So, it’s been a REALLY REALLY REALLY long time since I’ve done a story, so I stayed up to 3AM to bring you guys this one. I’m somewhat out of practice, although no one might notice since the noise in quality is so much more than the signal. Ha. Enjoy!

Edit: man, it’s really short, too. My bad.

Status update: misses California

It hit her when she was doing the dishes, flying across years and piercing the veil of the mundane such that the plate jerked to a stop in midsplash.

Her kids would never understand California.

Ever.

Not in the way she knew it: no, they would only read about it in textbooks, hear stuffy teachers pontificate endlessly on the political leverage the different political parties sought to blah blah blah such that the impact on the revolution was blah blah now, let's assess the validity blah blah blah blah BLAH.

That, and the networks had started carrying features that examined California in detail, alongside those that examined King Tut's tomb, or King Charles's left big toenail. It was really a shame, it had only been... well, it had been 9 years ago. She supposed she was getting old. But they would learn about it from there, too, history watered down and marketed to the lowest common factor.

And they had their own California, now, new cultural meccas where the weather was charming (to a point) and would-be-stars tried to make their name. She supposed she could tell them that their Peru was her California, and let that be that.

But they would know California better as a political cry, a cautionary tale, an unmitigated disaster before their time.

They wouldn't know it like she did, the way lovers know each other. A chance employment, a passionate spark, and she had fallen in love, first with the place. But it wore on her in quiet ways, and the torrid love affair came to an abrupt end. Not a moment to soon, either...

When she heard the news, though, she still cared: still cared for California, now gone. The beaches, the cities, all the people deluded, talented, vain, and brilliant. She wouldn't live there, and she now couldn't, but...

She still misses California. Even now.

The screen door clattered open, and she blinked. Somehow, all the dishes had gotten done.

Dear Pacific Northwest:

How have you been? I’ve been good, acting as a vector for illness in Columbia has been fun. I think I got my roommate sick… whoops.

Anyways, I have to tell you that while you’ve been close to my heart as a rain-filled moderate clime, I’m afraid I’ve found someone else.

No, I don’t know if I love her yet, I’ve only known her for a month. But my, just today she soaked my pants all the way through. And then my socks and shoes, too. I tried running, but it’s no use: she’s always there, even staring at me through the window when I roll up my blinds. It’s only a tad creepy. But all in all, the rain in NYC is much more passionate than yours, and warmer, too. I can’t decide if I’m happy with this or not, but I guess I’m stuck with her for the next two years.

I’ll talk to you later, or something, after I get into a torrid love affair with NYC and have a messy breakup with her.

So Facebook chat is really dumb, and doesn’t save chat history. If it does, getting to it is non-intuitive, and it’s just giving me another reason to dislike (hahaha) Facebook. As if I needed another reason.

ANYWAYS

Maker Faire was pretty damn awesome.

I could leave it at that, but my god that would be a disservice to everyone that wasn’t there and reads my blog, which translates into maybe 10 people, if you’re optimistic about the size of my readership. To sum up the experience, I don’t think I’ve been somewhere with so many cool geeks showing off cool things all in one place. And now, I’m just going to list what I saw:

