
After our *magical* time in Dolores Park, Dave and I left for a quick tour of his friend Matt's apartment. Matt mentioned to me earlier in the day that he enjoyed interior design, and it was sure as hell evident in the way his place looked. His place looked like something out of magazine. Check out some pics below.
OK, the last of our adventure's on this Sunday afternoon was a party at Dave's friend Benjamin's apartment. Benjamin is an executive at Apple, so his place was also like a palace. The windows out the back of his living room gave way to beautiful views of San Francisco. We mostly just chilled/chatted and drank fancy champagne.
I thought this photo was particularly cool because the left half of the city was covered by a shadow beneath a cloud, and the right half was perfectly sunny.
Also, here's another leftover picture I took of my roommates Keion and Aaron from one day when we were exploring downtown.
I'll be in Aruba all of next week, so I hope to have some sweet photos from that trip up here soon. Also, I plan to make this UI not nearly as shitty sometime soon, so if you're ever on here and things don't look right, it could be because I'm changing things up. Love and miss you all. -Max
San Francisco Update 5/24/2016
OK it's been ten days since I put anything up on here. I arrived in SF Saturday afternoon, and it's now Tuesday night.
These first few days have been pretty awesome, besides being 2500 miles from everybody that I love. After arriving Saturday, I spent the afternoon unpacking and settling in. I've got 3 roommates: Keion's from LA, Aaron's from San jose, and Srinath is from Arizona. They are all really interesting dudes and we seem to get along well. Here's a picture of the place, and the view from our kitchen.
On Sunday afternoon I went to my first Giant's game. AT&T park is literally a two minute walk down the street from our place. I'm pretty certain that almost all of my pay is gonna be spent on Giant's tickets. Being the fanatic that I am, I showed up like 3 hours before the game. I was also able to sweet-talk one of the security workers into letting me upstairs into the club level. That's where I took this first photo.
That same woman told me that I needed to try the AT&T park garlic fries. I wasn't a huge fan, 5/10.
Work has been awesome so far. I'm on the Salesforce Identity team, working on two cool projects. One of them is actually in collab with the project manager. His name is Matt, and I'm excited to work with him. We get free breakfast, coffee, lunch, and snacks all day. This is a pic of the full service coffee bar located on the first floor of my office. Totally free. I'm gonna drink so much coffee this summer. I miss everybody back home very much. I'm having a blast out here so far. I'll try to post again soon. - Max
Semester Wrap Up 5/14/2016
My last official turn-in assignment for Sophomore year was the revision of the science essay which I posted a few weeks ago (early April ish). Submitting that marks the unofficial end to sophomore year (still have to crush two finals). A Science Essay for the General Public (Revised Version) I'm a big to-do list guy, so it was sweet to cross that final thing off my last to-do list for the semester. It's been a crazy semester between classes and baseball, but it feels good to be done. It's crazy how much I've learned since coming to MIT. The environment here is so intense, like nothing I've ever experienced before. Fucking love it.
Networking God Dave Clark 5/12/2016
It's been about a month since I last wrote on here. Life has kind of gotten in the way. Today in my Computer Systems Engineering lecture we had a guest lecturer, Dave Clark. If you don't know who he is, you should. He's a networking god. He was a major player in building the Internet. He implemented the Internet protocols for Multics. Today, Dave spoke mostly about net neutrality. It was interesting to learn about net neutrality from a business perspective, since it's something we've been learning about all semester from a technical standpoint. My personal favorite quote from the lecture: "The Internet runs on beer."
Blocks-based Programming Languages 4/11/2016
Here's a draft of a paper that I wrote about the benefits of blocks-based programming languages in classrooms. For the past two years, I've worked in the MIT Media Lab on Gameblox -- a blocks-based programming language designed to build and prototype games. I'll be polishing this draft into a final paper in the next few weeks.
Quesadillas with Friends! 3/25/2016
Made some awesome quesadillas tonight with one of my roommates Dave and my beautiful girlfriend Amanda. We burned a couple but it was a grand old time, nonetheless.
This Summer - Salesforce 3/25/2016
Just the other day I finalized my plans for this summer: I'll be interning at Salesforce in San Francisco with one of the Big Data teams. I'm really excited for this summer. I think it will be a great learning experience, and I am pumped to live in SF. I've been told that I will be doing mostly backend work, which will be good because I don't have much experience with that. I also just found out that they have a spot for me in corporate housing, which will save me a big headache in trying to find a place to live in San Francisco. I've heard good things about the Salesforce corporate housing, so this is good. They also sent me a cool sweatshirt, which you can see me sporting in the picture below.
First Post! 3/24/2016
Hello! Welcome to my blog. This is the first official post. What is this place? Well, I'm not quite sure. My vision for this blog is that it will be a place for me to write about fun things I do, interesting computer science topics/problems/solutions I come across, and any other random thoughts I might have. I often find that when I think back to a fun thing I did, the one thing I wish I could remember is how I felt after doing that thing. This blog will be a way for me to keep track of all of the thoughts and reactions I have to the things I come across.
