AHHHHHH I went to metrix create:space and it is AMAZING. I was geeking out pretty hard, and actually ended up going there twice in one day: once to just take a look around with my friend, and again to attend makerbot night. Being in the presence of 4 printers in various states of function was something awesome to behold, especially since I’ve never actually seen a real-life mendel running. Wade’s extruder is pretty prevalent across the board, and surprisingly painter’s tape is pretty prevalent as a flat board cover (as opposed to kapton). While I was there, I also desoldered stuff from my destroyed extruder board, and got the wrong-sized trimpots off my stepper boards, as well as a melted switch on my motherboard (that heat gun was niceeeee… also, the soldering iron with a dedicated fume sucker right next to the tip is an amazing idea, and I want one, maybe by hacking my hakko ). Now, the trimpot holes are now filled with solder, which could be problematic, especially since it won’t come out easily. I might have to make another trip to metrix create:space…

Okay, enough talk! Now time for pictures: I actually made it into the metrix create:space flikr stream:

Me looking thoughtful

Me being happy

Very cool. I also got myself a hobo token (essentially metrix’s token of good will; I think it’s a laser cut wood coin): I’ll pop up a picture eventually, just to prove that I’m a big geek.

I also had some fun remixing this remix of a D-Day picture; my some of my friends (probably jokingly) decided it would be a cool motivational poster, so I called them out and whipped one up. Here’s one style, and here’s another (thank god the source image is unrestricted). I made larger resolutions if they actually want to print them out; ask if you want them. (Is it disrespectful of the soldiers? I think not: those guys were pretty bad ass, and I think the message just serves to highlight that)

On a different note, I really want to remix rainymood.com. It’s essentially a high-quality 30-minute loop of rain, and it just begs for a piano solo on top. Or maybe violin, too… At any rate, it’s begging to be remixed, and it’s CC-licensed, and I have a compulsion to do it, so you might or might not get something aural on the blog soon.

And for pure conjecture, I want to hack a wii nunchuk: I have a feeling it would be an amazing mouse-like device.

Okay, it’s way past my bedtime (I know, I know). I’ll post again soon, hopefully with some results for something.

EDIT: congrats me! I made my first blog post (at least the one the I’ve managed to keep un-mangled) 2 years and 2 days ago, so it’s kind of a blogging birthday. Fun fun.

So, I couldn’t resist, so you guys get 3 stories on 2 nights.

I had the idea before the status, and it took me a while to find a status to fit it.

Enjoy!

Status update: In the middle of the country

The clock tells him it's in the middle of the afternoon, a time falling between when the sun had passed it's peak and before the waning of the light impressed into the world. A glance out the kitchen window tells a much different story: a storm is gathering, menacing clouds pushing each other up as they tower over the plain. Low thunder rumbles, sub-audible shockwaves jittering glassware balanced on the kitchen counter. He gathers them in a flash, pushing them into the cupboard before glancing out the window again. The light had become fleeting in the face of the encroaching whirlwind, and he turns away: there are still storm preparations to be finished.

He's a simple man: he couldn't make it as an English major, couldn't keep any of his jobs, and couldn't keep his girl. He guessed she couldn't handle the thought of moving out to a farm, and he had clutched her shirt to his chest, shedding a tear or two (maybe there were more, but that didn't matter) ignoring the cries that began to emmanate from his newborn son's crib for all of five minutes. Five minutes was all he spent thinking about her, because even if he was terrible with people, by god he would be a good father. And he guessed he had done fine, although he failed in an oblique way when his son joined the military. Like mother, like son, he guessed.

