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.

Oh, hi, have a story. I’ll talk about California when I’m not cramming my head with tutorials, trying to be productive, or being depressed that I’m not productive. Something like that.

—

Status update: I don’t think I can ever get back up..

.. It had just been so *long* ago: it was years ago that she had fallen down this solar system’s gravity well and just happened to run into a hospitable planet instead of the star’s fiery atmosphere. Just the right probabilities had worked out in her favor, and she had survived planet fall.

Then, she had to learn how to live on the planet, full of strange ecosystems and geological formations. She still remembered… the day she was caught in a sand storm, the week she spent sick from the brightly colored fruit, the month she spent nursing her broken leg, the countless battles against the dogs determined to rip the flesh from her bones, the moment of realization that the planet was probably devoid of sentient life…

And those were only the very lowest points of her stay so far.

Well, she survived. She was built to win, and by golly, she had won out over the planet.

However, her past upsets blanched and cringed when set next to her current challenge.

She wasn’t an engineer in her past life, that much was clear. She lost most of her technology in the crash, though, and the world soon reclaimed the scraps that were left. If she were content with living out her life on this planet, then that would have been fine.

She wasn’t content with that.

One night, she couldn’t sleep, and as she looked up-well into the alien constellations, she remembered her life, flitting among the stars.

The next morning, she dismantled her thatched hut, retrieved the small computer that had survived the crash, and began to re-derive astrophysics.

Her first rockets had gone a measly 10 feet; later iterations went farther, and started to light up the sky with their failed excursions. But they were still that: failed, with a tendency to explode in the upper atmosphere.

She fired off 3 rockets of the same design last month: 2 of them failed. It didn’t bode well that she was sitting in a rocket sharing their design, with a few last minute tweaks thrown in.

It’s not like she had the margins of error that space farers of old had, lacking the huge organizations trying to extend human achievement. Chances of 2/3 were enough… for her to dismount her flying death machine, return to her hut, and wait, hoping that some space farer would pick up her distress signal (she had created her own antenna array!) and fly down-well to find her, with a rusted rocket sitting on the launch pad, ready with some tea to regal the traveler about how she had re-derived astrophysics, and look! There’s proof on the wall behind you, where I carved a particularly nasty result into my hut, aren’t you impressed? My, my, am I glad that I’m here to share this achievement with you, rather than blasted to smithereens and floating through

Okay.

Enough of that.

She gripped the flight control, and rested her finger on the ignition.

It was time to fly.

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.

So, I couldn’t resist, so you guys get 3 stories on 2 nights.

I had the idea before the status, and it took me a while to find a status to fit it.

Enjoy!

—

Status update: In the middle of the country

The clock tells him it’s in the middle of the afternoon, a time falling between when the sun had passed it’s peak and before the waning of the light impressed into the world. A glance out the kitchen window tells a much different story: a storm is gathering, menacing clouds pushing each other up as they tower over the plain. Low thunder rumbles, sub-audible shockwaves jittering glassware balanced on the kitchen counter. He gathers them in a flash, pushing them into the cupboard before glancing out the window again. The light had become fleeting in the face of the encroaching whirlwind, and he turns away: there are still storm preparations to be finished.

He’s a simple man: he couldn’t make it as an English major, couldn’t keep any of his jobs, and couldn’t keep his girl. He guessed she couldn’t handle the thought of moving out to a farm, and he had clutched her shirt to his chest, shedding a tear or two (maybe there were more, but that didn’t matter) ignoring the cries that began to emmanate from his newborn son’s crib for all of five minutes. Five minutes was all he spent thinking about her, because even if he was terrible with people, by god he would be a good father. And he guessed he had done fine, although he failed in an oblique way when his son joined the military. Like mother, like son, he guessed.

He stepped in from the porch, the downpour suddenly directing itself sideways along with a friendly gale. He slammed the door shut, not relishing the thought of sopping up the corridor. He flicked the kitchen light on, and flicked the dial of his radio to see if anyone knew if tornadoes were sighted. Only static: he supposed that this might be one of those new fangled storms that were dispersing the copious amounts of plasma that had leaked from low-orbit fuel ferries. Damn corporations should’ve cleaned up the mess, but instead they decided that interferring with the electromagnetic communications of most of the world was an acceptable consequence. More thunder rolled through the house, rumbling groans of discontent from a heavily laden sky. He flicked open his mobile: the electromagnetic interference was something fierce, as the mobile was barely able to connect to an access point 10 feet away. Of course, there was no net connection: he hadn’t been able to pay the phone bill again. Or was it because the dial-up company had gone out of business? He knew it was shutting down soon, and there was no way to find out. Well, except to dig out the letters and look…

He sipped his tea, reading his son’s latest letter. He had somehow missed it, filling it away before carefully perusing it. Quite unlike him. Well, he wasn’t in the military, and didn’t have his son’s compulsion for order and speed instilled into himself. And how the aerospace corp loved order and speed: stationed in the upper atmosphere, there was only a small amount of air to drag on the sleek craft, but enough to clean out any of the deadly debreis that infested empty space. The corp was free to scream through the sky, serving to sever any enemy connection between the ground and space, sometimes preying on craft that swam through the lower atmosphere. He had never actually seen his son in action, just watched tube vids of press-ready showcase manuvers. Still, he was proud, and with international relations in the state they are in, his son just might have to protect the country.

