There should be some sort of alert for this

Whoa! I had just opened up the LOA stats to show my parents the curious effect that the subway map had on our hits (as I remarked in a previous post), and found that it has exploded to become an order of magnitude greater than before. Whereas we used to get nearly 400 hits a week, we’ve been recently averaging more than 500 a day. This is all very curious, but it seems to really take off a few weeks after my post remarking on the initial effect. I took a look at our most popular search terms (still “New York Subway” and “New York Subway Map”, and still accounting for 99% of hits), I found that our picture of the subway system actually came up second on Google Image Search for both. I wish I’d done this just a few days earlier, because it seems possible that our recent slump could be caused by a bump from the first place spot. Damn that stonesoup.org!

Anyway, it looks like the attention doesn’t extend far beyond the post that started it all, though it’s impossible to tell if people are perusing the main site, or getting RSS feeds (and being sorely disappointed out our output). Still, I’m going to enjoy my little internet fame. In fact, I think I will use it to start a user-content driven web 2.0 crowdsourced social networking app.

And by that I mean, if you’re looking for a friend (social netwoking), leave a comment with your favorite movie (user generated content). If you see a pair of compatable looking movies (2.0 of them, to be precise), email me (crowdsourcing) and I won’t do anything (I’m still working on the app part).

Happy holidays!

So, what are you doing with your year off?

The worst part about being a LOAner (one of my goals this term is to get an arbitrary term into the common lexicon) is constantly answering the question “So, what are you doing with your year off?” and its variants “What have you been up to?” and “Which one of your family members is going to support you when you’re unemployed and living on the street?”

It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. If I tell someone that I’m studying Systems engineering (“It’s a combination of mechanical and electrical- sort of half a double major”) at a small but respectable accredited engineering college in Massachusetts, they would have a concrete, albeit probably inaccurate, concept of my past, present, and future. There are even some year off options that are pretty well understood, like doing an internship or traveling. They are considered intrinsically noble pursuits, and don’t require too much more explanation.

Because I don’t have any one theme to tie up the semester, my answer becomes a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. Like all chaotic systems, the conversation is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. If I’m feeling up to a longer conversation, the mention the web startup that I’m currently working on. Naturally, this leads to endless questions about what it does and how (I will be posting about it as soon as I get some of the final basics settled.) The medium-length solution is to get into the Solar Decathlon, and hope that if I tell them enough stories about things I have done, they’ll forget to ask about what I’m currently doing. Finally, I could deflect the question by saying “Oh, pretty much just hanging around”. In my experience, this will generally kill the conversation after a few more awkward exchanges .

It’s still better than having to lay out why I was in Washington DC on the MIT Solar Decathlon team, at which point I generally have to remind them that I don’t attend MIT- I just live there and build altfuel cars and houses with them. Then it turns into a discussion of why I chose Olin, and what Olin is in the first place. Which defeats the purpose of a medium-length solution.

I do enjoy telling people about what I’m doing, where I’m staying (I ❤ pika), and why attending Olin while taking advantage of the extracurriculars at MIT is the best deal in the world. But I’ve found that coming home has required me to repeatedly tell the story from the beginning (“I was at my high school college fair, and there was this one little college that nobody was paying attention to, so we went over to check it out….”) It gets old after a while. But I guess that if you wander a bit off the beaten path, everyone’s going to wonder where you’ve been, and if you fought an angry bear.

For the record, I haven’t fought any bears, but I met a massive (or, as Ben would suggest, giant) beaver…

What I’ve been up to

I was chatting with Ben in the Foundry’s beautiful new design studio, and he mentioned that nobody reads our blog anymore. A check of our stats reveals that he’s basically right, but the truth is a little more complex:

(apologies for the pictures, wordpress doesn’t seem to do sizing very well, I’ll fix them when I get the chance)

We get hits roughly when we sent the link to Students, and then things taper off. Makes sense, except:

you’ll notice that my early post ‘How to get into and out of Boston‘ seems to be doing really well. Now, there are a lot of people that want to get out of Boston, but this is a little suspicious. A look at the next chart helped shed some light on the issue:

 

So it appears that we’ve basically been reduced to a server for jpgs of the New York Subway (which I used in the Boston post). Still, a look at the first graph reminds us that Tim’s valiant posts from the front lines of the Virginia fight for equal rights are not going unnoticed. And if it’s Virginians that are looking for the subway maps, they’ve hit the jackpot!

But the rest of us have largely failed our goal of keeping an up to date record of our many adventures in LOAville. Part of the problem for me has been the feeling that I shouldn’t write about something until I’ve posted about the stuff leading up to it, but never having time to complete this huge task. So I’m punting. Here’s a summary of what I’ve done so far in this term:

• Did research towards starting a company to temporarily install environmental sensors into people’s homes (very similar to what the FBE group is doing now. I was initially annoyed, but then I realized it was free market research!)
• Did the temperature/humidity measurement and control for the MIT Solar7, and ended up with the house in Washington DC for about 2 weeks during the competition. All of the MITers were trying to balance their time in DC with their classwork, so they were really happy to have somebody who could pay attention to all of the readouts without interruption. By the time the awards ceremony came around, I was one of the only ones who hadn’t gone home, so I got to accept the certificate! (In my Olin shirt, of course)
• Recovered with a self-scheduled long weekend home in New York
• Am currently working towards my goal of becoming a mediocre web designer. I’ve got some friends who support themselves entirely through freelance web design, and while I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, it seems like a good skill to have. Additionally, it’s so much cheaper to start a web-based company than any other kind, and you’d be surprised at how many of them do modestly well without being the next Google or Youtube.
• I’m thinking about getting a real internship for next term. Possibilities include Johnson Controls, which does building energy efficiency, and Digital Design and Imaging Service, which basically involves taking awesome pictures from a mobile, tethered balloon. I was lucky enough to catch them working in NYC, and they let me take some shots of the Manhattan skyline at 100ft, during sunset. It was amazing.

Now you know all about me. I’ll hopefully post some more details on these or future adventures, but it’s time to hop the Wellesley bus!

ps if you’re here for links to the Subway map, scroll down.

pps Unless you’re looking at this on PlanetOlin, in which case you should still scroll down, because the other posts are going to be better.