Today: orientation stuff, good free food, set up bank account and TechCash and $30 monthly T pass. Discovered some good stuff online--I really so badly want people to understand the essence of the reality of the Gospel b/c it's so different and so cool. Jesus ain't just my homeboy.
Discovered a lot of things here...
- Grad students aren't quite so anti-social as I thought.
- Athena is pretty cool. It's got lots of programs available through AFS "lockers". You can install it on your home machine, or upgrade Debian-based distros to run its software. There's a huge cluster on the 5th floor of the student center (Stratton). And you can get root. And printing is free.
- Right across from the Athena cluster in Stratton is a huge reading room, with 6 or 7 group study lounges too. Couple that with laptop and it looks like a great working space. If not too crowded.
- There are 4k undergrads and 6k grads here. Yup, more grads than undergrads...
- 4th floor of Stratton has three piano rooms, MIT card access. One upright, two baby grands. Nice. I realized just how much grace God has shown me in my piano playing ability... without ever really intentionally practicing, I'm able to just play stuff, styled chords really, to pretty much any song I know and have it sound decent. What really got me was pedaling. I've been conscious for a while that I use the pedal a lot. I wondered occasionally if I just held it down all the time and made an ugly sound. Today I decided to actually try holding it down and seeing if it sounded like what I usually play. As soon as I hit the second chord it sounded muddy, not like usual. So I realized, when I let my foot go back to doing what it normally did, was that I have always been pedaling chord changes smoothly, without ever really noticing or practicing it. Grace.
A good read: http://mrlauterbach.typepad.com/gospeldrivenlife/why-the-gospel-must-be-ev.html