• Makerbot crews
• Reprappers from around the area, and even some from Montana or Idaho
• New reprap boards
• A veritable lack of NYC reprappers
• Man, I bet some hip-hop artist is going to pick up the tag 'reprapper'
• Just watch
• I did NOT get to see arc attack. Quite disappointing, something crazy stuff about 'room capacity' and 'public safety'
• The local hackerspace booths: NYC Resistor (I have to say Metrix's hobo token is much more badass), Alpha One Labs
• Lock picking booth run by TOOOL. Didn't manage to crack their locks, but I only spent 3 minutes at their booth
• Epilog laser (should we make our space green, or get a laser cutter?! Oh, the agony!), Autodesk, some commercial 3D printers
• shop bot
• Make Magazine (duh)
• Couple of dudes presenting their thesis work, like interactive music, drawing with computer interaction
• Element 14
• mbed - realized I'd forgotten people are trying to make money with this stuff when I asked 'are you open sourcing the server code?' and they laughed.
• huge straw structure
• games, of course. physical games, of course
• rubix cube solving robot
• live music remixer using only sound recorder and windows media player
• arm overlay that lets the computer know how the arm is positioned
• fabric hacking! Especially liked the ball o' yarn pressure sensor, and the tape bend sensor
• utility kilts
• The human sized mouse trap
• mathematica playing cards. Seriously. They'll likely be the geekiest cards I'll ever have
• lots of LEDs
• guy that played guitar while wearing a monitor on his head
• luminescent fluid in tubes
• HUGE LED arrays, with separately attached LEDs.
• monome-like devices
• cart-based youtube video uploader
• the reverse geocache guy
• over priced fair food, of course
• microsoft attempting to shoulder into the hobbyist electronics market
• book scanners: at least two guys were doing it
• guy in a 3-4m tall germ suit
• jet-powered fair ride
• biobus!
• sparkfun!
• open STM (scanning tunneling microscope)!
• lots of people trying to sell shirts and stuff
• 3D light show with yarn and a projector
• hydroponics
• talk by a dude that wants to use the building-top water containers as a city-wide cosmic ray detector
• learned exactly how pressure waves kill people in explosions
• listened to Wolfram talk, which was somewhat disappointing because all he did was do random stuff with Mathematica and push his cellular automata based view of the world
• talk by the creator of scratch
• talk by the creator of lilypad
• talks by lots of people that wrote books
• derived statistic: child would have to work full time on getting kidnapped for some 750,000 years for it to certainly be kidnapped. I have some qualms about this derived stat, but it's interesting none-the-less
• I thought the talk titled 'Sustainable hacker spaces' was going to about making hackerspaces green. Nope! It was about how to keep the hacker space alive, a much more pressing concern
• conductive play dough
• guys that want to stick gardens on the top of buses. They're not entirely crazy, either!
• floor that generates power from footsteps
• carrot flutes
• wearable, welded together steampunk-ish suits (think big daddy, or fallout 3 cover guy, but much more chaotic)
• science history museum
• computer recyclers
• some kids trying to rickroll the subway car (okay, so this was on the way back home, and they weren't at maker faire, but still!)

Seeing all those finished projects is a really good motivator: at least, it feels like one. We’ll see if I get things done sooner than later.

My octopart (day 1) and xkcd (code compiling) shirts got positive attention. Woot. Geek status boost!

Okay, I really have to get back to… um, doing homework. And listening to trippy japanese pop. Yeah.

Oh! And Dresden Codak AND Methods of Rationality both updated within a day of each other! Yudkowsky and Diaz must be conspiring together, or something (sadly, this doesn’t even seem to be that far-fetched).

I’m headed out to check out Alpha One Labs, a pretty inclusive hackerspace. Nyc resistor is another hackerspace that I want to check out, but they seem notably more exclusive, so I guess I’ll have to just wait until they hold a class to dig into their space.

Only problem with Alpha One Labs is just how far away out is from Columbia: it’s all the way over in the middle of Brooklyn, which in terms of subway time is about an hour, which really doesn’t bode well as an indicator of how much time I’m going to spend around there. I could do homework like I’m writing a blog right now, but the jerking train isn’t really conductive for even plain studying, so really, I can’t just pop over and spend an hour there.

Note that it wouldn’t matter quite as much if Columbia was really open, in terms of machine shops or even tool caches, but for the amount of money I’m paying to attend this school, they should really make making things a whole lot easier, not less transparent. For example, one cool thing about calpoly was the fact they had a craft center, outfitted with a fair complement of tool, which anyone could use. There might be some equivalent here, but I doubt it (calpoly is very much undergrad oriented), and if there is they do a terrible job of advertising themselves.

Man, this humidity is really screwing with my ability to type. We’ll see how alpha one labs is, and work from there.

A COUPLE DAYS LATER

Alpha One Labs seems pretty cool: the space isn’t quite as organized as Metrix, and it doesn’t look like the scene is very strong overall, but I guess it’s one of the stronger hackerspaces around NYC. We’ll see how things continue to pan out.

