Butterflies.

A familiar flutter, deeply set, matching the flutter of probability. I know the numbers, but I can’t quite put my irrationality aside and face up the facts as I fumble for my boarding pass.

So many people have died. Too many to ignore.

Shuffling forward, shoeless, I contemplate. The TSA agents let these people pass, but they will die, like the billions before them. Security? Only for a few hours, and marginal at that.

Now, the two hours I spend waiting for this delayed flight carries about the same risk of death as the two that will follow it: being suspended 10,000 feet in the air is a negligible risk next to the unseen microbes making their way to my gut. It’s unreasonable to focus on flying as a personal existential risk, this I know. This, I also feel. Then from where do the butterflies spring?

A reminder. A reminder that we can do great things, and that one day we can defeat death, when revised culture strides forward hand-in-hand with advancing science. Impossible?

They used to think flying was impossible, too.

And yet here we are, engines thrashing defiantly against gravity with a mighty roar.

Liftoff.

Fuck yeah, Humanity.

• Attended some graduations
• Tweaked the Arimaa Icon set up to version 3 4 4.1
• Attended a Classical Revolution session in Seattle
• Re-read Neuromancer
• Made progress on finding housing. I detest looking for housing. In fact, I detest looking for most anything.
• Failed to finish Halo: Reach
• Got to the Silicon Valley without dying

Start work next week! I should be able to actually start finishing projects again, so heads up for that.

I have rectified what I have previously noted as something negative. With less than a week of practice under my belt, I managed to not suck that much at a Classical Revolution session.

I’m coming for you, anti-generality. And lemme tell you, it’s going to be a wicked battle. Count on it.

• Tweaked/updated my Arimaa Icon set
• Got a job! Internship! Whatever you want to call it! Now I don't have to rely on intrinsic motivators to get things done!
• Checked out Jigsaw Renaissance and Dorkbot-Seattle at the same time by failing to get to the Dorkbot meeting in time to see most of the presentations
• Attended a meeting of the Seattle BUG (Blender User Group) (instead of attending the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon)
• Got matched up through HackMatch right after getting accepted to aforementioned job, which got a bunch of people pinging me about summer jobs, right when I didn't need it anymore. Too slow, HackNY, too slow.

I haven’t closed any projects this week, but I finally gave in and re-edited my /etc/hosts file to block off Reddit and Hacker News. My productivity should automatically boost by 200%! Additionally, not being bogged down with finals means I can actually attend cool events when I hear about them: I heard about the Dorkbot the day of, and found out about the BUG the day before. It’s pretty cool to be without massive amounts of responsibilities, but like I said above, it’ll be nice to let my intrinsic motivators take a rest.

So what’d I do this week?

• Got sick with Viral Gastroentrisis again
• Finished The Glass Bead Game
• Hit up Seattle's Less Wrong Meetup group
• Finished Oryx and Crake
• Finished a project of mine. A small project, involving data visualization

Thoughts on book reading: I don’t quite get modern literature. Or any “fine” literature, for that matter. If I didn’t read the foreword for The Glass Bead Game, then I would have been totally lost. Heck, reading the foreword I get a glimpse into what people that know literature get out of reading literature, and much of the time I wasn’t getting that. Like with many things, once I knew that I was deficient in this area, I had an immediate urge to make myself not deficient. However, since I’d just be delving into more literature, a second thought tells me it wouldn’t be especially useful.

Oryx and Crake was a bit better: in particular, some people don’t know how to include technical riffraff into their work. However, Atwood does a good job of sprinkling technical tidbits throughout a text.

However, I’m not into the whole doom and gloom scenario put forth by Oryx and Crake. As I subscribe to secular humanism, I think that humanity is overall on a upward slope, not a constant degeneration. Just because I’m not into the scenario, though, does not mean I don’t think it’s important: even if we occupied several planets in the solar system (like Stephen Hawking says), we could potentially kill ourselves off with a single dedicated mad scientist (it brings to mind the saying “every 18 months, it becomes twice as easy to shoot ourselves in the foot” with respect to strong AI. I don’t know where it’s from, sorry). Something approaching protection from even deliberate attempts on the existence of humanity is interstellar colonization without faster-than-light drives, but I’m sure the only reason it seems safe is because I’ve been thinking about it for less than 10 years. And this is why I think HPMOR will end in tragedy: Harry will do almost everything right, but it won’t be enough, because you could do everything you were supposed to, and Nature is still allowed to kill you.

So for each of these 13 weeks of summer, I’m going to try and wrap up what I did each week. It’s probably not as satisfying as doing a wrap-up each night, but it’s some form of review, so I’ll take it. So, what I did this past week…

• Walked a graduation ceremony without actually graduating
• Kicked off stage 2 of my internship search (semi-successfully, I believe)
• Rooted my phone (finally)
• Turned out 3 project pages (these things take forever to write) (the Arimaa, Hunch Punch, and ttool ones)
• Finished single-player Portal 2, fell in love with Want You Gone
• No longer so pasty white: sitting out in the sun does a boy good
• Revamped the look of the image section of my website

And that’s a wrap folks! This next week should be more code writing, and less doing administrative stuff. I’m putting off hardware work until I know I’ll be somewhere for more than a few weeks.

