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.

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.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Wait, I don’t think I’ve ever told you guys what I was actually studying. So, I guess I better start there, especially since I have a better idea of what I was doing now that it’s over.

The REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) was based in Calpoly, with a focus on robotics. My particular project’s long term goal was to track/follow sharks with multiple AUVs, with the short-term summer goal of tracking/following a boat with one AUV. In short, we (research team had 4 people in it, with two of us ending up branching towards some very different target) failed pretty miserably at attaining that goal. If you don’t mind, I’m going to rant a bit on why that happened, instead of blabbering about the details of the project, which aren’t that interesting anyways.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that speed is incredibly important. It’s not a very good mantra for a plethora of reasons, but didn’t have the raw speed to make up for our other shortcomings. For instance, I only knew rudimentary opamp theory going into the REU, but I spent the better part of a day learning what I needed to know. Now, spending a day learning 30-minutes of information is bad, and that sort of situation happened over and over again. Sometimes it was inevitable, like learning to use Eagle taking two days. Much of the time, it wasn’t. Generally speaking, I was working full time on a series of problems, and once days started to slip by with token progress, I should have known something was up.

Another problem I’m going to peg our failure to score a goal on is the agonizingly slow start we got off to. Now that it’s over, it feels like if we started with what we knew at our 3rd week, then we could’ve really done some damage. Not doing homework before getting there was a problem, certainly, as well as the closely related problem of not pounding our advisors with more important questions. I don’t even think the problem was well-defined in our heads until a few weeks in, which in retrospect was a very, very big problem, and probably why we didn’t know what we were doing for the first two weeks.

A comparison might be handy: it was very much unlike the MCM, where we had a concrete goal and a very short time period in which to do something about it. Our project stayed undefined for a while, and stayed murky, and we had a relatively long time in which to do something (bad, since I only pulled my requisite all-nighter (of course! it’s not an REU if you haven’t pulled an all-nighter) on the last night (I do not recommend pulling it the night before a presentation, though). It feels like motivation goes way down when there’s too much time: much stricter goal setting and goal meeting insanity on my part would have ameliorated this somewhat).

So I guess I’ll end my rant here. It was a very valuable experience, and I was glad I got to do it. I just wish…

No. I’m really ending my rant, and going to go do something cool. Hopefully I’ll have something to show by the end of the week.

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.

So, not 20 minutes ago, I decided something. I was very confused, and probably didn’t make the best decision. Nothing life changing, mind you (in the way that you don’t expect significant life changes from the mundane), but importantly character revealing.

Have some background: I am still in SLO (San Luis Obispo), which is between LA and San Fran, which also means it is essentially in the middle of nowhere (comparatively: it’s still California after all). I’m doing a robotics internship at Cal Poly, and our professor suggested we check out some of the labs over at Stanford. Plans were made, and while a bunch of us research dudes were going to Yosemite after checking out Standford, a couple of us just wanted to get home after poking around San Fran and San Jose. Since I’ve been to Yosemite before, and know just how long the drive up there is, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of driving all the way up there and then climbing half dome, especially on a minimal amount of sleep. So, we plotted about how to get home from San Fran, since cars were in short supply among us. Coming home by bus seemed like the most attractive option, although it left San Jose at around 10PM.

So I wake up this morning, earlier than usual in order to get ready to go. I get out to the pick up point, and then I find that the rest of the guys skipping Yosemite had flaked out, effectively leaving me alone for the 2nd portion of the trip. That threw me into a slight panic as I tried to figure out what I should do, and I eventually decided to flake out, too. After I spent some time on top of a toilet contemplating what just happened, I finally figured that I should have gone. But then, my butt was parked on a toilet, and the caravan was already 10 minutes away.

So what’s the big deal? I missed out on a day trip to a larger city, so what? I’ll soon be parked in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, for at least 2 years to boot. What I think is the big deal is that while I came up with the right answer to ‘What is my utility for going to Standford?’, I came up with it much too slowly (while sitting on the toilet no less). An event that I hadn’t considered (the rest of the non-Yosemite team flaking out) blindsided me and (I’m guessing) temporarily overwhelmed my utility function, causing me to make a decision that I didn’t want to make in retrospect.

It was also clear in retrospect that I should have seen it coming, and then pre-cached my thoughts about it (humans think relatively slowly, so we (probably) cache a whole lot of our thoughts to keep up our mental quickness. In this case, trying to come up with a 30-second utility evaluation wasn’t so stable). The guys I was going to be coming home with have had a history of flaking out, and the time/cost investment of the trip would only have raised the probability that they would flake out. In retrospect, it was so obvious that the probability was going to be high that I can’t figure out how I missed it entirely. And if I can’t catch obvious branches like that, then what else am i missing?

