End of Semester Review

So it’s been a while. Sorry about that, I’ve been kind of… busy. And not the making-cool-stuff sort of busy, more of the oh-my-god-finals-are-coming-AHHHH-THEY’RE-ALREADY-HERE sort of busy. But now it’s over, and I’m essentially guaranteed all A’s and A minuses in the reported-to-the-registrar sort of way. That was somewhat surprising because I didn’t always get straight A’s at UPS, where the classes weren’t always trying to kill you; but at the same time it’s not surprising at all, because around 80% of the material was old hat to me.

So now that I have some time to actually think back and reflect on my time in New York, the foremost question is how everything panned out, versus how I thought it would pan out at the beginning of the year. But before that, perhaps a comparison and contrast:

• I went from living in a basement to living 7 stories above the street. There was a bit more light reaching my window (curse you, tall buildings that I am not in!) but the size of the window more than made this move a huge gain in the not-being-gollum sector.
• I went from living in a suburb-ish sort of area to a decidely urban area. UPS being in a suburban area really closes off the school and isolates it into its own sort of ecosystem, whereas Columbia being uptown of a huge urban center really... I'd say it doesn't open up the campus, but boy is the ecosystem definitely more of a niche.
• I went from being a junior to being a junior. This is weird because you're taking lower lever classes, but you're *old*. You end up talking to freshmen, because they're the only ones without established groups, and it's striking how they seem so naive and young. Ahh, youth...
• I went from being on a first-name basis with several professors to "oh hello, do you remember my from that one class? I don't have time to do research with you right now, and I'm going to be gone in a year. Opps, year gone, goodbye!" (I really, really hope this sort of thing doesn't happen)
• I went from being a pasty recluse to being a pasty recluse.

So how was I expecting New York to pan out? I was expecting… I’m not sure, anymore. A geek mecca? (Except that would have been obviously not probable, given the relative placements of MIT and Columbia) Now that I think about it, I just went without an agenda and decided to take whatever life threw at me. I didn’t know what New York was like; I based my 3/2 decision on who gave me more financial aid, not on which school would give me the better opportunities or whatever. I had no idea what I was getting myself into; I only was vaguely expecting something big.

So I wasn’t expecting too much, but I had some ideas about the ‘geek mecca’ that I was looking for, and to an extent Columbia has delivered. I will note that the geeks at Columbia are more inclusive of the business side of things, which kind of threw me off: hell, we didn’t have enough geeks at UPS to even talk about doing startups.

It might be because I got involved with the geekiest-sounding group I could find on campus, and while some of the ADI goals are aligned with my own (CODE CODE CODE) some of the others are somewhat different (encourage entrepreneurship!) and the main goal of the ADI (geek herding!) is a nobel one that has to be done to do great things, but it’s… still grunt work (unlike CODE CODE CODE). So what I was trying to say is that since I’m involved with the ADI, I have no idea if my conclusion that Columbia geeks are more business oriented than geeks elsewhere is true or fallen prey to selection effects or not, which reminds me I need to actually do things with the IEEE group on campus, since I managed to miss almost every single meeting/event thrown by IEEE, and there are probably some hardware hackers lurking with them.

Like always, some professors are cool, and some other professors just don’t give a shit. I suppose this is standard for large research institutions, but it’s a definite paradigm shift from UPS, where most of the professors did give a shit about the students. I suppose that the one class where the professor was less than engaging could be explained by the fact it was held in the early evening, and covered some of the mind-numbing basics of the field [FOURIER TRANSFORMS AGAIN??? I MEAN WHEEE], but that’s no excuse for being inaccessible and having the difficulty of the midterms jump all over the place.

I realized (finally) that classes are somewhat of a waste of time: all the material covered, at least in these lower level courses, can be found in the book. However, I need motivation to do the studying, and there’s nothing like locking me in a room for an hour to raise motivation for studying. Also, I’m paying for something, and by golly I’ll be getting something out of it.

