I previously said that I would finish off LIMBO and then start doing productive things: this turned out to be a false statement. Instead, it turns out that I wanted to game a bit harder than that (and Steam sales are crazy), and hence broke some of the self-imposed constraints that I detailed in the first winter break post just to batch through a few more games (theme of my life: batch through everything). But now, it’s time for a couple day retrospective, and I’ll write some thoughts on what I just played.

There are probably spoilers.

LIMBO

A cute little puzzler. Wait, did I say cute? I meant gruesome: after I finished the game, I learned that the makers of LIMBO architected the game so that the player would have to die at least a few times to get through sections of the game, which makes all sorts of sense. In fact, I would be surprised if anyone could play through the game without coming to that conclusion or going insane (maybe some platforming genius with precognition?).

Once you get over the prospect of dying multiple times just to get past a puzzle, then it should be fine: I didn’t breeze through the game, but I only got seriously stuck (as in ask the internet for help) twice, and then mostly because I was impatient. Sometimes I got annoyed because the controls didn’t feel responsive, I would grab a rope and then jump off it because I was holding the up arrow while airborne (because the arrows affect your movement in midair, which is annoying). However, those and similar issues are not hard to put up with, and it’s easy to get lost in the shading and shadows for the several hours it takes to pick apart the puzzles (6 hours + 2 cheats. Yes, shame shame).

The ending is gruesome. Wait, did I say gruesome? I meant cute. And abrupt. And it’s basically all the story/motivation you get from the game, and it comes at the very end (and did I mention it’s cute?). A tabula rasa would feel somewhat confused about the plot; why he is running away from spiders and dealing with mechanical monstrosities and killing children, when a sentence long synopsis (Do it for the girl!) would suffice. If you had to read the description of the game to buy it, then we don’t run into this problem, but gifting… well, we’re here for the platforming and the creepy atmosphere, so we’ll sweep that under the rug.

tldr; Braid spoiled me, I whine whenever I have to start over from the beginning of a puzzle.

Multiwinia

So during the insane Steam holiday sales, all the Introversion games ever went on sale in a bundle for $5. I’ve been thinking about getting myself some Introversion games ever since they did that kind-of-open-source-thing, and once they went on sale it was a no-brainer.

There aren’t that many RTS games released, and even fewer I want to play: in this case, Multiwinia sated my desire for a game where I could send waves of minions into the thresher, and do it within half an hour (I’m looking at you, Sins). The multiple game modes spiced things up, but there’s ultimately not that much strategy involved, and a man can only cackle manically for so long.

DEFCON

Worldwide nuclear war: what’s not to like?

Well, if I had friends that played it, too, then I could see it being even more fun when we all inevitably backstab each other and end up punching each other in real life.

Solar 2

A game with an interesting premise; be a celestial body, and go grow yourself into a black hole and consume the universe. Or you could play a bunch of mini-games, but they’re not that interesting. Plus, the realism is all game play oriented, so you definitely don’t want to buy it for that. It provided a couple hours of entertainment, and I got it for a couple dollars, so it’s more or less a fair trade.

Bastion

Nice looking graphics and a gravelly voice muttering quips in my ear: what else could you want? Okay, go get it!

As I sat through the credits (yes, I did that. It was 3am, what else was I going to do?), it’s never been quite so apparent just how much work goes into a single game: all the game mechanics that get dumped into a box, wrapped up with art assets, tied up with plot lines into one neat package, and then delivered by the Steam elves (maybe steam punk elves? Daft steam-punk elves? I’m sorry).

Bastion really is a gorgeous game, with the standard RPG hooks and a compelling story to boot. If I didn’t try to rush through the game (somewhat failing in this regard, because I have a need to collect all the shiny things, although I did finish the main quest in 10 hours) then there would be plenty of content that I could settle into, and I could conceivably entertain myself for quite a while.

Analogy time: if LIMBO is to a painting, then Bastion is to a short novel, keeping in mind the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words (really? Only a medium sized essay? Who comes up with these things?). And I’ll leave it at that.

Oh, and I saved Zulf, and evacuated the Bastion. In case you were wondering.

I have been the proud owner of a Kobo Touch for a bit longer than 3 months. So, what have I found?