Thunder rolled; the baritone speaker in the sky had gotten closer. He fancied that the very foundations of the house had to have been shaken. At least the wind was slackening, and he could see through the rain again, watching the clouds light up with lightning. Sometimes, the clouds seemed to glow, followed by sharper, tenor cracks unlike the rumbling baritone of the thunder he had been hearing. Well, plasma will do strange things to a familiar weather pattern… The rain had begun to slacken, so he fetched a chair, perching on the porch to watch for the rainbow that inevitably followed the storm. He sighed, sat back, and looked up just in time to see the sky falling.

So I really didn’t like that last story, so I decided to do another one. Hope this one came out better.

—

Status update: i’m super bored so ask me something [link]

Beg your pardon?

Yeah, that’s my super power. I know, it doesn’t sound like much…

No, I mean, my hearing isn’t what it used to be. They had to reclassify it as non-super hearing a few years back, and had to hook me up to this hearing aid in the last month, so…

Ah, okay. So my super power (she paused to gesture at herself) is inducing severe boredom in people.

And how is that a super power? I know plenty of people that can lull nearly any one to sleep, including (especially!) several senators.

Well, I don’t have to actually talk to anyone: I can snap my fingers and induce an irrepressible feeling of boredom in people.

But how is that useful?

Oh, you bore the guard and sneak past him while he’s fixated on the TV. Works like a charm. Or, my favorite one was when I bored my adversary so much that he stopped fighting me and sulked off to work on his latest gadget.

Interesting. (He took another sip from his tumbler, smoothing out his suit with the other hand while gazing out the window. It certainly was a beautiful nightscape, he thought. Whoever chose this mansion overlooking the bay certainly had good taste.)

I know, right? That stunt was the one that actually got me into the league, if you didn’t know already; but you must know, they must pass all the applicants past you. Right?

(He gave a wan smile and took another sip.)

(She also turned to look out the window) I still can’t believe I’m actually in the league, fighting crime and all that. I actually get a costume and my own press agent and worldwide transportation and complimentary dry cleaning (her breath caught in her throat for a bit, before she jerked her head inquisitively around)… say, you must have a lot of stories, being the original man of steel and all that. What was your last… job like?

Boring.

What?

I responded to mail and played golf.

No… I mean your crime fighting job.

It’s been years.

What?

I’ve been a desk jockey for at least 5 years.

Oh, like head of the league?…

No, I’m merely a figurehead (another wan smile). I happen to be too important to the managers of the league to fall, so they stuck me behind a desk in the most secure building in the world.

Which building is that?

Our headquarters, of course. I’m surrounded by supers of all shapes and sizes, although to be honest I’m not sure if they thought you could bore missles out of existence or not.

(Wait…)

Well, it was nice being bored with you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get another drink.

(He ambled out of the dark sitting room, back into the main body of the party. She stayed alone in the darkened room, limply holding her wine glass. Well, she thought, it was a beautiful twilight over the sea…)

(The bay exploded in a fireball, and

So I’m going to dump core, and whine and complain for a bit. Feel free to ignore, rebut, or burn.

I think I’ve figured out why I can’t do anything: I switch context way too often. What I mean by switching context is switching from one task to another: for instance, going from sleeping to eating, or studying to practicing, or studying to adjusting the volume on my music. Yes, that last one is a context switch: it’s fast, but it still adds overhead. I’ve complained about overhead before: a certain amount of time each day has to be devoted to things like waking up, showering, eating, and all that. And context switching is another source for overhead. Overhead is terrible, because you’re usually too occupied doing things that don’t advance the self, and you can’t focus on something more meaningful. Overhead eats up your time without leaving you anything to show, aside from “hey, I’m still alive!”

So, I’m forcing myself to switch contexts several times a day, aside from the things that one must do to keep alive, by having too many projects open at one time. I’m trying to complete hardware projects (minty preamp, useless machine, pocket oscilloscope, didj hacking, monolith, book scanner, phone glove for a partial list), study physics (Feynman lectures) and math (probability theory and abstract algebra), on top of that I’m trying to do artsy fartsy stuff (on top of writing stuff, actually putting something in the musical section of my blog, and finishing that damn animation), and I have a few software projects jiggling around in the back of my head (mathematical note taking, sane photo management, doing deep integration of twitter and wordpress) as well as a redesign of a completely inane website for an organization that I was once part of.