He stepped in from the porch, the downpour suddenly directing itself sideways along with a friendly gale. He slammed the door shut, not relishing the thought of sopping up the corridor. He flicked the kitchen light on, and flicked the dial of his radio to see if anyone knew if tornadoes were sighted. Only static: he supposed that this might be one of those new fangled storms that were dispersing the copious amounts of plasma that had leaked from low-orbit fuel ferries. Damn corporations should've cleaned up the mess, but instead they decided that interferring with the electromagnetic communications of most of the world was an acceptable consequence. More thunder rolled through the house, rumbling groans of discontent from a heavily laden sky. He flicked open his mobile: the electromagnetic interference was something fierce, as the mobile was barely able to connect to an access point 10 feet away. Of course, there was no net connection: he hadn't been able to pay the phone bill again. Or was it because the dial-up company had gone out of business? He knew it was shutting down soon, and there was no way to find out. Well, except to dig out the letters and look...

He sipped his tea, reading his son's latest letter. He had somehow missed it, filling it away before carefully perusing it. Quite unlike him. Well, he wasn't in the military, and didn't have his son's compulsion for order and speed instilled into himself. And how the aerospace corp loved order and speed: stationed in the upper atmosphere, there was only a small amount of air to drag on the sleek craft, but enough to clean out any of the deadly debreis that infested empty space. The corp was free to scream through the sky, serving to sever any enemy connection between the ground and space, sometimes preying on craft that swam through the lower atmosphere. He had never actually seen his son in action, just watched tube vids of press-ready showcase manuvers. Still, he was proud, and with international relations in the state they are in, his son just might have to protect the country.

Thunder rolled; the baritone speaker in the sky had gotten closer. He fancied that the very foundations of the house had to have been shaken. At least the wind was slackening, and he could see through the rain again, watching the clouds light up with lightning. Sometimes, the clouds seemed to glow, followed by sharper, tenor cracks unlike the rumbling baritone of the thunder he had been hearing. Well, plasma will do strange things to a familiar weather pattern... The rain had begun to slacken, so he fetched a chair, perching on the porch to watch for the rainbow that inevitably followed the storm. He sighed, sat back, and looked up just in time to see the sky falling.

So I really didn’t like that last story, so I decided to do another one. Hope this one came out better.

Status update: i'm super bored so ask me something [link]

Beg your pardon?

Yeah, that's my super power. I know, it doesn't sound like much...

No, I mean, my hearing isn't what it used to be. They had to reclassify it as non-super hearing a few years back, and had to hook me up to this hearing aid in the last month, so...

Ah, okay. So my super power (she paused to gesture at herself) is inducing severe boredom in people.

And how is that a super power? I know plenty of people that can lull nearly any one to sleep, including (especially!) several senators.

Well, I don't have to actually talk to anyone: I can snap my fingers and induce an irrepressible feeling of boredom in people.

But how is that useful?

Oh, you bore the guard and sneak past him while he's fixated on the TV. Works like a charm. Or, my favorite one was when I bored my adversary so much that he stopped fighting me and sulked off to work on his latest gadget.

Interesting. (He took another sip from his tumbler, smoothing out his suit with the other hand while gazing out the window. It certainly was a beautiful nightscape, he thought. Whoever chose this mansion overlooking the bay certainly had good taste.)

I know, right? That stunt was the one that actually got me into the league, if you didn't know already; but you must know, they must pass all the applicants past you. Right?

(He gave a wan smile and took another sip.)

(She also turned to look out the window) I still can't believe I'm actually in the league, fighting crime and all that. I actually get a costume and my own press agent and worldwide transportation and complimentary dry cleaning (her breath caught in her throat for a bit, before she jerked her head inquisitively around)... say, you must have a lot of stories, being the original man of steel and all that. What was your last... job like?

Boring.

What?

I responded to mail and played golf.

No... I mean your crime fighting job.

It's been years.

What?

I've been a desk jockey for at least 5 years.

Oh, like head of the league?...

No, I'm merely a figurehead (another wan smile). I happen to be too important to the managers of the league to fall, so they stuck me behind a desk in the most secure building in the world.

Which building is that?

Our headquarters, of course. I'm surrounded by supers of all shapes and sizes, although to be honest I'm not sure if they thought you could bore missles out of existence or not.