Being relatively far away from campus sucks. I used to be able to roll out of bed and get to class in 2 minutes, and now I have to actually plan out my mornings. Well, having structure isn’t a bad thing, but gosh darn it if convenience isn’t swell.

It’s depressing: I sat down and tried to play some piano on the last day of classes, and it’s all gone. My violin is going, too. Have to do something about that…

Out of steam, I’ll do a end-of-year post on New Years Eve or something.

Merry Newtonmas!

Botacon is a robotics conference being held in Brooklyn, happening right now. It consists of a bunch of talks by people from robotics, like some dudes from Makerbot and Make magazine, which I was planning on going to. I say planning, because I’m not in Brooklyn: instead, I’m in my dorm. It’s quite unfortunate: these cool things are happening in my backyard, and I don’t even go to them…

The reason I’m still in my dorm is that I finally screwed up my sleep schedule. Being something of an insomniac, I have been waking up at 9am for the last week or so: except for the last 2 days, it’s been working wonders on my sleep schedule. Waking up at a constant time, instead of whenever I have to wake up, has seemingly cured my insomnia. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not getting 7+ hours of sleep each night, so I’m always tired: that notion lends credence to the thought that without enough sleep, I have to crash sometime. And I think I crashed this morning, right through 9am to 12am.

Staying up to 3am did not help things. Why did I stay up to 3am? My laptop is… less than satisfactory. For the record, the color really does appear differently under different lighting conditions: I have a feeling my friends are going to take one look at it and say something along the lines of “WTH IT’S SILVER FOO WHACHA COMPLAIN’IN ABOUT”. Ah well. At this point, it’s the internals that have really stood out to me: the touchpad is not quite an unusable monstrosity once I got used to it, and removing the fingerprint reader drivers removes that particular annoyance.

Nay, I do believe that the main cause of my troubles is the i7, which I got on a whim after I discovered upgrading to an i7 cost the same as keeping the i5 due to a coupon. The i7 seems to be putting out prodigious amounts of heat, and conversely draining the battery at a prodigious rate. When I cold-boot my laptop, it takes about a minute before a very particular spot under the laptop becomes uncomfortably warm on my lap. Then, battery life takes a dive, and I’m left with about 3 hours of life, max. I spent much of last night trying to figure out if switching to an i5 would help on both counts, which seems like it should help.

At any rate, I should probably change out of my pajamas, and actually get stuff done today. Hopefully Botacon comes back for a botacon 1 next year…

Oh hi. Since you’re reading this, you probably know that my old laptop died and refused to be resurrected without a bit of magical malarky involving increasingly higher sums of money. Being a good consumer, I decided I’d instead shell out for a bit better laptop, as my friend the lower-end Dell Inspiron was starting to grate at my edges: another budget laptop seemed to be just asking for more of the same. Of course, I didn’t go that much higher: I’m still a student, after all, and I’ll be a cheap bum at heart for a while yet. I sprung for the HP dm4, with a few modifications thrown in to make it palatable to my inner power user.

First impressions: damn, it is pink! I know, I should be above that, but my inner man-child was still unnerved by the unpacking. After seeing my friend’s HP, which was quite definitely silver, I thought those dm4-is-pink haters were just being silly. They aren’t; such a shade of light red can bring burly men to question their masculinity. Of course, being a refined gentleman instead of a burly man-ape means I don’t have to care. Maybe. OH GOD THE COLOR IT BURNS MY EYES

Second impressions: damn, this mouse pad really does suck! I thought the reviewers were being, I don’t know, whiny or something. Surely such a small problem is trivial, right? Especially when the reviewers still suggested the Envy 14 despite the problems with it. Nay, HP’s mouse pad really does suck. It doesn’t pick up gestures, which is one of its selling points (not for me), and the buttons are just not going to see very much use because some UX engineer decided it would be a fantastic idea to extend the capacitive-sensing area into the buttons. I can work around it, but such an integral part of the laptop shouldn’t even be noticeable.

Next impression: this keyboard feels weird. Not such a big problem, but while I’m airing my grievances, I might as well be thorough.