• The device itself is pretty petite. Next to almost every other e-reader out there (maybe excepting the Nook Touch) it really sizes itself down and reduces itself to almost just a screen and a border. This is both a curse and a blessing: it's not the 10inch screen I wish I had, but it fits comfortably in several larger pockets in my clothes.
• The touch interface is nice, and the gestures are natural. Finger smudges don't matter quite as much as I thought they would, with the matte surface taking minimal finger oils. It is unnerving to have your headphones brush against the screen and move the page around, though, since the touch sensing is infrared based.
• Like I suspected, the touch interface makes reading PDFs bearable. Since lots of long-form web material is tied up in PDFs, this is a deal-maker.
• There are not a plethora of options in the software. This isn't a deal breaker, though, partly because I couldn't return it if I wanted (since Borders is dying and all) and because the defaults are usually good enough that I don't care.
• I will say that I am not such a fan of the home screen with only 5 book covers: Kindle's linear listing of books is much more my style. Ah well, such is life.
• The battery doesn't last forever: I can maybe get 150 pages from a charge? I mean, I finished 2 around 200 page PDF textbooks in some 3-4 charges, so it frees up my cellphone from having to blast photons from an LCD. It's a pretty good battery life, me thinks.
• It is not quite as convenient as I hoped it would be: social rules sometimes make it awkward to pull out the thing and start reading, or my subway stop is coming up, or other such things.
• Reading the thing in direct sunlight was wonderful.
• Not having time to read from the Kobo due to school is annoying.

With the next generation of e-readers quickly approaching (mostly ~$200 faux-tablets), this review may become quickly deprecated. Oh well?

Random thought: this does remind me of a potential e-reader format, which has e-ink on both sides and requires the user to turn the device over: you solve slow redraw rates and add in more physical interaction in one fell swoop. And end random idea.

Upon finding out about Advanced Linux Programming through one of my social streams, I slotted it into the “to-read” queue and went off on my merry way. Once I got my Kobo Touch, though, I bumped up the priority on ALP because, well, it’s available as an ebook (pdf) (which I put together into one PDF with pdfsam). Plus, I’m taking OS (operating systems) this semester, which is apparently very difficult and all sorts of crazy, so dipping my toe into the C world wouldn’t be a bad idea.

What was a bad idea was reading ALP right after reading K&R. ALP reads like a glorified reference after reading K&R, lacking that organic feel and concise non-contrived examples. There was a sense in K&R that the authors were mini-gods, black belts of C, and they knew enough to know how much material was enough. Obviously, I didn’t feel that in ALP (there is a certain mysticism grown up around K&R, which is probably screwing with my calibration. Word to the wise).

I understand that not all examples can be non-contrived, but references deserved to be in an easily indexed format, not a heavy PDF. Instead of a reference, something… more like Why’s Guide would be better for getting people started with programming real things with Linux (why is there an Advanced in the title? I don’t understand that, either. It feels pretentious). Actually, that’s a terrible example, because Why’s Guide goes off the deep end in the other direction, and also in some ways falls prey to the same reference-rigidity that ALP does… but at least it’s not obviously a reference tome! And you get cartoon foxes.

To top it off, ALP finishes off with a medium-size program source embedded in the book. I still don’t know why people put this sort of information in books, reference information and source code alike: electronic applications solve these problems to such an extent that I’m befuddled why something that provides fine grain information consumption hasn’t killed everything yet. Oh well, +1 to the reference counter for working on Notesoble…

Positives: I did learn more about how Linux is put together, but not enough to replace my OS books. In particular, the multiprocessing/IPC things were interesting, and knowing about “Linux System Calls” a few days before we covered them during the 2nd session of OS was helpful. I’ll admit, I skimmed over “Inline Assembly Code” and the “Sample GNU/Linux Application”, but I think you can finagle why.

Overall, I think the book was a net gain: I did learn things, and it kept me company from Seattle to New York. However, I do look forward to killing this ebook and it’s ilk.

My next book is going to be something sci-fi, and after that I’m going to go finish up Visualizing Data, which I left unfinished and I have lots of homework to do oh god

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s been a long haul, but I’m done with Probabilistic Robotics, the beginning of my reading spree until the end of my time here at Columbia. If you don’t remember, I decided I should start a reading spree until I didn’t have access to the huge library at Columbia: hell, all that money has to be paying for something. But the fact that I said that back in October, and only now finished the first book says something about… something. It’s kind of complicated.