(Wait...)

Well, it was nice being bored with you. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get another drink.

(He ambled out of the dark sitting room, back into the main body of the party. She stayed alone in the darkened room, limply holding her wine glass. Well, she thought, it was a beautiful twilight over the sea...)

(The bay exploded in a fireball, and

So I’m going to dump core, and whine and complain for a bit. Feel free to ignore, rebut, or burn.

I think I’ve figured out why I can’t do anything: I switch context way too often. What I mean by switching context is switching from one task to another: for instance, going from sleeping to eating, or studying to practicing, or studying to adjusting the volume on my music. Yes, that last one is a context switch: it’s fast, but it still adds overhead. I’ve complained about overhead before: a certain amount of time each day has to be devoted to things like waking up, showering, eating, and all that. And context switching is another source for overhead. Overhead is terrible, because you’re usually too occupied doing things that don’t advance the self, and you can’t focus on something more meaningful. Overhead eats up your time without leaving you anything to show, aside from “hey, I’m still alive!”

So, I’m forcing myself to switch contexts several times a day, aside from the things that one must do to keep alive, by having too many projects open at one time. I’m trying to complete hardware projects (minty preamp, useless machine, pocket oscilloscope, didj hacking, monolith, book scanner, phone glove for a partial list), study physics (Feynman lectures) and math (probability theory and abstract algebra), on top of that I’m trying to do artsy fartsy stuff (on top of writing stuff, actually putting something in the musical section of my blog, and finishing that damn animation), and I have a few software projects jiggling around in the back of my head (mathematical note taking, sane photo management, doing deep integration of twitter and wordpress) as well as a redesign of a completely inane website for an organization that I was once part of.

Whew okay, so I have all these things I want to do, and I want to do them all at once. So that means I’ve been trying to divvy up my day into partitions, and doing different things for each part. But once you consider that switching things takes overhead, then that’s the wrong strategy. If you set a few days, instead of a few hours, you should be able to drop overhead, mental and physical, and get much more out of those few days.

Part of this has to do with not sleeping so much. Part of it also has to do with streamlining my life.

Part of it also has to do with my urges. I’ve said before that I would rather the bio-hackers hurry it up and get to the point that I can re-route my libido to mostly scientific inquiry. Leaving aside that particular urge, I’m also not very happy about the urge to create. No, not that sort of creation: we’ve already disregarded that one. I’m talking about the urge to create works and realize thoughts in objects. You might not feel it, but I do: I want to create. If I don’t create something new, then I’m just taking up space and pushing the universe faster towards an entropic death, and who wants to rush that? Another way of stating it: if you’re not saying anything, than you might as well die, and if you’re not saying anything worthwhile, you might as well say nothing (with speech defined in the broadest sense: by patronizing certain restaurants, you’re saying something about your preferences with your actions).

So it feels like I need to create things, so I flit between different projects with the hope that I push them towards being done. I guess I’m hoping for a breakthrough with the least amount of effort, so that I get that high of finishing something while knowing I have projects in the pipe, because starting things is difficult too, and has it’s own overhead associated with it. But then, it’s not nearly as vicious as switching context several times a day.

In closing: if I could just break the tyranny of creating, or the tyranny of time, then I could be happier. Maybe.

I’m not really happy with the way this one came out, but that’s what you get for 30 minutes, and when you write the ending line first. Anyways, it’s time to try and get a reasonable amount of sleep.

Status: i'm super bored so ask me something

Who are you?

It had been a few hours since I found her sitting at the table, after which I took the chair across from her, after which I sat, sizing her up, trying to categorize her as friend or foe. All this before trying to just ask: you couldn't be too cautious here.

No answer. Not even a visible or audible response of any sort: her eyes refuse to track me as I shift my weight.

Hello?

