The weather this week was horrible. It started out warm, humid and rainy and ended chilly. This is what I woke up to on Monday:

I was actually looking forward to storms, because I bought a Senz Umbrella for $15 on Woot over the summer. Supposedly, its aerodynamic design makes it immune to flipping inside out. Unfortunately, the rain this week was of the slow and steady type, and I was not able to see if it works as advertised.

On Tuesday, I went to President Lee Bollinger‘s House for a fireside chat. He does this a few times every semester and lets undergrads (chosen by lottery) to attend and discuss issues involving Columbia and the world. Before the chat, we were treated to a rather large assortment of food:

A blurry picture of the president at the chat:

On Wednesday, Caroline and I watched Avenue Q The Musical. It was popular a few years ago for the song “The Internet is for Porn.” I had a great time and wouldn’t mind watching it again.

It just kept raining ):. This was taken on Thursday:

Over the summer I purchased two TI Launchpad embedded development kits for $4.30. I wanted to interface the microcontroller with a 4 line by 20 character HD44780 LCD display that I bought almost 5 years ago. On Thursday, I modified some code that I found online, loaded it into the microcontroller, wired up the circuit, and it worked! The little 14 pin chip in the picture is the microcontroller.

On Saturday, Phil and I met Leslie at Brick Lane Curry House for Indian food. We were going to take the “Phaal Challenge”, which involves eating probably the hottest Indian curry in the world, but decided not to after realizing we had important things to do that day. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture even though I had my camera with me ):.

Afterwards we headed over to the Threadless popup shop. The window with the pink alien is the shop. The silver truck is an ice cream truck called the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. The truck had some interesting toppings like wasabi pea dust and cayenne pepper.

There weren’t too many shirts left when we got there. There were probably more earlier in the week, the day we went was the last.

They also had a wall of designs that visitors made. We could vote on our favorite and the winner would get $2000.

In the evening, I lugged my desktop over for the LAN party and Starcraft II tournament that Sean, Will and I organized. The tournament hit a lot of delays due to our unpreparedness, but it was still successful.

To close, here are some views from my window this week.