Fingerprint reader is somewhat annoying: I’m probably not going to use this. Disabling it is only 5 minutes away, but really, I don’t feel quite like doing it right now. I will have to do it, though, or the constant accidental swipes across it that pop up a setup wizard are going to drive me insane.

The i7 seems to run a bit hot, even when I’m not pushing it, and the 6GB of RAM is going to be very useful. I haven’t run very rigorous tests on the battery life, but it seems to be draining somewhat quicker than I was hoping (15% in 30 minutes, so a potential total of 3 hours. Not very long when I’m used to going for 6 hours between charges). Video card seems to be so-so so far: it couldn’t handle the stupid HP flash intro very well (a better approach would have been FUCK YOU, USER. YOU’LL LEARN TO USE A COMMAND LINE INTERFACE, AND YOU WILL LIKE IT. Really, that would’ve been the better approach here). Haven’t done any Blender work on it yet, so we’ll see how that goes. The switching mechanism between integrated and discrete graphics is less than perfect, although it seems that it could be solved by software update.

The screen is somewhat small: I guess grabbing snatches of work on 21" monitors makes the 1366x768 resolution seem puny by comparison, but it still irks me that there’s no 1600x900 option for most sub-15" laptops. Definitely shelling out for a higher-res screen in my next laptop iteration. 14" seems like a good form factor, and the weight seems very reasonable (4.4lb).

The metal case is pretty cool, but that review that claimed it was ‘mostly encased in metal’ was wrong. Not that I’m complaining, since the plastic shell of my old laptop picked up all sorts of crap way too easily, which a semi-metal chassis should solve.

A number of my grievances are probably going to be solved tomorrow, when I will probably get the SSD that I ordered and do clean installs of everything, which means all the crappy software that comes with the laptop will be gone and I can install Ubuntu (good idea install Windows 7 and then Ubuntu).

All in all, it’s not an absolutely terrible laptop: I’m guessing most people would be fine with this laptop. I’m fine with it, too, for all it’s shortcomings (or maybe I just don’t want to go another day without my own computer?). I got some pretty nice internals for a pretty good deal (I essentially swapped out an i5 for an i7 for no increase in price), and I’m guessing that once I beat someone to death with this very light-red laptop, no one will question my sexual orientation. Maybe.

Without a computer to call my own.

I can do this.

Maybe.

So, I’ve been without a personal computer for 5 days now, with at least another 4 days ahead of me, minimum. For someone that thought he lived and died by his computing power, it’s been surprisingly bearable.

For a full accounting, my laptop’s video card fried, and it’s in the repair shop for at least a week. If that doesn’t work (I have a reasonable expectation that it should), then I’ll end up splurging and getting myself a good laptop: at least, not a lower end Dell. There are several shortcomings of my Inspiron 1545 that are annoying, like no numpad (for on the fly blender work), weird keyboard bevel material, weak screen/body joint, and no virtual machine support. So, even though I expect the repairs to work, I’m kind of hoping… they won’t?

Anyways, life without a personal computer. Between having a capable smartphone and plenty of University lab computers, life is pretty manageable. It’s not a big thing, but I managed to hack together a bunch of ADI stuff (custom QR codes, several flyers) without pretty much any of my usual resources. Made me feel badass. Ha.

However, the little things drag down on me. Not having the resources to do my homework on my computer is not so great: I can’t rip through lines of a math proof with LaTeX/Emacs and C-a C-k C-n C-y, and can’t change my intermediate results on the fly (have to erase them when you write it out. Unfortunate). It doesn’t seem like typing out your homework in LaTeX would be faster, but it at least feels like it is. For some reason, though, I finished all my homework early (even when just writing it out), and then lazed around for pretty much an entire day. Bah.

I can’t work on my pet projects the way I want to: for instance, there’s no place for me to pop open Eagle and start designing the clock PCBs I need. That’s annoying.

Wouldn’t want to be this way forever. Only for a few more days, hopefully.

Excuse the incomplete thoughts. Computer withdrawal, you know.

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.

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?