Sometimes I forget that I live in the real world, a world full of entropy and forces of nature, so it’s always good when small things like getting passed over for a job or not getting into a music program remind me about that. Getting my map out of sync with the territory is always a terrible thing…

So, not miffed about not getting violin lessons or being part of the university chamber music program: getting to know another violin teacher would be cool, because I’ve only had 3 throughout my life (and more is better, asymptotically), but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep doing classical music when I signed up for auditions. I’ve been doing classical music for almost 10 years, and I’m moderately good at it, but it’s nowhere near good enough to even make a small local impact. And ultimately, this is bothersome: I’ve spent maybe a solid third of a year playing the violin, and for that much playing, a minimal number of people hear my playing. No, I’m not trying to become a professional musician. Yes, I’ve personally benefited from all the practice and musical thought patterns drilled into my grey matter.

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that if it doesn’t move people (emotionally or in dance), then it’s worthless. Thus…

Ah, screw trying to fill up a blog post. No one listens to my playing, no one cares about my playing, and I’m tired of it. I’m going to try my hand at more pop-ish music (ha. Anything next to classical is pop), and try writing my own music.

We’ll see how that goes.

Back on the original tack, I’m a bit more miffed about not getting that sysadmin position. Ah well, time to apply to those tech support jobs…

On a different note, there seem to be a large number of geeks around here (good indicator is the fact I attended a talk by a speaker that blogged something a read a few days before). I’m just not sure how to get them to come out into the open: maybe RAM on a stick?

Well, I wasn’t planning on putting more than a week between blog posts, but I’ve realized it takes a whole lot of discipline to blog regularly. Sitting down and finding time to document life and riff on it is actually kind of hard, even for a shut in like myself. I suppose being in the middle of New York isn’t helping (moving to Iowa might…).

Social skills have gotten better, although they’re below par. I still can’t figure out what normal people talk about: usually, I rely on the ‘year/major/dorm’ question list, and after that it’s hard to figure out where to go from there. Note that sometimes I pick up on things like musicality, but many times I don’t have too many threads to pick up and run with. An obvious first effort would be to try to talk about music with everyone, but that doesn’t quite work: for instance, trying to talk about classical music with most people is somewhat painful. Additionally, you have to stick with semi-universal subjects. I have a feeling trying to get people to talk about what they love is a good approach (Feynman once commented that you have to have asymmetrical information for a discussion. Or, well, he said something like that. I suppose he would say something more like “you can only talk when someone knows something and someone else doesn’t”. I’ll have to find that quote… and I have to work on being clear in communication. Drat!), but I have no idea how to draw people out and get them to talk about their passions. I tried it with an English major during orientation, which led to quite the failure in interesting communication. Ah well, I’ll get it one day.

On a tangent, church went okay, big take away thought is that I need to get back into debates. I’ve forgotten how fun they can be, and I have more ammunition than ever! Granted, I had no idea what I was doing with it, so it didn’t actually help. One very, very bad thing that I found when debating, though, is the fact that I am scared of losing. Honestly, it took me about a week to realize this, and another 5 minutes to get myself to stop rationalizing. If Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has taught me anything, it’s taught me that honest self-examination is progress: you have to train yourself to stare at the pain instead of flinching away. So, I’ll say it again: I am afraid that Christianity is right, and I am wrong.

So why is this bad? It means that I’m not internally balanced, rationally off-kilter, basically unable to examine evidence without bias. I undermine my own basis for debate, undermine my own credulity. Now, I’m not saying that there’s a bunch of evidence that Christianity is right, and I’m afraid to acknowledge it because it’ll undermine my atheistic position and I can’t go on sinning, but rather that I’m afraid of being wrong, especially after I switched sides already. Hogwash! you may be thinking. Evidence has compelled you in one direction, and more evidence may compel you in another: there’s nothing wrong with going where the evidence leads you. True, but I never said the basis for this fear is rational. I feel I must point out that the fact that I’ve singled out Christianity is not rational either: there’s a whole pantheon of pantheons to choose from, and I’m still fixating on the religion I’ve been brought up with. Ah well.

Moving away from abstract topics, classes seem not-too-hard, the city has cooled down considerably, and I’m starting to really get the hang of walking across the street. Attended the New York Tech Meetup, which was enlightening: I feel it lends credence to Paul Graham’s musings on city environments.

On a completely unrelated note, I hope this program I’ve been working on for the last week or so will get finished soon, so I can show all of you and… uh, be done with it! Whoooooooooo.

Anyways, it’s time to find some food.