I wave my hand to catch her attention, the one that isn't occupied with clutching my katana. I picked it up a few days ago, or what felt like a few days: it was hard to tell when it was always dark, and there weren't any clocks to consult. It wasn't like I was a good swordsman, but the shotgun was out of rounds, and I had done a bit of fencing. Plus, it got me through some troubles, which was the true test of a weapon.

Dropping my hand, I permit a quick sigh and look around: no monsters from the dark trying to sneak up on me while I try to find if this one is friend or foe. True, I hadn't met any friends yet in the void, but one never knows. Laying my hand on the table, I drum my fingers.

Her head snaps up, suddenly meeting my gaze.

I freeze, waiting for a manical lunge or for any portention of an impending attack. It was a hard place, the void. Always had to be on your guard.

... Hello?

No response.

I give a small tap with my pinky.

She breaks her gaze away, towards my hand.

Well then.

I tap out .... . ._.. ._.. ___.

She widens her eyes, as if she recognizes the message within.

I'm not surprised she only understands morse code: strange things have happened in this godless void. And god knows I've had enough time to encounter them...

I taps out a query: are you a friend?

She smiles, and then opens her mouth:

Of course.

I immediately know the voice. Of course she would be here: she had been the only one with enough power to bind me into this void. The only one with enough sway over his world. In retrospect, it should have been clear. Of course she was her. She was

No more questions. I challenge you to battle.

I’ve been getting too much sleep.

Sounds strange, no?

Well, once you know that I’ve been sleeping through half the day (little less than 12 hours), then it’s not quite so strange. I’m sleeping way too much, and if I was getting 4 more hours of wakefulness into the day for a nice balance of 16/8, then I would probably be much more productive. I probably wouldn’t be as sleepy, and damn, 4 hours is a long time, especially once you multiply it over 2+ weeks.

The only reason this is a problem is because my REU is fast approaching (1.5 weeks): ignoring my lack of housing, I also need to prep for the project, which means reading a lot of material. When you consider that a large chunk of my day is taken up with overhead, those 4 hours could increase my productivity dramatically. Now, figuring out how to change my sleeping habits is going to be difficult, but man, does it need to happen.

Okay, time for me to stop screwing around with facebook, wordpress, and whatever other social networking sites I’m hanging around and to work. Fun.

So, it just occured to me that I haven’t updated on the status of the reprap in a while. Obviously, I didn’t finish the metal mendel, although my partner in crime is moving the project forward while he stays for summer school. I think the metal mendel will be finished by the time summer is over, too: we were at least halfway done, and now he has a bunch more time on his hands to put into the project.

Despite not finishing the metal mendel, I still want a reprap of some sort (there’s a reason I bought two sets of electronics), and I’ve opted for the recently developed mini-mendel. I got the RP parts, just ordered the motors and bearings, and am now waiting for more money so I can get the rest of the mechanical bits, plus extruder RP parts and bits, plus enough stuff to get my boards working again (they’re in pretty poor shape right now, I’m sorry to say). So, I have stuff, but I’m not quite ready to move forward. There’s also the small matter of stubborn de-soldering jobs I’ll have to do…

Basically, there is a very high probability that I will have a reprap by the end of the summer.

While starting to read through the Feynman Lectures, I thought of this: In Starship Troopers, a certain planet has less competitive wildlife because it happens to be orbiting a star that puts out less mutation-inducing radiation than our own star, with the hidden implication that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” However, a good balance of mutations is evolutionarily beneficial (I think his basic premise is correct: more mutations mean more variation, and hence better fitness), such that life on the planet should evolve less genetic safeguards (assuming a similar biology to us), leading to a similar rate of mutation.

Okay, I’m done sprouting randomly. Ideas like this would normally be up for twitter, but this one was a bit long.

Also, you should check out Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality . URL says it all.

So, I’ve had some ups and downs in the 2 weeks since school ended. I’ll be focusing on one particular thing, which is the distributed computing cluster me and a friend set up to crunch through solutions to the optimization problem I’ve been looking at.

