Allow me to introduce you to our home: 75 Jefferson Rd. The tenants are Augustin Soule, Ragesh Jaiswal, Xiaojuan Ma, and moi. In addition to these inhabitants, our home is regularly guested by several good friends: Matt Caesar, David Steurer, William Josephson, Chang Kim & Juni, Marion Riggs, Midori Valdivia, Jing Cao, Yi Wang, Jiayue He, Jialu Huang, Chris Park, just to name just a few. And our favorite activity is to host these friends for dinner parties: Asian potluck dinners, pre-Movie Club dinners, Janek dinners, random dinners, Halloween dinners, etc etc. Rarer guests/treats to our home include Ann Raldow, Forrester Cole, Jamie Consugra, Janek Klawe (here also with Ann and Jamie).

The Cornell Engineering Career Fair was in mid-September as usual, which luckily brought us Ramona and Polly from the west coast. We had dinner together on the 14th at Alfama: Aditya, Kori, Polly, and Ari; Neal, Ramona, Tammy, and moi. Both Polly and Ari were in their usual form, and Ramona looks very intellectual in my glasses. After Alfama we headed to a bar for some drunkenness. You here see Aditya and Kori in a fond embrace (note Kori's nice necklace!). I believe Chethan is here scheming how to get Polly drunk (or was it fake Polly?). I am smiling here because I won a Yankees-Sox debate with Ari (it's just too bad the Sox won the title..). The next day we played lackadaisical ultimate (contradiction in terms?) in Central Park. The End.

My mother was visiting me between the 3rd and 10th of November. The first thing we did was to head up to Ossining to visit my guardians. After returning we attended a housewarming potluck dinner at my advisor (Jennifer Rexford)'s new house in Princeton. Other attendees included: Elliot Kaprilovsky, Jiayue, Juni, Jing, Minlan, Joe Jiang, Matt, Yaping, Natasha.

One of our social inventions for the fall was a Potluck Dinner + British Mystery evening, and the first British mystery was "Prime Suspect". We had a very good bunch for this first get-together, including Chris Bienia, Moritz Hardt, Elaine Auyeung, Jia Deng, Jiayue, Melissa Carroll, Shirley Gaw, Sombuddho Ghosh, Yongxin Xi, Tim Weyrich, Yun Zhang, and me!

The summer of 2008 was spent in Ann Arbor, MI interning at Arbor Networks. Ann Arbor is a college town with a vibrant feel much like Ithaca, NY. I ended up living on a cute house on a quiet street called Dewey Ave. A view inside the house: kitchen, dining room, and living room. The University of Michigan is undoubtedly the focal point of the town, but the sprawling nature of the campus (at least when compared to the Ivy League standard I am accustomed to) means that it is difficult to find a "central point" with a high density of old architecture. In any case, I took pictures of Hill Auditorium and the Hatcher Graduate Library. "Downtown" Ann Arbor is located near the aptly named Main Street, but the best restaurants in this area are generally on side street (including Cafe Zola on Washington Street). Finally, an uninteresting picture down Fourth Street.

I spent the first full weekend of June in Chicago. I was first amused by the bascule bridges in the middle of the city over the Chicago River. Note also the strikingly hideous apartment buildings, complete with semi-open parking spaces near the base, to the right of the photo. Chicago's Millennium Park [W] is supposed to be the new most awesomest park in the world. Naturally it comes with some trippy architecture/scultpures, including the Jay Pritzker Pavillion (this is only a picture of the band stand) designed by Gehry, and the Cloud Gate (aka "The Bean") designed by British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor. Finally, some token pictures of the Chicago skyline: from the Shedd aquarium [W] and from the Hancock Observatory [ext].

[Several of these photos are Copyright Augustin Soule. Released under a creative commons license.]