So maybe this episode wasn’t character revealing; oh well.

Now I have an entire day ahead of me. Wiped empty. Well, better get to filling it.

Oh, hi. I’m in California now, and it’s been way too long since I’ve made a post that wasn’t a story, and I’ve been in Cali for almost 2 weeks now and how can I call myself a blogger when I can’t even post when I dump my life upside down for two weeks? Hell, my internship thingie is almost 2/9ths of the way done, and I haven’t made a blog post about it. Okay, so I’ll quickly attempt to remedy this dire situation before going to sleep.

So, first things first: I’m in cali, but in the middle of nowhere cali. Okay, that’s not a very nice description of San Luis Obispo, but when you consider the neighboring cities of San Fran and LA, then SLO seems very much like the middle of nowhere. Even if it is the middle of nowhere, it’s a very nice middle of nowhere: there’s maybe been one fully overcast day, and yet the air is cooler than cucumbers. Get something of a tan (I’m indoor much of the time, so I’m not really being exposed to this famed Californian sun, but I guess I get enough from just walking around) while not roasting: I like it. I managed to score an apartment that’s close to the school and some shopping places (realizing in retrospect just how far all that other housing was: Google maps seems to do the distances less justice than it should). Note: walking everywhere is a pain in the butt (walking downtown to the farmer’s market… good berries, but it took a while). I’m still wondering if I should get one of those collapsible bikes, although it might translate to a literal pain in the butt…

Okay, so that’s where I am: but what am I doing? Well, we’re not sure, so I’ll hold off on explaining that. Although, I’ll comment that I’ve found use for my optimization class: it might involve very nasty non-linear optimization, but that’s even better! Now, if I can figure it out before my 9 weeks is up is a good question… Also, the pace of doing 9-5 research is much slower than the MCM. I have a feeling that the MCM is going to be my benchmark for frenzied progress from now on…

Since I have an aversion to breaking up posts into consecutive topic posts, I’ll just mash on some thoughts to the end of my update.

So I don’t think it’s the context switching that’s causing me problems (ref. 5 posts back): at least, context switching isn’t such a big problem as compared to others. For instance, just dicking around instead of doing things. Again referencing my previous post, I came up with this ginormous list of things that I want to do: it turns out that I have no will to do those things. More rigorously, it turns out that I have limited will to do those things while I’m working on research for around 8 hours each weekday, and I have a pretty strong compulsion to screw around and waste time rather than do something I’ll remember and have use for twenty years down the line.

Exhibit the first: I got a nice idea to work on an introductory video for git when I realized that no one teaches scm, at least in your usual comp sci curriculum. You have dozens of blog posts detailing why you should care about git (or hg or svn or w/e), and plenty of videos detailing how to do things, but nothing that just introduces the basics about why you should be interested in using a s(ource) c(ode) m(anagement) system like git. So, using Ignite’s (argh! I just remembered that SLO’s ignite night was tonight! argh! again!) slogan ’enlighten us, but make it quick’ I set out to put together a short and sweet video animating the principles behind git.

So, I allocated myself a little more than an evening to finish it, reasoning that if I used some sweet icons from the Tango icon set, I could stick this thing together reasonably quickly. Well, now I’ve been sitting on it for more than a week, and I think I have all the blocking nicely done. Yup, blocking. I haven’t even thought about how to do the custom music track I was planning on doing.

Looking back, it’s glaring how obvious positivity bias (I’m pretty sure this isn’t what it’s called, but I don’t want to dig through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality just to find it: I won’t sleep all night if I try it) was present in my time allocation. So am I really that bad an animator? Well, not really: out of most of the days in the past week, I’ve maybe gotten less than an hour in working at the video, mostly because I wouldn’t let myself have at it until around 10 o’clock (Which reminds me, having a regular sleep schedule does not work wonders). Sometimes it’s because I’m context switching around and trying to get some reprap stuff done, or otherwise, but all this incidental work + dinner should take a maximum of 2 hours. The other drains are from surfing around the web: I would hate to see my productivity if I hadn’t blocked reddit, digg, and slashdot, although I still tend to stare at the screen and mentally scream for those mental sinks.

I wonder if it’s a withdrawal effect: if so, it’s a pretty long lived one. I’ve ditched most of those social aggregators a while ago, although I suppose it’s more like developing a taste for candy: you might go back to chicken n’ rice, but you never forget the taste of people catering to bored dudes on the internet.

In the end, I just want to make and know things. Please. Come on, mind, you should be able to pull this off. I think we can put aside our differences. For science. You monster.

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

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

Me looking thoughtful

Me being happy

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been getting too much sleep.

Sounds strange, no?

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

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

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