It’s strange, looking back at the writing of a younger self. The things I concerned myself with are simultaneously familiar and foreign: I still cared about God, without any hints of my later de-conversion, but I would post up poorly-worded rants on terrible HTML practices in educator websites. I would whine about school, talk about math, and post random music tidbits. As I delve back through the years, some other observations:

• Spell check in the browser has made so much of a difference: I no longer look like such an idiot by default. Sure, I work hard to make sure I appear to be an idiot, but it's no longer easy as pie.
• I made this thing called the Sarge engine, which apparently was supposed to be a forum engine. I had a thing for fancy project names that had nothing to do with what they actually did.
• I started doing Linux stuff around here. I was also posting TI-BASIC code in plaintext, so I guess the two cancel each other out.
• I thought heaps and stacks were incompatible, because C and Java used stacks and heaps, respectively.
• Twitter has certainly changed how I blog, for the better.
• I got excited when new versions of Blender came out (2.37!!! WHOOO!!), just like I do now (minus the fact I missed the 2.57 update).
• I was a very angsty child (boohoo why won't anyone love me?! I'm so ronree!).
• I thought, at one point in time, that programming as a job would be boring. Which is why I did it all the time, apparently.
• I thought I could help my fellow nerds become less anti-social. Ha.
• I was slightly socially incompetent. Just slightly.
• I was also just slightly incompetent at making anything I wrote make sense to me 5 years later.
• I sure hope my kids don't write like this for such a long time. To be fair, I posted almost every day, so it only seems like a long time when I read 5 posts at a time (5 one line posts all saying something along the lines of ARGHHH I IZ IDIOT or LOLZ MAH PRGRAMZ BROKEN), but it's very much a product of not being competent: to be fair, these posts were part of the process that got me here, but it would be less embarrassing if it were a shorter part.
• Oh god, POVRay code.
• Very few of my long form posts contained coherent content: most of the time, longer posts could be decomposed into tens of one-liner posts. I believe this is a consequence of my inability to focus during my high school years, and/or just my general stupidity at that time. In retrospect, it's amazing I even got anything finished.
• It reminds me that I wished I could go out of Christianity with a bang: make a huge scene while breaking with the church, screams of fire and brimstone going both ways. Now that I'm standing here, I didn't get that, but I realize it's okay. I'm still where I need to be, and it doesn't matter I had gotten there with strife.

In the negatives department, I don’t care quite as much about music: sure, it would be nice if I could pull some music out of my bum, but I don’t have the will to make it happen at the expense of my other pursuits (and if I’ve learned anything from that trip back, talking about things and doing things are very different. Didn’t exactly understand that back then). Another negative is the fact I can’t go back: at that time, I could have conceivably given up programming, gone to seminary, and lived out a simple life. It really is unfortunate that at this point, my only options are to rock the world or die trying. So be it.

And here’s to another 6 years of growing up!

Note: don’t try looking for these writings. As soon as I posted this, I deleted that blog account. Would it have been hilarious to look back on another 6 years from now? Not really, as it would’ve been even more pathetic than anything else. May as well put this content out of it’s misery now than later. So long, 2006-2004: it was nice knowing you.

Hi, I’ll keep this short and sweet. I just thought this was a natural time to touch base with the blog, so… here you go.

This HackNY (still sleep dep’d up from the previous 48~ hours), I actually got into a team and . It’s a basic game that leverages the Hunch API in a trivial way, meaning that the game mechanics didn’t actually depend on the existence of the API.

I do need to keep in mind that I have limited resources: this hackathon could’ve turned out something useful (I have a list of perhaps useful things that need creating that’s approaching, oh, say, aleph not), but instead I helped turn out something no one wants, and for which no one will want. I did help a crap ton of people get better at the craft, though, so I feel good about that; working on Notesoble would’ve been a bigger utility gain, though, in the end.

Boy, do I have a lot of things to do.

Brb, going to go take a level in doing work.

So I’ve been to Carnegie Hall twice in two weeks, and haven’t written anything about either of those events, so… I suppose I should rectify that.

First, a little background. Despite my grounding in classical music, I hadn’t gotten into Carnegie Hall in the nearly 7 months I’ve been in New York. I know, shame, shame. However, I really didn’t have any excuses during spring break, and Mahler was being played by the Boston Philharmonic, so off I went to get some student tickets.

First impressions: while it’s not modern like Benaroya Hall, it’s also not overly ornate like the Rialto Theater (which I spent a fair amount of my high school years in). The seats are passable, but the seating in the balcony is tremendously steep.

Oh, you want me to talk about the music and acoustics? Well, it was somewhat disappointing for string enthusiasts, because when you get so far up the balcony, all the strings kind of get mushy and lose a lot of their definition, especially when playing softly. And really, strings shine when they go down to ppp and leave off the vibrato, so that didn’t work out so well. The brass came through much better, but there’s not really a time when the brass don’t come through, so that wasn’t a plus (winds? what winds?).