Whew okay, so I have all these things I want to do, and I want to do them all at once. So that means I’ve been trying to divvy up my day into partitions, and doing different things for each part. But once you consider that switching things takes overhead, then that’s the wrong strategy. If you set a few days, instead of a few hours, you should be able to drop overhead, mental and physical, and get much more out of those few days.

Part of this has to do with not sleeping so much. Part of it also has to do with streamlining my life.

Part of it also has to do with my urges. I’ve said before that I would rather the bio-hackers hurry it up and get to the point that I can re-route my libido to mostly scientific inquiry. Leaving aside that particular urge, I’m also not very happy about the urge to create. No, not that sort of creation: we’ve already disregarded that one. I’m talking about the urge to create works and realize thoughts in objects. You might not feel it, but I do: I want to create. If I don’t create something new, then I’m just taking up space and pushing the universe faster towards an entropic death, and who wants to rush that? Another way of stating it: if you’re not saying anything, than you might as well die, and if you’re not saying anything worthwhile, you might as well say nothing (with speech defined in the broadest sense: by patronizing certain restaurants, you’re saying something about your preferences with your actions).

So it feels like I need to create things, so I flit between different projects with the hope that I push them towards being done. I guess I’m hoping for a breakthrough with the least amount of effort, so that I get that high of finishing something while knowing I have projects in the pipe, because starting things is difficult too, and has it’s own overhead associated with it. But then, it’s not nearly as vicious as switching context several times a day.

In closing: if I could just break the tyranny of creating, or the tyranny of time, then I could be happier. Maybe.

I’m not really happy with the way this one came out, but that’s what you get for 30 minutes, and when you write the ending line first. Anyways, it’s time to try and get a reasonable amount of sleep.

—

Status: i’m super bored so ask me something

Who are you?

It had been a few hours since I found her sitting at the table, after which I took the chair across from her, after which I sat, sizing her up, trying to categorize her as friend or foe. All this before trying to just ask: you couldn’t be too cautious here.

No answer. Not even a visible or audible response of any sort: her eyes refuse to track me as I shift my weight.

Hello?

I wave my hand to catch her attention, the one that isn’t occupied with clutching my katana. I picked it up a few days ago, or what felt like a few days: it was hard to tell when it was always dark, and there weren’t any clocks to consult. It wasn’t like I was a good swordsman, but the shotgun was out of rounds, and I had done a bit of fencing. Plus, it got me through some troubles, which was the true test of a weapon.

Dropping my hand, I permit a quick sigh and look around: no monsters from the dark trying to sneak up on me while I try to find if this one is friend or foe. True, I hadn’t met any friends yet in the void, but one never knows. Laying my hand on the table, I drum my fingers.

Her head snaps up, suddenly meeting my gaze.

I freeze, waiting for a manical lunge or for any portention of an impending attack. It was a hard place, the void. Always had to be on your guard.

… Hello?

No response.

I give a small tap with my pinky.

She breaks her gaze away, towards my hand.

Well then.

I tap out …. . ._.. ._.. ___.

She widens her eyes, as if she recognizes the message within.

I’m not surprised she only understands morse code: strange things have happened in this godless void. And god knows I’ve had enough time to encounter them…

I taps out a query: are you a friend?

She smiles, and then opens her mouth:

Of course.

I immediately know the voice. Of course she would be here: she had been the only one with enough power to bind me into this void. The only one with enough sway over his world. In retrospect, it should have been clear. Of course she was her. She was

No more questions. I challenge you to battle.

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.

So, it just occured to me that I haven’t updated on the status of the reprap in a while. Obviously, I didn’t finish the metal mendel, although my partner in crime is moving the project forward while he stays for summer school. I think the metal mendel will be finished by the time summer is over, too: we were at least halfway done, and now he has a bunch more time on his hands to put into the project.

Despite not finishing the metal mendel, I still want a reprap of some sort (there’s a reason I bought two sets of electronics), and I’ve opted for the recently developed mini-mendel. I got the RP parts, just ordered the motors and bearings, and am now waiting for more money so I can get the rest of the mechanical bits, plus extruder RP parts and bits, plus enough stuff to get my boards working again (they’re in pretty poor shape right now, I’m sorry to say). So, I have stuff, but I’m not quite ready to move forward. There’s also the small matter of stubborn de-soldering jobs I’ll have to do…

Basically, there is a very high probability that I will have a reprap by the end of the summer.

While starting to read through the Feynman Lectures, I thought of this: In Starship Troopers, a certain planet has less competitive wildlife because it happens to be orbiting a star that puts out less mutation-inducing radiation than our own star, with the hidden implication that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” However, a good balance of mutations is evolutionarily beneficial (I think his basic premise is correct: more mutations mean more variation, and hence better fitness), such that life on the planet should evolve less genetic safeguards (assuming a similar biology to us), leading to a similar rate of mutation.

Okay, I’m done sprouting randomly. Ideas like this would normally be up for twitter, but this one was a bit long.

Also, you should check out Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality . URL says it all.