When I said I’m done with the book, I didn’t mean that I finished it from cover to cover. No, by the time I was halfway through the book it stopped being fun and started being tedious. The content of the book is relevant to my interests, but it was written in such a way that it didn’t really make sense how to transform the concepts to code. The psuedo-code was very math heavy, whereas lots of single letter variables represented potentially huge covariance matricies. My inexperience with matrix math didn’t help here: matrices were used everywhere, and it wasn’t immediately apparent how it all fit together.

I suppose the fact I didn’t try implementing any of this in code didn’t help. I know, big mistake on my part, but it seemed kind of… pointless. I don’t have any motivating factors right now, and the only thing I would really be interested in implementing would be the FastSLAM algorithm, but I couldn’t understand anything in that chapter (yes, I’ll take that hit to my geek standings. I did not understand something in a book).

Another topic of contention was my experience with probability: the author assumed a bit more familiarity with probability than I actually had, so I was kind of lost for much of the time. Sure, I know what the covariance is, but keeping everything straight in addition to the covariance wasn’t easy.

Hence, my next book will be a book on Bayescraft, and getting myself familiar with probabilistic ideas. Since I’m in the middle of a Devfest hackathon, I can’t exactly get up and go get a book, but I’ll be sure to have it waiting for me when the storm ends.

And just FYI, sometime, I’m going to read Probabilistic Robotics again and win.

Also, I should note I have no kindle. It’s okay, it means I’m not trying to hack it into my life, which would undoubtedly sink huge amounts of time.

EDIT: Right! I forgot to talk about Devfest! The Devfest at which I played a non-trivial role! I didn’t botch my role as workshop facilitator, which is a big win, although I need to learn how to wield a big stick and get people to stop talking, either on stage or off it. Aside that, the tutorials covered lots of ground in relatively little time (it wasn’t necessarily good: some of the audience’s eyes were glazing over, although I should note that most of the audience was a very quiet crowd. It gives me a new appreciation for a responsive audience). So yeah, cool. My big contribution to Devfest is made, and from here on out I essentially just have to code. So far, I just have a gimp plugin published, so… I guess I’ll get started on another one. Good times.

So.

My first phone interview.

Didn’t crash and burn, didn’t do fantastically well either.

Just so-so.

One thing that got me thinking, though, is my off-the-cuff response to “tell me about an interesting project you’ve worked on recently”, to which I launched into a brief, somewhat tangled exposition on the Reprap project. Even as I was doing so, my inner critic was screaming “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU’RE TALKING TO A SOFTWARE COMPANY. AN INTERNET COMPANY. HARDWARE PLAYS NO ROLE IN ANYTHING THEY DO, SO SHUT UP AND TALK ABOUT A SOFTWARE PROJECT”. But I couldn’t help myself, and later, while munching on a burrito, I think I figured out why.

Recently? I haven’t been writing much software, so there’s not a lot to choose from to get an interesting project. Even then, my projects in progress are, honestly, not very exciting. They’re infrastructural, sure, (the positive news index is meant to support a particular feature of the clock, and the CPU cost/core calculator is meant to help system builders get the most bang for their buck) but honestly, they don’t fire my imagination. Like Hacker-mapper (too big a solution for too small a problem, I realize), they don’t solve the most important problem I’m facing at the moment, and as said by Yudkowsky (or someone he quoted), the thing that made Einstein different was an important problem to solve.

That’s why I immediately started talking about the Reprap when asked about an interesting project: once it’s built, it promises to change the way I look at things. Heck, it’s already changing the way I think. Wouldn’t it be nice to a have a widget there? What about there? Once done, it poises me as a point person to start introducing printer tech to the University. It’s interesting, it’s impactful, it’s disruptive. When you compare that to my software projects, it’s no wonder why I started talking about it instead.

Figuring out what is my most important problem is not immediately apparent: even problems that are ‘good enough’ aren’t apparent. However, I think I have a problem that should keep me busy for the time being without being somewhat silly, concerning a rewrite of how textbooks work. I think it’s a good idea, but it just seems too easy to do, and hence not very enticing, which is why I haven’t started on it yet. But it seems like the idea/project that will yield the largest potential impact, so I should be working on that instead of anything else in my github repos. As Devfest quickly approaches, I won’t have tons of time to write, but I know what I’ll be working on during my spare time.