Okay, so I suppose I should finish up my chronicles on my adventures in New York, especially now that I’m situated at the beginning of orientation.

Not too much happened on Sunday, just hung around Columbia and went to church (NOW I’M GOING TO TALK ABOUT RELIGION, SKIP DOWN IF YOU DON’T WANT TO DEAL WITH IT). It’s still awkward to hang around Christians (in church, where they expect mainly other Christians to be), especially when family is around (which makes me Christian by proxy unless I say something; I usually don’t). It feels like I should blurt out the fact that I’m an atheist as the second thing out of my mouth, just to make sure that there aren’t any misunderstandings: I mean, I think that religious memes in general need to die. We’re working from different axioms, and the people I talk to should know that.

It doesn’t have to be awkward: I could announce I’m an atheist, see how people respond, and church hop if I outstay my welcome. Maybe be kind of a reverse-evangelist. That particular course of action, though, is only possible if I develop my social acumen (orientation has shown that my social acumen has fallen a bit, and I’ll need to see if I can change that).

So going to church doesn’t have to be awkward. It doesn’t have to be boring (ex. could write responses to sermons as they are being preached, which is way more interaction than a passive intake of knowledge), and as a ‘fallen child’ of the faith, I know the culture and society of the church (evangelical) and can handle it. I won’t talk about how my parents insist that I attend church, though, because I smell a 3-hour long essay and no sleep for me. I’ll spill everything in a mega-post someday.

OKAY, I’M DONE TALKING ABOUT RELIGION. YOU CAN COME BACK NOW.

Orientation was okay: got moved in, cleared up some things, and started to meet people. Really, routine orientation stuff. Thankfully, not quite as insane as the last orientation I attended…

However, I did notice that my social skills have deteriorated a bit. My response times are noticeably lagging, and I’ve forgotten what normal people talk about. Please don’t tell me I have to immerse myself in pop culture to make friends: I was hoping for a mecca of geek-dom, but none is yet forthcoming. Ah well, should have known better: the geek-dom doesn’t reside in the place, it resides in you (is this pattern-matching wisdom, aka, filling in something that sounds wise?).

Random thought: I had been thinking that lying to my children about Santa Claus wouldn’t be something I would do, but it might put a good amount of weight towards anti-authoritarianism, which should balance some of the implicit trust in the child’s main authority figure. In other words, lying about Santa might be an important part of growing up.

Have I mentioned how much I’m going to miss Washington weather?

Before we start the next iteration of our scheduled New York blog series, I would like to note that the score is currently 2 TV, 0 Nathan. I thought that since I could listen to music and blog, and since blogging in a room with a TV shouldn’t be all that different from blogging with music, that I should be able to blog with the TV on. Unfortunately, I had never watched the series House before, and I managed to catch what my brother told me was one of the more mind-bendy episodes. Note: I think that shows like House can be addictive for me, because it feels like I’m learning something (there’s something intellectual going on somewhere in here, I know it!) when I’m really not. Rather, I’m learning with something that’s been diluted somewhere between useful and homeopathic. Anyways…

Sorry if I cut this one short, I couldn’t sleep last night, so I’m running short on it now. Probably shouldn’t have eaten that chocolate, because now I don’t feel quite so low on energy. Rawr.

Thus ends day five of the adventure.

To remedy our previous skip over Korea Town, we hit it this morning. In comparison to lil’ Italy or China Town, Korea town is much smaller. However, it’s a whole lot less grubby than China Town. There’s none of this open fruit and fish stall business, for one, and let me tell you that all the Korean restaurants I passed by so far have been pretty gosh darn immaculate. Oh, and the random-stuff shops that are pretty prevalent in China Town? There might’ve been one in Korea Town (not counting that book store). So what does this say about the Chinese vs. Koreans? Next to nothing.

After that, we hit Grand Central Station and the UN, both of which weren’t all that impressive. What was impressive was the street fair that we walked into on the way from the UN to lunch. From the end we were standing at, we could see booths stretching for a fair number of city blocks, with the street shut down all along the way.

A street. Shut down. In New York. For a street fair.

Didn’t expect that to happen.