The poor acoustics may have contributed, but I didn’t really enjoy Mahler’s 9th: I thought that since I was really into his 5th and 6th symphonies, that his 9th should also be fantastic. However, it didn’t really have any hooks like the other two, and the brass tended to ride on top of the strings without letting them through except for when the entire orchestra dropped low, and by that time the strings just didn’t come through at all. So, Mahler’s 9th is not my favorite yet: I do want to listen to a recording before I pass judgement.

I went to Carnegie Hall for the 2nd time today, to do something completely different: there was a screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s work, specifically, 2 shorts by Studio Ghibli that have never been screened in the USA before.

So, wow. After watching those simple animations, I realize that my story telling prowess needs work. A lot of work. I simply could not see myself coming up with or writing those sorts of stories, or storyboarding them, and the animating was fantastic. So. Yeah. I think I’m still in Creative-Output shock. I’ll figure out what I’m thinking sometime.

Okay, now it’s time to watch Ask an Engineer. And then after that, work some more on the advanced programming project of death, and maybe even doing some work on the algorithms homework of death!

So I decided to take a bit of time out from the programming project of death, and do a laptop review.

Earlier, I reviewed HP’s dm4, and eventually decided I wouldn’t keep it, mostly because of the battery life, prodigious thermal output, touchpad, and the salmon hue the chassis took on under certain lighting conditions. Credit, though, where credit is due: HP is really, really cool about their return policy. 30 days to return for refund, which is just plain awesome. Such a long grace period to test-drive machines should not go unrewarded, which is why I felt bad about returning the laptop to jump ship to another manufacturer.

After spending a bit more time surfing around the nets (note to self: hate laptop shopping! HATE LAPTOP SHOPPING WITH A PASSION! from your past self), I finally settled on an Asus. However, the cheaper Asus models I was looking at had this… weird keyboard configuration, where the enter key was stretched vertically instead of horizontally. That was quite the deal breaker for me, since once I get into a coding zone, I hit enter all the time. Placing it farther away is probably one thing I wouldn’t want to get used to. Hence, I went with the more expensive Asus u33jc-a1.

First impressions (admittedly skewed, since I’m writing down experiences from a few months ago): hmm, looks nice. The wood facade doesn’t look that real, and it’s somewhat difficult to see that it’s wood if one isn’t looking for it. The partially-metal chassis is a nice touch: now, if only the entire thing could be made of the same…

Weight-wise, picking up the laptop for the first time was a heavens-open-and-angels sing moment, as the chassis had just enough heft to not float away. And then I picked up the battery and it turned into another laptop. However, it’s advertised as getting 10 hours, so I’m fine with the introduction of balance/rotational momentum issues around the hinge of the computer.

Second impressions: the keyboard is pretty good, it feels better than the HP keyboard, which felt kind of sticky. The keys are kind of loud, but not overly so. The media keys overloaded on the arrow keys is somewhat strange, and it’s getting me into strange habits, so it’s a very, very slight negative. The screen size (13") is a nice balance between portability and size/resolution (another 1366x786), and the screen brightness is a little less than some other laptops I’ve owned, but still turns out fair. The touchpad is initially interesting (hey! it’s covered with wood!), but becomes annoying until you learn where exactly in the veneer the touchpad extends.

Interestingly, I swapped out the SSD that had OS installs from the HP laptop, and they mostly worked fine without tweaks. Windows required some more drivers, but it displayed a video signal, and linux just ran like there wasn’t any change in the underlying hardware. I suppose that once you have a live CD that runs most everywhere, it’s not very much work to have installs that also run most everywhere.

Another note on OS disparities: linux boots and shuts down faster than Windows (SSDs are so nice! yeahhhhhh), but Windows has much better battery life than linux (7h vs. 5h, with wifi on. Once you take out the wifi, it boosts to something like 8h on windows). Also, linux runs hotter than Windows: take what you will from such qualitative measures.

After a few more impressions: the wood is very hard to take care of. For instance, the wrist rests on the laptop soak up oils from the bare skin, and it starts to act like hard plastic and with regards to oil, which was one of the qualities I didn’t like about my Dell. The outer shell hasn’t fared much better, since it picked up all sorts of dents and scratches without much effort, which detracts from the aesthetic feel of the laptop. However, the rest of the chassis is still solid, and my only other gripe is the bevel around the screen, which is made of the annoying smooth plastic.

As for innards, rendering out scenes with Blender drives the CPU to around 90C, which probably isn’t that great for any of the electronics. Rendering with only 1 core lowered that temperature to ~70C, which is acceptable, but means that I’m not going to be rendering out any huge animated scenes soon, at least with this machine. I’ll have to look into getting 6-core machines sooner than later…

Oh, and the RAM situation is less than ideal: the maximum 4GB limit is already grating against my needs. However, since I’m planning on not using this as my workhorse machine, the limit shouldn’t matter much.

tldr; The Asus U33JC-A1 is a solid machine, slightly more expensive than needed, but aesthetically pleasing in several ways with only a few cosmetic blemishes and without compromising efficiency.