My reprap, of course. $&%*#&@ rods.

Or books! I could have the top three books I was reading on me at all times, and just pull one out anywhere! I'll never have to waste another minute of my life! What do you say, Professor McGonagall?

- Harry Potter in HPMOR

Now, I love the idea of e-ink ebook readers. Truly dearly love them, more than I love books, mostly because books take up space: too much space for my tastes. Textbooks, bah: for the few pages I can read in a day, I have to lug around this brick of a book. I do love textbooks, they have all sorts of goodies in them that just don’t show up anywhere else (like technical explorations of quantum mechanics!), but… their mass drags me down (ha! you see what I did there?).

So the fact that my mom is willing to lend me/outright give me her underutilized kindle is kind of a boon for me. Jeepers! A library in my (oversized) pocket! I’ve already put a number of books on it, and its e-ink screen makes me giddy every time I see it.

But the title of this post is “Nathan and the ebooks of terror”, so there’s something negative about my experience: namely, textbooks just don’t fit. “Nathan!” you might be thinking. “Stop pirating books! It’s bad for you!” But, go fetch yon open source math book, and ye shall find the provided pdf shows up with unreadable fonts. Sometimes you can just add a \usepackage{geometry} statement, but sometimes that doesn’t work. Or you can jack up the font size and use \larger, but that doesn’t always work. And then there are the books that don’t provide their source, or provide it in such a way that it’s frustrating to convert it to something the kindle will read (docbook format, I’m looking at you).

I think the best thing would have everything in HTML: it reflows, and it’s hand-editable by pretty much any technically inclined person. Then it’s only a short hop to convert it to whatever format you need, like mobi.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen, and I foresee long battles with getting books into my kindle, because gosh darn it, I have a kindle and I’m going to use it.

In other news…

I only have a week of break left! Gosh, the panic hormones are coursing through my body at amazing speeds right now. So much to do, so little time… Like applying to a bunch of internships for the summer (no bumming around for me), doing some cutting for my Huxley (reprap), finishing some code, reading books, getting new books (including pushing them kicking and screaming onto the kInDlE), buying a bookbag (maybe), and figuring out how to make the world a better place. And I’m planning on getting distracted many times, since that seems to happen even when finals are breathing down my neck.

Also, I’ve noticed just how out of my depth I am at Columbia. It feels like I’m really noticing it this time, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be even more blown away by the end of this semester. There are insanely smart people at Columbia, and the only way I beat them is in non-insanity. Welp.

Well, I’ve just had solid 3 days of awesome.

I guess I’ll go to sleep, or something.

But before that, I suppose I should tell you about what actually happened, especially since I didn’t actually tell you blog-followers yet. I was very lucky, and got to attend IROS, the awesome-cool annual IEEE robotics conference. I wasn’t insanely lucky, however, because it wasn’t in NYC like Maker Faire was. Instead, it was in Taipei. Well, I guess I was insanely lucky.

So, first a list of what I learned:

• Sitting down for almost the entire duration of a world-spanning plane ride is hell on your feet.
• Dehydration is a terrible thing.
• Not having any purchasing power because you forgot your credit card pin is a terrible thing.
• I know almost nothing. It's quite pathetic, really.
• Just because you're attending a technical conference does not mean the internet is great at the conference venue.
• Just because you're in Asia does not mean the internet is cheap and fast. Especially at some swanky hotel.
• Knowing that someone on Omegle is 12 hours off from you is one thing: actually moving 12 hours offset from most of the people you know is another.
• The rain there wasn't quite as vicious as the worst NYC rain I've seen, but it definitely made up for it by raining the entire damn time.
• City design should account for the weather. This means making sure there are no slippery tiles of death, especially when it rains all the damn time.
• Willow Garage is the shit.
• ROS is the shit.
• Visual SLAM is the shit.
• Repraps are not intelligent robots
• You can include anime in your talk and get away with it.
• Google does not care if you can't read chinese: it'll serve up ads in chinese if you're in Taiwan. Not a complaint, but it was still funny.
• Brilliant people can give terrible talks.