Of course, we immediately ditched our plans to get lunch in Korea Town and got some gyros from a street vendor, and proceeded to shop around. Unfortunately, like all street fairs, it suffered from a pretty uniform booth makeup, such that once you saw part of it, you saw most of it.

After figuring that out, we ditched the fair (of course we bought stuff! To uphold the American way!) and tried to find Broadway theater. Surprise! There is no one Broadway theater, it’s a bunch of theaters. Learn something new everyday.

To wrap up most of our sight-seeing, we went and walked around on Brooklyn Bridge, which wasn’t the best idea after we spent the entire day walking to everywhere else. Like everything else, it wasn’t that impressive in person.

Moral of the story thus far: immersive VR can kill tourism.

And the way people take pointless pictures of things is… not cool. Taking another picture of the Empire State Building is pointless, since you can grab photos from the web whenever you want. Taking a picture of the Empire State Building while your family jumps off because they can’t handle the familial insanity any longer is much more unique.

End rant. Time to sleep.

Well, I’ve found out that trying to type things out while there’s a TV running is nigh impossible, possibly because I never watch TV, and TV has been evolving to be visually/aurally addictive as possible. So I’m left without immunities to the viral memes (mental genes) of the TV… oh noes…

Well, have to try anyways.

So, day three of the trip: like all good tourists, we had to visit the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, it turned out that getting into the crown of the statue wouldn’t happen, since tickets had been booked out 3 months in advanced. In fact, tickets into the base of the statue were booked out a few days, so instead we spent the afternoon just wandering around the statue and Ellis Island. Life lesson learned: pre-ordering tickets online will beat getting tickets on site. We skipped a huge line by doing it, which hopefully makes a big enough impression that I don’t forget about it.

Interesting and slightly creepy: while we were navigating through the tourist trap mess that is the Statue of Liberty, I found a cute girl. Actually, I found a bunch of cute girls. Actually, cute girls are everywhere in NYC. Even after you subtract out an estimate for the fob girls (I don’t have anything against fob girls, I just think that it’s very unlikely that it would work out with a fob girl, and anything impacting the already astronomically small unlikelihood of my chances with the ladies is bad. Very bad.), then you still end up with a fairly sized population. True, I’ve been walking past which seems like millions of people, but still!

But Nathan, you may be thinking. That isn’t creepy at all, it’s just you being a guy. True! Anyone that doesn’t accept my dude-ness can go suck it, and noting special members of the fairer sex is nothing even puritans can frown upon (okay, they may frown upon it, but they can’t stop their genes from trying to reproduce, so I say HA!). What’s creepy is that while I was looking at them, one of them was looking back at me. Staring at me. From the back of the fast food serving counter-area-ish (she was more of 16 feet away, instead of just 2 or something like she would be if it were any other burger joint). I know, because I snuck a glance, and noticed that she always seemed to be looking at me. All. The. Time. It wasn’t an empty stare, either. Then she went and manned a register for a short time, and then went back to leaning on the back wall and staring at me again.

Okay then.

I must mention that didn’t exactly fit my cute definition, either, especially when she was manning a fast food register in what is possibly one of America’s most commercialized National Parks. So, a little creepy? Maybe a silent plea for help? Filling me into her mid-day fantasy about how a dashing young man leaps over the counter, punches her mean boss, and rescues her from her crappy service job? Filling away as much information so that she can stalk me later? Trying to obtain my phone number through mind-reading? Thinking about how ugly I am (similar to how you can’t look away from car wrecks)?

In any case, it was pretty gosh darn unnerving, and I sure hope she’s not looking into my hotel window, or that she won’t be looking into my dorm window. As long as it doesn’t come to that, I’ll be okay. What’s thaAHHHHHH

(Note that I’m only typing about this because I never expect to see her again. Hopefully. IF YOU TRACKED DOWN AND ARE READING THIS BLOG (AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) GO AWAY)

After the statue, we visited Wall Street, the WTC site, and called that a day.

Horray! Day three of the adventure finished.

Since trying to offset the blogging isn’t working out at all, I’ll also be blogging about what we did today! (day four)

Another touristy thing to do is go on top of a tall building and take a look around New York. The traditional building to do this on is the Empire State building, but since everyone and their unexpected-relation-here does that, we just went to the top of the Rockefeller tower (building?). Again, pre-ordering stuff online saved our sanity (or what’s left of it). It still surprises me just how freaking huge central park is, which the Rockefeller building gave us a really good view of. It’s also surprising that it all seems so small when you happen to be 70 stories above street level; the feeling of vertical stretch one gets from the ground floor dissipates once you get to the top of one of those uber-tall buildings. Doesn’t seem quite so hectic and amazing from far up above, eh?

