A contrived world I find myself fallen into: a little light filters down through the haze, barely illuminating brazenly artificial structures that I must scale, to reach the overworld once more. My current guide brings forth a feeble light, and leads the way.

Why this particular task is a rite of passing for our culture, I cannot say: glimpses of the overworld afforded to us show me and my brethren who also undertake this task that the mountains we will climb after exiting this cave are natural, lacking the sharp, geometric corners and flat faces that make up these artificial counterparts.

When we started at the very bottom of these mountain ranges, oh so very long ago, we were afforded more leeway, the first guides carrying bigger lanterns. But how slowly they went, and as future guides strode with more urgency, carrying smaller lamps, one had to learn to stay on the path, lest one be lost in the gloom. In between thoughts of where to place another step, perhaps a small thought registers an interesting piece of architecture passing by before it is swallowed by the twilight. If thoughts wander too far, then I am liable to slip, slip off the peaks and cliffs to who knows where.

Not only is an uncertain end reason to keep to the straight and narrow: if I reach the goal first, then I win. Everyone has told me so: my parents, every one of my guides, and even my peers would offer up grudging admiration for having outrun them with stoic determination. To what end is the winning aimed? I do not know, but surely it is worth it.

And, up ahead! A flash of light, which my guide tells me is coming from the machinery that drives the lift at the goal. The lift that will lift me and my peers to the overworld. It looks to come from a place not far off: I only have to put down my head and trod forward a bit more, and it will be over.

An allegory for academia, into which I couldn’t fit everything I wanted to say. Hence, this addendum.

First, the bad: it’s not as easy as throwing yourself off a cliff and finding there’s a portal to the overworld that catches you. No, your parents had to pay coin to allow your passage through the trials, and saddle you with some of the debt, so if you take the easy way out you still have the associated debt without the prestige that comes from weathering the trials.

Then, the good: when I leave school, I’ll also be leaving behind a nice, structured life that didn’t require much of me outside of studying and trying to maximize my point spread (extracurriculars, though…). In particular, I’ll be leaving behind friends of goodly caliber, and the density of awesome people that made meeting all of them possible. These are the good things I’ll be leaving behind, which I’ll have to work to combat (less the first than the second).

Finally, I don’t think Universities are optimizing for teaching: there’s not a tight feedback loop in which the teachers get to know which methods have the greatest impact, and are moved to use those methods. This might be changing, but it’s gonna get ugly before it gets better.

And that is why I am looking forward to leaving academia.

You know what, I just wrote a ton of stuff covering some projects, like dod3catgraph and pensievr, and also documenting my time at Redwood Systems. I’m counting that as four days of writing, because it is a ton of writing, and unfortunately I’m the one holding the reigns in this particular regime. I still have to put something out for today, though, so heads up for a post soon.

Chilly night, possibly preceding a snowfall. Feeble jackets won’t keep the cold out for long.

My hackathon illness seems to have followed me from California: HackNY saw me talking with people rather than finishing something. And getting 4 hours of sleep, which is simultaneously tolerable and not.

Or more generally, it seems the pace of my hacking has fallen off, and other things shoulder in. The state of my writing in particular has fallen into disrepair, with a few posts sitting in the edit queue for a few months now.

Well, it’s more accurate to say that everything I’m doing is slowly starving for time. Time and will, but mostly time: there is only so much will to go around, and bioengineering isn’t good enough to fix that yet.

But really, the only reason I write here after 1.5 months of silence is the fact that missing an entire calendar month without blogging anything is… unacceptable. Even if nothing especially newsworthy happened to me this month, it would irk to be missing “October 2011” in that archive list. And so, I go. Hopefully next month holds more flash in store.

As Maker Faire is fast approaching, I happen to be in the making spirit. Actually, that isn’t the reason why I decided to try out DIY book binding, but no matter. The fact of the matter is that propaganda sometimes takes on long forms, and sometimes getting people to read things on the internet is a pain.

Surprisingly enough, doing the binding yourself isn’t hard: time consuming, perhaps, but not difficult (and even the time aspect is mostly because I had no idea what I was really doing). I followed the helpful instructions from diybookbinding.com, which essentially boils down to “tap the pages so they line up, and then slap glue on the spine”.

Some things I learned:

• White glue (Elmers, PVA, what have you) seems to be working just fine. A bunch of sites swear by gorilla glue, but it cost 4x times more, so I decided to make this first batch with Elmers and see how they survived.
• Dicing up everything without folding it first makes gluing the spine much easier: if you try to fold all the pages over into something that looks bookish (8.5"x5.5" format), the cutting tends to go one way or another, and you end up with an uneven spine. If I had an even spine, then everything would have been hunky-dory.
• If you use a dedicated paper cutter (and you should), then cutting fewer pages at a time will make the cuts more accurate: too many pages lets the top pages slide around, so the spine is again uneven.

Honestly? It took around 4 hours to do 3 books. However, now that I know what not to screw up, I think the next batches should go faster.

And I’ll post some pictures of my very diy efforts soon.

EDIT: and now there are pictures! I’ll add more as I make more batches.

Oh my. Last weekly post.