Ahem

It is really, really, REALLY inspiring to see all this completed work. It makes me think that I can do something with myself. Hell, it has me thinking that grad school is really something I should do at some point in time. Not maybe, but something that I really should do. Failing that, R&D (and who the hell fails to go to grad school? I mean, the USA imports grad students, and the deficit is definitely due to people just not caring enough to try). I suppose the fact they had to squeeze all their work down into 20 minutes makes it seem a whole lot easier that it actually is has something to do with how inspiring it was…

In that vein, I need to check out some books. I’m attending a huge university with a huge library, there’s absolutely no reason why I’m not taking every advantage of my position. First stop: Probabilistic Robotics. I’m still shaky on my Kalman filters, not to mention particle or unscented particle or rosy-smelling car filters. Then, the best non-linear optimization book I can lay my hands on, and then… well, I’ll come up with something. Basically, I need to start I gigantic book orgy until I graduate, which is fine by me: re-reading old Methods of Rationality yields diminishing returns. </geekgasm>

Speaking of being inspired, I want to expand on one of my previous taglines. Namely, the fact that many of the speakers could not present to save their lives. True, not many of the presenters have English as a primary language, but a presentation is still a presentation, and knowing the speaker hasn’t been immersed in an english-speaking culture for 21 years doesn’t magically endow the listener with comprehension.

You would think that academics would be very good at transmitting information: they’ve been on the receiving end of explicit information transmission for most of their academic lives, and surely they’ve picked up (at least by osmosis) what works and what doesn’t. An academic should know how it feels to be on the receiving end of notes being read aloud, and yet many presenters just read their speaker notes. There was very little engagement of the audience: the professor that sponsored me on this trip was the only speaker I saw that came out from behind the podium while speaking (he’s very cool, and his accessible and engaging presentation only cemented that belief. P(coolProf|coolPresentation) = P(coolProf)P(coolProf and coolPresentation)/P(coolPresentation) where P(coolPresentation) > 0.99, yo, definite positive update).

Maybe an ignite presentation style would be good: we wouldn’t have the guys that fumble around with their slides (the usual ‘oops, overshot: lemme go back, oops again’), and squash the 30 minute presentations. We’d have to make it work with the people that finish their presentation right before they present, but it seems like it should be a trivial problem.

Meta-note on the conference: why in the world did they have to go and kill all those trees to make those huge conference books? Smartphone apps and interactive webpages not only fit inside a phone/laptop, they can do things like grep and do interactive planning. I’m sorely tempted to write a conference app framework, at least for android (finally dip my toe into phone development).

Another meta-note on the conference: it was really terrible that we managed to DOS the conference center routers. You couldn’t even connect to the router until Thursday, when people realized the rain wasn’t going to let up before the conference ended, and started to go explore the city anyways. I know the conference center doesn’t live and die by the quality of their IT infrastructure, but it’s an IEEE conference. Surely we could’ve whipped up some wireless links to relieve congestion on the main routers, or something (this thought makes me think that there’s some merit in becoming a conference/meetup hacker: someone that notices things wrong with an event, and hacks something up to remedy it before the event ends. Now, only if there were a job in it…).

On that note, I was able to actually get things down without always-accessible internet. Surprise, surprise. And then, those few times I got an uplink were always frenzied moments of trying to squeeze as much doing into as little time as possible. It adds some weight to the notion that I should not have accessible internet everywhere…

I was not impressed with the night market. It always seems like these things have 95% of merchants selling the same old clothing/shoes/jewelry/electronics (maybe the electronics booth is more of a NYC street fair thing), and the rest are actually doing something that you won’t find in every other street market in the world. Like, the bajillion claw-game parlor: I have no idea how they turn a profit with that many claw-games. We might have been in the wrong market: it was pretty tame compared to what  I thought it would be like, and it seemed like most of the shops were just extensions of the store fronts that are always there. So, my thoughts may very well be moot.

Finally, I noticed that I’m a very bad introvert: I seem to get energy from talking to people, especially helping people. Definitely not traditional introvert behavior. Not sure why that happens, when it started happening, or if I ever really was introverted.

Okay, I think that’s enough for a first mind dump. Time to actually unpack and start getting back into doing hw…