Of course, getting back to the ground floor removed that particular illusion.

Unfortunately, we visited Greenwich Village, or what’s left of it. Probably would’ve been cool to be in when it was an actual cultural source in the last century.

And like good Asians, we had to visit ChInAtOwN (please don’t punch me for the caps)!!!!!!!!(or the exclamation points) Welp, there’s a bunch of food stores, and a bunch of stores selling dvds and clothes. You know what I’m talking about. And lots of signs with Chinese characters. I swear, one of these days I’m going to discover how to time travel and introduce a sane alphabet to the Chinese.

Interestingly, Lil’ Italy is right next to Chinatown. I don’t have any idea how it happened either, since it’s more like little Italy runs directly down the center of Chinatown. Little Italy came first! Why did the Chinese see fit to just hop over Little Italy? An effort at cultural hegemony? Economic warfare? A mysterious and spooky turn of events? I’m no sociologist, so I probably won’t find out for a while. However, it did not escape my notice that Little Italy has outsourced their t-shirt-and-other-junk shops to the Chinese.

I’m not sure why Korea Town is so far away from these other ethnic enclaves: maybe they knew the Chinese would try and take over. Anyways, we’re going to have to visit it again, since we just passed by it while trying to catch a train back to the hotel.

Some final thoughts: I originally thought that I wouldn’t really settle into New York, even after the second day of taking a look at the city. It seemed so gaudy, hyper, grimy, technologically impotent, noisy, and lacking wonderful weather that I’ve been taking for granted for most of my life. And yeah, it is all those things, but it feels like I can have some fun living around here. There’s definite life in this city, and they might need an uber-geek in residence to spice things up more (ha) (ha). (ha)

(ha)

Plus, there are hot girls.*

WHEEEEEE!!!!

• Don’t give me that look.

So my l my life sucks, it's so boring.

HAHAHA.

Right.

I'm posting this from my shiny new Android phone while in the middle of New York, which is about as exciting as something can get without involving large amounts of wonton destruction.

And like any good blogger, I need to give my inexpert opinion and do a review.

So the phone is a Samsung Captivate running Android 2.1, with Swype preinstalled, with a gorgeous screen. Ahh, le amour... Surprise! I haven't rooted it yet, but I certainly plan on it, since it looks like the only way to really dev things is with a rooted phone...

Oh, you wanted to hear about New York? I guess I'll start from the beginning and go from there in chronological order...

Flying here and sleeping weren't interesting, so we'll skip those parts. We started off by checking out my new institute of higher learning, which is, like I've said before, is really tall. My dorm is pretty far away, considering that the rest of the campus is pretty geographically dense. Nice buildings are to be had by all, although I have a bit of a premonition that using the elevator to get to class won't be weird in a week or two.

I've been rambling for a bit too long without a tangent, so I'm going to riff a bit on some engineering thoughts from an unlikely source. While coming back from my summer stint in california, my cab driver commented on the age of New York's infrastructure and how it contributed to the hectic nature of the city. I can see evidence for this thesis; everything seems so old, for better or worse. It gives us the cool greek columns that adorn oodles of buildings in NYC, but the bathrooms behind the facade tell a different story. We'll see what sorts of constraints this tosses on my stay, but I'm fairly sure it'll contribute to capping my stay to a few years.

<\end tangent>

Next place...

Holy. Crap.

I don't think I've ever seen a bigger museum in my life. To get an idea of the scale, we burned off almost an hour to get through 1/18 of the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art. I could've spent a few days really exploring the entire thing. To be honest, I'm not that a big history buff, so I'd rather be doing other stuff, but man does it bring out my inner geek.

Also, central park is freaking huge. Enough said..

And Times Square is... Just as gaudy as I imagined.

Yup.

Okay, I'm not going to write blog posts on here anymore... It's taken me pretty much the entire day to finish this one and I don't relish the thought of doing it again.

Out.