• Decided that the reprap would have to wait until I got myself across the country. Yup, no print in California before the end of the summer, very sad.
• Finished up my internship. I'll post about it soon, but suffice it to say that I had loads of fun and got myself a fair bit of experience.
• Finished K&R. I learned stuff about ANSI C I hadn't seen before, and saw some actual good C getting slung around (sans error checking, which is arguably not good C at all). Like all forays into lower level computing, it makes me really appreciate things like objects and exceptions... You know, things that our parents couldn't have while they were going to school, uphill both ways. At any rate, taking things from the standard library as examples of how to write C style code is an interesting one: I have yet to see if this would work with python. The best thing about the examples is that they aren't contrived: they solve fundamental problems in very C-ish ways, and introduce you to the mechanisms behind the libraries you will be using on a regular basis. It's a very elegant way to introduce examples.
• Did a knight move: first up to Seattle, and then across the country and back to New York. Yup, I'm a chess piece.

So now here I sit, moving into a school dormitory for the last time (at least, in my undergraduate education). It’s been good, summer, but now it’s time to rest. Autumn is here, and I wouldn’t want you to see all the blood that’s gonna come out of this encounter.

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.

Too late for an End of Year Review now. Oh well, it’s not like I had much to say anyways (At least, stuff that I haven’t already said or won’t say at some point in time).

I whipped up an animation in too many weeks, tis on my youtube.

Now… time to apply to internships!

I swear I’ll be back in blogging shape soon. Until then… ta ta!

So you should note that I moved the blog root, and I’ve figured out how to get my project documentation into wordpress. Not that I’ve actually done that, it might be a while before I get around to doing that.

Before I lag too much in time, HackNY was pretty awesome. Coded up something semi-useful, although it took me way too long to do it, and it screwed up my internals; this will go up on the projects page once I get that up. The week-long awesome next week is going to be even worse on my stability, and I’m already pretty gosh-darn unstable. I need to finish so many things, and make some more time to do some more things, so I probably will have to drop off the face of the earth for around 2 weeks, optimistically speaking.

See you guys on the other side.

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.

My gosh, so much happens in a week.

So, I got evicted (not my fault, although now I know that I have to keep tabs on the people I rent from, too), started really whaling on my internship (partly why I haven’t been posting lately), and played out in public. Granted, I sucked, and I’ve been out of practice for about a week (and my god, why can’t they leave a grand where I can get to it, and let me at it when I can get to it?), and there wasn’t anyone around to hear it, but it’s the thought that counts! Right? Right…

But since real life is boring (at least until I start finishing projects, which are all in varying states of incompletion, aka don’t expect anything soon), I’ll be talking about something that I’ve slowly come to realize. It’s been a feeling that’s been with me around a year, starting as something innocuous, but I’ve only recently figured out what it actually means (I know, it’s kind of late, so my word-smithing is somewhat off. Do forgive me).

I realize just how cool of a place UPS was, and I wish (in a way) that I could’ve stuck around for a little longer, or maybe gone back and done some things differently.

Of course, I only realize that UPS was a delightful place to be when I’m leaving it, as such things are apt to happen. In this case, the relationship is not entirely coincidental: getting to know how other schools do bureaucratic work gives me an appreciation for the close knit-edness of us around UPS. For instance, I just need maybe 2 days to a week in a machine shop to finish the mechanical bits of my Mendel. The fact it’s not finished doesn’t mean that I’m lazy, just that it’s nearly impossible to get permission to wrangle around in a machine shop here at Calpoly. I can see why (not a student, summer quarter, safety up the wazzoo (although I think that everyone should adopt metrix:createspace’s liability release, hehe)), but it’s frustrating to be right in the middle of an engineering school and not be able to engineer something. So, I’ll have to use up part of my week back home to hack at it, or figure out how to navigate Columbia quickly and get access to a machine shop there.

But so what? No one cares about how Universities handle machine shop access. Rather, it is indicative of the larger ways and methods of how things are done, and it is with regret that I now know I haven’t been using my professors as much as I should have been. Now that I actually know that, I fear that Columbia is going to be a much different sort of place. Maybe not quite so different: professors that are enthusiastic about teaching are everywhere (the converse is also true, unfortunately). However, Columbia is big enough to have TAs teaching classes, rather than having professors teaching every single class, all the time. Time lost getting to know the actual prof.

Then, there’s the geekiness factor. But Nathan! you may be thinking, Isn’t that one of the reasons you didn’t like UPS? Because geeks that you could engage with were few and far between? True, but not being surrounded by geeks means that I’m not completely cut off from the larger world, that I can have a direct impact on the world of those around me just by being geeky, especially being enthusiastic about being geeky. Of course, I missed this sort of chance to really engage people, although I really wasn’t quite geeky enough most of the time back then… so I guess I’m only partially off the hook. Cause, you know, a real geek would have already been geeky enough.

And there’s some of the usual suspects: leaving behind friends, a familiar place, a familiar admin system, and a campus small enough to sprint across in less than 5 minutes. That last one was still causing me trouble up until last week; this last week of work has been me coming in and working until I get too hungry for dinner, so I haven’t been strictly keeping tabs on getting to work on time. Gonna have to fix that before I get to Columbia.

So, didn’t know what I had until it’s gone.

Mind you, I’m really anticipating a different flow in New York, a new chapter in life, and a whole lot more learning, so I’m not going to change my mind about moving. These are just some thoughts about what insights hindsight has given me concerning the past few years.

Enough rambling. Guy is still playing with his flash editor on the couchahemmy bed, so I guess I’ll get him to move.