Well, you may be thinking, you have a computing cluster? In that case, man, you’ve got it made! The sky’s the limit when you’ve got a computing cluster! Well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but having a whole lot of computing power behind you makes solving certain problems easier or just plain out possible. In this case, having a bunch of cpu time crunching on this optimization problem makes it tangible study in depth.

So, a certain very good friend of mine heard that I was looking for computing time, and since he worked for a branch of his university’s IT department, he knew that a certain computer lab would go unused for most of the summer. So I whipped up some customized live cd’s that would be devoted to solving these problems, along with a distributed computing system to tie everything together (part of why I got this domain in short notice) and we filled up the lab with systems running off the live cds. For a few short glorious days, I had over 100 cores crunching numbers for me: it’s a great feeling to wake up and have a job that would’ve taken a month with one dual core computer finish overnight.

Then, some of the other IT guys stumbled into the lab looking to play some games, and failing to closely read the friendly note I had left on every computer in the lab, proceeded to freak out and raise a pretty good shit storm over it. Looking back, we could’ve prepared better for this, by at least telling the IT people with access to the closed down lab that we were up to something in there. In our defense, though, we didn’t think that people would be dumb enough to freak out about it (which was a mistake on our part: sometimes, you just have to assume that people are insane. To be honest, I’m glad I’m learning it now rather than later). At one point we were afraid that my friend would get fired, but all they did was close down the majority of the cluster, and now I’m back to having some 20 odd cores at my disposal. It’ll get done eventually, but it’ll take a bit longer.

So what’s the point of this little story, other than you should prepare for unforeseen consequences? There isn’t one, but it got me thinking about something that I’ve been wondering about. Your usual university might have a dedicated research cluster, but most of the smaller ones don’t have a one. However, all universities (the ones I’m familiar with, at any rate) have at least a few computer labs, all with non-ancient hardware. Most people use those computers at sane hours, or if at insane hours, then they’re usually there by the time insane hours start.

I’ve never gotten why no one has tried to tie together all the labs as a giant cluster, but one that only functions at night. If there aren’t any jobs, then the cluster shuts down like it’s supposed to: if there are jobs, then they crunch through them until it’s time for the lab to open, and then the cluster shuts down and becomes a normal terminal-ish thing. That way, smaller universities have an appreciable amount of computing power on hand, in house. That would be cool.

There’s plenty of  objections to this sort of scheme, with security, cost, and maintenance topping the list of concerns that I can make off the top of my head. However, so far, it’s just an idea I’m tossing out there, mind candy to kick around and think about when you can’t sleep. Like all the other ideas bouncing around in my head, we’ll see where it goes.

Two-fer-one night!

Status: I’m finally home.

Home.

You should be happy you're home.

That's what they said.

That's what they all said.

They never had to come home to empty cities.

Empty streets.

Empty building.

Empty people.

He had to fight.

Fight a war.

All by himself.

Well, that wasn't true.

The leeks were good fighters, but terrible leaders.

They needed a leader.

He led them into battle.

He won every battle except the one that mattered the most to him.

He lost Earth.

The leeks didn't know what the enemy did to their conquered worlds.

They had never regained a world from the enemy before.

After victory was assured, he took back Earth.

And now he was home.

Except home wasn't home.

People had become automatons.

They looked better, the cities cleaner as well as the people, their technology advanced, but they had lost their spark.

Why?

How?

The last enemy had been extinguished: they couldn't be asked.

He tried asking his people what had happened during the invasion.

They told him about an industrial revolution.

Then the computing revolution.

Then the biotech revolution.

Then the bionic revolution following on it's heels.

It was clear, then.

The enemy just had to teach.

The leeks invaded on his command, and he watched from the top floor of his abandonded farmhouse as fire poured from heaven.

After half an hour, he called the leeks off.

Except for one ship.

No more dusty farmhouse.

No more conquerer.

No more genocide.

No more.

No.