http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:17:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Of course you'd never guess from reading my blog, but I am quite sick at the moment.  I am huddled on my bed, with spent tissues all around me, awaiting my next coughing fit.  My back aches from the repeated spasms!  I take shallow breaths so as to avoid inducing ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2009/10/30/in-sickness-and-in-health/ See, I'm late for class, as it is, but I'm not done with my homework.  A lot of folks call homework "PSets" around here.  I call it homework.  Fin.  But I digress. So I walk toward said class, crossing the Infinite Corridor, but turn off the hallway and walk out onto ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2009/09/30/funny-story/ I get off the plane and I walk hurriedly past the other passengers, because I know right where to go.  The pathway takes us around the great atrium with its weighty water fountain; past the ridiculous and happily familiar dairy advertisement, cut into the grass; to the customs.... -------------------- I emerge from ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2009/09/01/parallel-lives/ This entry is about my second summer as an instructor for Middle East Education through Technology (MEET), an amazing MIT-affiliated conflict resolution program based in Jerusalem that brings together excelling Palestinian and Israeli high school students in an intense curriculum of computer science, entrepreneurship, and team building.  You can learn ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2008/10/01/adventures-in-meet/ When I was young enough to go out trick-or-treating, the best part of the evening for me was coming home and plunking myself down on the living room floor with my sister, overturning our orange, pumpkin-shaped buckets filled with the night’s haul, and making little piles of every kind ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2008/06/02/morality-and-the-geek/ Dear Blog, Sorry I’ve neglected you for a while. But I am, after all, a graduate student. My procrastination is spoken for. You see, Blog, I’ve fallen for another. Wikipedia. Wikipedia has everything I’m after – useful and useless tidbits, links to take me off-course, circular arguments, and censorship. And ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2008/05/20/dear-blog/ In this age of “guaranteed next-day shipping”, a person might take for granted that his or her order will hit the road almost immediately after making the mouse-click or phone call that initiated the purchase. But not every company works like Amazon or Barnes and Noble or NetFlix. Now, when ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2008/04/24/rushed-delivery-or-what-a-difference-four-weeks-make/ Before there were the PhD Comics, there was Aristophanes’ “The Clouds”. Over twenty-four hundred years old, the play is surprisingly timely, capturing in brief the prototypical elements of graduate study that any modern student could identify. I’ll let the comedic master speak for himself (or rather, through a translation by ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2008/04/09/blog-for-a-cloudy-thursday/ Seeing as I am now in 18th grade, I had hoped I would have learned the ropes by now. Evidently not so. Learn from my mistakes. Here’s the deal: take some time off during spring break, I say. ... http://eecsblogs.mit.edu/blog/tgolfinopoulos/2008/04/09/great-expectations-or-why-you-should-enjoy-your-spring-break/